Waterfall Project Manager Simulation — Catholic Charities USA

The scenario

Catholic Charities USA (CCUSA) is the national office of a federated nonprofit network — 50+ diocesan affiliates serving roughly 12 million people across all 50 states. Each affiliate is its own independent 501(c)(3) corporation under the canonical authority of its local bishop, with its own board, its own program rules, its own state Medicaid reporting requirements, and its own IT capacity. The National Office can publish standards, fund pilots, and convene the network — but it cannot mandate adoption. The principle is called subsidiarity, and it is the operating constraint that governs every coordination decision in this program. The Case Management Modernization Program is the National Board's attempt to retire a 35-year-old paper-and-spreadsheet case management baseline that varies wildly across the affiliates. Caseworkers in Brooklyn intake clients on a 14-page paper form; Phoenix uses an Excel template that lives on a network share; Detroit ran a half-finished Microsoft Access migration in 2019. None of these systems talks to state Medicaid reporting portals, so every monthly compliance report is hand-assembled. The pilot wave funds the rollout of Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud — Outcome Management + Experience Cloud — to three representative affiliates over 27 days, after which the National Board will decide whether to fund the full 50-affiliate rollout as a multi-year program. You are the third Project Manager on this program in four months. The predecessor transferred quietly after the Brooklyn diocese refused to send its Q3 intake records to the National Office for the Accenture discovery sprint. The Accenture engagement is $2.4M of the $4.2M baseline and was signed before the diocesan directors were brought into the SOW; $400K of that has already been billed against discovery work the previous PM checked off but did not validate against actual affiliate intake practice. The Charter Gate is on Day 6. The National Office can publish standards and fund pilots but cannot mandate adoption — and you have no positional authority over any of the three pilot diocesan directors whose buy-in determines whether this rolls out to the full 50-affiliate network or quietly dies.

What you'll do as the project manager

• →Deploy Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud (Outcome Management + Experience Cloud) to the three pilot affiliates — Catholic Charities Diocese of Brooklyn, Diocese of Phoenix, and Archdiocese of Detroit — with caseworker workflows live by Day 27
• →Migrate a sampled subset of historical intake records from each pilot affiliate (paper, Excel, and Access sources) into the new platform with a documented data-quality posture per affiliate
• →Implement state-specific Medicaid reporting integration patterns for New York, Arizona, and Michigan such that each affiliate can produce its monthly compliance report directly from the platform by Day 27
• →Achieve HIPAA + multi-state PII compliance certification (joint internal audit + National Office InfoSec sign-off) prior to Day 27 go-live for all three pilot affiliates
• →Deliver against the $4.2M baseline with no more than 7.5% variance and within the 27-day implementation calendar leading to the National Board's pilot-rollout decision

Project management skills you'll build

The challenges you'll navigate

• •Federation authority gap — the three pilot affiliates report to their own diocesan boards and bishops, NOT to the National PMO. Coordination is informal and revocable at any moment, including mid-program. The predecessor PM hit this wall when Brooklyn refused intake data.
• •Scope variance between the signed Accenture SOW ('standardized intake form across all affiliates') and the field reality (50+ distinct intake form variants across the network) was never validated by the previous PM — Charter scope position is at risk on Day 6
• •Three different state Medicaid reporting integrations (New York, Arizona, Michigan) — each with its own portal, schema, and certification cadence — collapse onto the same 27-day window. Any single state's compliance certification slipping delays the pilot decision.
• •$400K of the $2.4M Accenture engagement has been billed against discovery work that the previous PM signed off on but did not validate against affiliate intake practice. Re-validating consumes cycle that the Charter Gate calendar does not have.
• •Contingency at $100K (2.4%) is well below industry norm (5-10%) — the previous PM committed to this number to land charter sign-off and any material risk realization will require a National Board budget supplemental, which Sister Mary Catherine has signaled she will not request without exhausting all alternatives first

Technology & stakeholders

You'll manage 7 stakeholders, including Sister Mary Catherine Bellamy (President & CEO, Catholic Charities USA), Marcus DeWitt-Okonkwo (Director, National PMO — Catholic Charities USA), Helena Rivera-Aguilar (Chief Information Officer, Catholic Charities USA National Office), and more.

What you'll walk away with

A verified, shareable record of a completed enterprise project — plus the PMO deliverables you produced along the way (charter, project plan, SteerCo deck, closure document). It's real, demonstrable project management experience you can put on your resume and speak to in interviews.

Frequently asked questions

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