Maria-Paz Barrientos

Maria-Paz Barrientos has more than 20 years of management consulting experience advising C-Suite leaders and senior U.S. government officials on strategic planning, organizational transformation, and change management. She has extensive experience managing programs, projects, and people, including defining scope and level of effort, governance, mitigating risk, and producing impact with high quality project deliverables. 

Her clients have included the Departments of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Justice, and Education, National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Military Health System, Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Navy and Army, and U.S. Postal Service. Federal projects have received excellent CPAR scores over the past four years.

As the project management (PM) capability lead, Barrientos heads an organization of program and project managers accountable for project delivery to a diverse set of clients in Abt’s U.S. Domestic Division. She oversees innovative solutions, offerings, assets, and continuous improvement of PM methods, standards, tools, and best practices. She is responsible for building an engaged, high-performing organization of project leaders that can deliver client satisfaction and successful business performance on a portfolio of hundreds of projects of different size and complexity.

Barrientos joined Abt from Deloitte, where she served as a Managing Director for Government and Public Services, focused on transforming Federal healthcare and nonprofit organizations. In that role, she was responsible for all aspects of project solutioning and delivery, including budget, milestones, client management, and billing, for over 20 projects. Among other things, she supported the development of a GenAI strategy for two large public health nonprofits.

Prior to Deloitte, she was a Vice President and Senior Partner at IBM supporting healthcare clients, where she led a team of more than 1,000 consultants on the $300+ million Anthem account, IBM’s largest healthcare client. Other roles at IBM included serving as the global leader for one of IBM’s global competency centers, and as the service line leader for Public Sector, Organization & People consulting services, she led up to 600 consultants with annual revenue of over $150 million on over 40 programs. In this role, she also coached teams on project management principles, met regularly with clients to gauge client satisfaction with performance, and worked with project leads to address and solution delivery issues.

Publications

• Barrientos, M and Singer, M, Five keys to optimizing employee experience, 2018, IBM Institute for Business Value. https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-businessvalue/en-us/report/employee_experience
• Barrientos, M and Whiteford, E, Mastering the art of change in the digital domain, 2017, IBM Institute for Business Value https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institutebusiness-value/en-us/report/masterchange
• Barrientos, M, Myths, exaggerations, and uncomfortable truths: The real story behind Millennials in the workplace, 2015, IBM Institute for Business Value
• Barrientos, M et al, Making change work…while the work keeps changing. How Change Architects lead and manage organizational change, 2014, IBM Institute for Business Value