Ever since I became a project manager, I’ve enjoyed leading teams as they chart their paths. My favorite days are ones where I get to work with several different teams and have the opportunity to work side by side with our employees, clients, partners, and the innovation community in defining strategies, making decisions, and planning solutions that more effectively serve constituents and enable our clients’ missions.
Meet Nancy
Vice President
Nancy Rhodes is a leader in Booz Allen’s Citizen Services and Economic Advancement business with over 30 years of experience in technology-related industries. She and her teams support critical systems essential to our clients’ missions through idea conception, refinement, and implementation. Currently, she provides senior leadership and guidance to programs at the Department of the Treasury and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Prior to joining Booz Allen, Nancy spent 15 years at Fannie Mae as an IT director, leading data warehousing implementations and legacy system migrations.
Nancy has an M.S. in management information systems from American University and a B.S. in finance and management information systems from the University of Virginia. She is also a certified project management professional.
Why are you passionate about financial systems initiatives? I was a finance and management information systems major at the University of Virginia and thought I would work directly in the finance industry. Yet, in my last year of college, I found that I loved my programming and computer classes and headed in that direction after school. I’ve been in the financial systems area my whole career and still love the combination of finance and systems development. I enjoy being able to implement digital solutions that improve the business processes in finance and enhance the transparency of financial data.
What are the greatest challenges for today’s financial systems? In the financial environment, there are a number of legacy systems that need modernization, from the back-end processing on very old platforms to the front end that doesn't present the data in a user-friendly format. These gaps provide significant opportunities to modernize and transform the business. However, the nature of financial systems creates added modernization challenges—the data has to be exact, the flow of funds has to continue, and there can be no downtime during a transition. Legacy financial systems are a long way off of the modern applications offered by the commercial financial institutions and expected by the user, making the need to modernize efficiently more urgent.
How do you inspire your teams to do excellent work? How do your teams inspire you? I like to think of “what’s next” and encourage my team to always be thinking in the same mindset. Whether it’s new technologies, threats, or opportunities—we need to understand them the best we can to better deliver to our clients. My team inspires me with their dedication to clients and the passionate services they provide every day by understanding the client’s mission and their unique challenges. At Booz Allen, we’re fortunate to have teams comprised of people with different backgrounds and experiences as well as different ways of thinking and seeing the world, resulting in a diversity of thought that brings new ideas and solutions to our clients.
