Kimberly “Kim” Denver, Leidos
Leidos Contracts organizes performance of the function around three value drivers: supporting growth, increasing return and managing risk. Across these value drives, cultivating and managing customer relationships is a key factor to delivering value to the enterprise, said Kimberly “Kim” Denver, senior vice president and chief corporate contracts executive at Leidos.
The Contracts team published videos on how to secure on contract growth, ensuring what was on the contract remained sold.
“Consider it managing the government’s checkbook,” Denver explained. “If there’s an underrun, advise the government — with a fiduciary intent — of what else within scope can be acquired to enhance the product/mission. If you don’t keep what’s on contract sold, you water down any on-contract-growth.”
In terms of inorganic growth, Leidos Contracts also developed a Contracts M&A Handbook describing the required due diligence in context of the nature of target acquisitions and the associated risk to be mitigated to preserve and increase value.
But 2020 brought its own unprecedented challenges to address. Following a significant initiative this year executed in February, every contract was to assess the clauses, terms and conditions and scope that would protect and indemnify the company from COVID-19 performance impacts.
“We developed a database to track all performance and financial impacts, documents, associated terms and conditions necessary to support and justify recovery/reimbursement,” Denver said. “As a result of the efforts to catalogue impacts along the way, Contracts positioned the enterprise to experience limited impacts from the pandemic.”
Why Watch
According to Denver, Contracts will continue to drive team performance around the established value drivers of supporting growth, increasing return and managing risk.
“We are assessing our relationships and making a concerted effort to cultivate new relationships and manage existing relationships and overlaying those relationships on current contracts/programs and those procurements in the pipeline,” he said.
See the entire Top 10 Contracting Execs to Watch in 2020 list here.
