Nicole T. W.
Brown.MBA

The challenge

Approximately 800 bus aides reported to individual schools. Fragmented supervision made staffing, attendance, financial accountability, and service consistency difficult to manage.

My leadership decision

Centralize transportation-only personnel under Student Transportation and align staffing to the work. Partner with school leaders, SEIU Local 73, legal counsel, and district leadership to implement the change.

What changed

Established consistent supervision, scheduling, and performance expectations. Paired route assignments improved workforce utilization and created fuller workdays for employees.

The outcome

Approximately $5 million in operational savings and clearer accountability for transportation resources across 456 schools.

The challenge

Bringing Ventra mobile operations in-house required an internal support capability for a platform serving approximately five million users. Technology readiness and customer readiness had to advance together.

My leadership decision

Build a dedicated operational team, including mobile management, engineering, data analysis, and customer support. Establish governance and coordination across technology partners, operations, and transit agencies.

What changed

Created the support organization and operating processes needed to sustain the platform after launch, including readiness for customers moving from physical cards to digital wallets.

The outcome

Transitioned operational ownership internally and supported the scheduled Apple Wallet launch through coordinated, real-time implementation leadership.

The challenge

My team was frustrated by customer meetings in which employees were criticized without feeling supported by leadership. Senior leaders rarely engaged below the senior-manager level, and customer requests could redirect work regardless of the contract. Rebuilding trust required visible leadership support and clearer expectations on both sides.

My leadership decision

I created the agenda, attended the first meeting, and communicated my expectations of both the customer and my team. I taught my team that they could—and should—have expectations of customers, alongside their responsibility to understand and manage the customer’s expectations of us.

The operating structure

Each functional lead met weekly with their customer counterpart. Both sides reviewed unresolved issues internally, and I met weekly with customer leadership to address escalations. This established a defined path from working-level discussions to executive decisions.

Connecting expectations to execution

There was initial skepticism. When I incorporated expectations from those meetings into our Project Management Office (PMO) discussions, the value became clearer. Program and activity status, work within scope, and milestone timelines became more apparent. Scope creep became easier to identify.

The difficult conversations

I made the resource trade-offs explicit: this is what we have allocated resources to complete; adding new work can delay an existing commitment; additional resources carry an additional cost. Those conversations gave us a concrete basis for deciding what could be delivered and when.

I also required changes to be reflected in the contract so leadership on both sides understood the impact. The documentation preserved commitments and decisions for successors if any of us left.

The outcome

The customer accepted the approach reluctantly, while my team welcomed the clearer boundaries and leadership support. A concrete commercial outcome was a $13 million contract amendment covering the rewiring of all CTA and Pace buses for 4G compatibility.

The work demonstrated how customer governance could clarify scope, resources, and delivery commitments while giving the team a stronger basis for managing expectations.

Leadership perspective

Supporting a team includes addressing difficult customer conversations directly. Clear expectations and documented trade-offs help people deliver responsibly while preserving accountability on both sides of the relationship.

The responsibility

Lead supply-chain operations for the Northlake manufacturing plant, connecting planning, inventory, and operational execution.

The approach

Strengthen planning, controls, and inventory discipline to improve how resources were deployed.

The outcome

Reduced inventory by 27%, demonstrating the financial impact of more disciplined supply-chain management.

What I bring forward

A practical understanding of how decisions in planning, procurement, production, and distribution affect the entire business.