Page 38 - FCW, October 2017

Justin C. Ariel
Network Engineer/Systems Administrator, Office of the CIO, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
NASA
As a network engineer and systems administrator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Justin Ariel took a lead role in the expansion of JPL’s national security IT environment.
His work included handling a network migration that touched nearly every aspect of JPL’s field center, building infrastructure servers and services, and instituting centralized desktop management.
The self-described jack-of-all- trades when it comes to technology said the network migration took six to eight months, and he had
to balance mission delivery with strict regulatory compliance on a closed network that supports users nationwide.
Not only was Ariel the architect and leader for moving the old network to the new one, he also had to establish connections within the intelligence community.
“The fact that JPL is fairly new in the intelligence community \[means\] the footprint’s not there yet,” he said. “The challenge is to make those contact points, to establish the relationships for their support and vice versa.”
One colleague called Ariel’s involvement instrumental in expanding JPL’s national security IT environment and forging connections for the new office.
“Without his innovative solutions and fierce determination to produce optimal and customer-centric results,” the colleague said, “program teams would have been hampered by limited bandwidth,...a higher
risk of work-impacting outages or performance degradation, and daily operations and management of
the environment would not run as smoothly.”
— Chase Gunter
Lindsey Averill
Associate Vice President
The Ambit Group
When the hurricane hunters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration learned in 2016 that they had to leave their longtime home at MacDill Air Force Base
in Tampa, Fla., they faced a nearly impossible task.
Losing any member of the 110-person team was considered unacceptable, so the organization needed to find a new home at a nearby airport that had enough space to house nine aircraft and advanced IT assets and equipment. To top it off, the team needed to reconstruct its existing hangar and move everything and everyone
in a span of five months, before hurricane season kicked off on June 1, 2017.
Enter Lindsey Averill.
“Lindsey’s mentality — you can’t install that, and you definitely can’t know what a person is made of until they’re dropped in that situation,” NOAA Associate CIO Joseph Baczkowski said.
By all accounts, Averill dove headfirst into the eye of the storm. As the project manager for the Ambit Group, she negotiated with federal, state and local officials before finally settling on a 10-year lease with Lakeland Linder Regional Airport, 50 miles from NOAA’s previous home.
In addition, she oversaw the redesign and remodeling of the hangar, managed over 16 IT procurements and ultimately helped deliver one of the largest relocations in NOAA’s history while spending just 45 percent of the budget earmarked for the project. She
even managed to organize a ribbon- cutting ceremony with federal and state officials to celebrate the new home.
Along the way, her work ethic and personal style endeared her
to NOAA employees. Baczkowski said her humor and empathy won over frustrated staffers, many of whom were less than thrilled at the prospect of leaving the only base of operations they’d known for two decades.
“You can imagine that there were quite a few cranky people, and I think Lindsey has this incredible ability to put a person at ease, to listen to them,” Baczkowski said. “No one will know every little thing that she did to get this project completed. There was just so much that was done behind the scenes.”
Ultimately, NOAA achieved
its retention goal, with all 110 employees deciding to make the move. Averill said her goodbyes to the staff on Sept. 1. A week later, Hurricane Irma passed over their new base in Lakeland, and the hurricane hunters went to work.
— Derek B. Johnson
18 October 2017 FCW.COM