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down apps that aren’t pulling their weight. It is
a structured methodology for analyzing a portfolio of applications. But when she started with the acquisition portfolio, there were
three lists of applications, none of which were authoritative.
Palmer began by surveying users and systems administrators for their business and technical input, then she graphed
the different phases of each application’s life cycle according to whether to tolerate, invest, migrate or eliminate an app.
Then she led deep dives into each app with the business and technical owners to determine the capabilities the application supports, how widely it
is used, associated costs and other details. Based on that information, she and her team developed recommendations for senior agency leaders.
Her efforts resulted
in 33 applications being tagged for elimination and an estimated $9 million in cost avoidance from fiscal 2015 to 2017. The estimated return on investment was a whopping 1,320 percent.
In addition, Palmer identified four-year strategic roadmaps to indicate whether each application would be tolerated, invested in, migrated or eliminated over that period. The roadmaps help agency executives make data-driven investment decisions.
Her managers say she
maintained a positive attitude even when political, technical or business challenges arose. The project never fell behind schedule and was successful throughout
the two years. Beyond the cost savings, they say her work has resulted in centralized data, better resource utilization, increased security and improved communication between apps’ business and technical owners.
— Mark Rockwell
William Pratt
William Pratt exhibited outstanding leadership
at the Department of Homeland Security by energizing and pushing through a departmentwide process for adopting agile IT development.
He planned, scheduled and implemented a streamlined systems engineering life cycle, which will help align all DHS efforts by eliminating the requirement for component agencies
to maintain their own development life cycle processes. He also helped set agile and incremental software development as the default process at DHS.
All software development at DHS now must take an “agile first” approach — a significant change in direction that will save a significant amount of money.
Pratt established the IT Program Management Center of Excellence
to promote best
practices, provide tools and information, and coordinate assistance to programs and projects to maximize the successful management of DHS
IT investments. He also manages the tracking
of DHS performance measures for IT initiatives.
His goal — in collaboration with partners across DHS headquarters and component agencies — is nothing less than the transformation of how DHS acquires IT resources by transitioning from dated waterfall models to the latest state-of-the-art agile and DevOps techniques.
Pratt’s influence extends beyond DHS; he has also helped several other federal agencies kick-start their own agile software development processes.
— Aisha Chowdhry
federal contractor to the Department of Homeland Security and then applied for federal employment.
In both capacities, she
has been instrumental in helping DHS gain greater insight into — and mitigate — cybersecurity risks.
She provides expertise and leadership for the team that ensures that information security programs and systems for DHS headquarters and
all component agencies meet federal compliance standards and reporting requirements.
She has been the
chief point of contact
for internal and external reporting activities under the Federal Information Security Management Act, which includes quarterly and annual reports to Congress and responses to Government Accountability Office and DHS inspector general audit requests.
In addition, Proctor played a key role in the initiative that developed a program to consolidate data from disparate scanning tools, allow analysis of the data
for potential risks and provide actionable feedback so that system and asset owners can address vulnerabilities. When no commercial tool was available, she met the challenge by successfully building an innovative application that consolidates and normalizes all the continuous monitoring
Teresa Raye Proctor
Teresa Proctor spent a couple of years as a
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