Program Leadership, Not Deliverables
EDJ does not sell hours. We sell accountability. Every engagement is scoped around a specific compliance or technology objective, led by senior program leadership, and designed to end when your organization can operate independently. The work is structured. The communication is clear. The exit is intentional.
Governance-Led Program Leadership
The gap: No one owns the full initiative.
Most regulated organizations have vendors doing the work but no one running the program. The MSP is configuring systems. The compliance firm is writing policies. The security vendor is running assessments. But no one is sequencing the work, enforcing dependencies, or telling leadership the truth about where things stand.
EDJ serves as fractional CIO-level program leadership. We define scope, assign ownership, set milestones, and hold every party accountable to a single plan. We run the weekly check-ins. We maintain the centralized tracker. We make the calls when priorities conflict.
The result: one point of accountability across every vendor, every workstream, and every executive conversation.
What this looks like in practice
A mid-size government contractor needed to achieve ITAR compliance and CMMC Level 2 alignment across a 45-user M365 environment. The initiative involved a dedicated cybersecurity firm, an infrastructure partner, and internal staff with no prior compliance experience. EDJ led the 12-week program from scoping through close-out: coordinating a 6-person technical team, managing a 4-phase implementation roadmap, maintaining milestone tracking with owners and due dates, and delivering weekly executive briefings to the CEO and senior leadership. The program completed on schedule with full audit-ready documentation.
Compliance Translation
The gap: Frameworks exist on paper but not in practice.
NIST 800-171, ITAR, CUI, FISMA, and CMMC are not implementation guides. They are control frameworks. The distance between "we need to comply with ITAR" and "here is exactly what we need to configure, document, and prove" is where most programs stall.
EDJ translates regulatory frameworks into three things: practical control requirements your team can act on, executable task plans with owners and deadlines, and audit-defensible documentation that holds up under scrutiny. We don't write a gap assessment and leave. We convert findings into work, and we see that work through.
What this looks like in practice
A 90-person engineering firm with active DoD subcontracts had been told by a prime contractor that they needed to demonstrate NIST 800-171 compliance within 120 days or risk losing their subcontract. They had a security vendor running vulnerability scans and a compliance firm that had produced a gap assessment six months earlier. Neither had converted findings into an actionable plan. EDJ translated the gap assessment into a prioritized control implementation schedule, mapped each control to specific M365 and infrastructure configurations, and built the SSP and POA&M from scratch. The client submitted their SPRS score on deadline and retained the subcontract.
Vendor Orchestration
The gap: Vendors are engaged, but no one is coordinating them.
A typical EDJ engagement involves three to six vendors: an MSP, a compliance firm, a security vendor, a cloud or M365 specialist, and often one or two additional contractors. Each vendor has their own scope, their own timeline, and their own definition of "done." Without a single coordinator enforcing handoffs and resolving conflicts, gaps appear between workstreams. Deliverables slip. Finger-pointing starts.
EDJ sits above the vendor layer. We don't compete with your vendors. We make them perform. We enforce scope boundaries, manage dependencies, ensure that one vendor's output is another vendor's input, and prevent the accountability gaps that cause programs to stall or restart.
What this looks like in practice
A policy research firm with 35 employees handling CUI was preparing for its first client-requested security audit. The firm had an MSP managing day-to-day infrastructure, a compliance consultant drafting policies, and a separate cloud migration vendor moving file shares to SharePoint. None of the three vendors had visibility into what the others were doing. EDJ stepped in eight weeks before the audit, established a single project tracker across all three workstreams, identified four critical gaps between vendor scopes that would have surfaced during the audit, and coordinated remediation. The firm passed the audit with no findings.
Executive Communication
The gap: Leadership lacks clear, decision-ready visibility.
Compliance and technology programs generate enormous amounts of technical detail. Most of it is irrelevant to the people making decisions. What leadership needs is not a status dashboard. They need someone who can walk into the room and say: here is where we stand, here is what is at risk, and here is what we are doing about it.
EDJ provides weekly executive reporting that translates technical progress into language leadership can act on. We surface real risk early. We frame tradeoffs honestly. We make sure that the CEO, COO, or executive sponsor is never surprised by a missed deadline, a vendor failure, or a compliance gap they should have known about three weeks ago.
What this looks like in practice
A PE-backed engineering services firm had acquired a small government contractor and inherited a FISMA compliance obligation it was not prepared for. The board needed quarterly updates on compliance posture, but the internal IT director could not translate the technical program into language the board could act on. EDJ provided executive-level reporting throughout a 16-week remediation effort, translating control implementation progress, risk exposure, and vendor performance into concise briefings. The board approved two critical budget decisions on schedule because they understood exactly what they were funding and why. The IT director stayed focused on execution instead of spending 10 hours a week preparing slides.
Representative Engagement Profile
Every EDJ engagement is scoped to the client's specific compliance and technology objectives. While no two programs are identical, a representative engagement typically includes:
You already know something needs to change.
EDJ works with organizations that have recognized the gap between where they are and where they need to be.
The next step is a conversation. No pitch. No proposal. Just clarity.