Challenge: The Department of State (DoS) Bureau of Consular Affairs, Office of Consular Systems and Technology (CA/CST) Website Support Services (WSS) program requires high availability cloud infrastructure, software development, and monitoring for more than 100,000 federal users and 15+ Web applications supporting nearly 1 billion calls annually. Under VMD’s contract, WSS is also serving as CA/CST’s pilot Agile program.

Approach: VMD worked with CA/CST to transition the program from Waterfall to Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) in three months; we now use Agile development for public-facing web applications, travel.stage.gov (TSG), and its subsystems. In the process, VMD trained the stakeholder community on Agile best practices and roles, as well as training government personnel to act as Product Owners. VMD is also piloting DevOps practices on the WSS program by proactively introducing the concept to customer stakeholders. We also implemented continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) for rapid incremental releases. For the TSG production version, we manage a private cloud environment built on a highly virtualized architecture.

Impact: VMD has developed and deployed 106 major releases for the 16 CA/CST applications through the first three years of the program using SAFe methodologies and best practices. By implementing the Sencha Web Application Lifecycle Management platform, we increased the speed and reliability of web application deployment. We also migrated five environments out of ESOC West to AWS GovCloud migrating TSG to a private contractor cloud that provides elasticity with up to 100-fold bandwidth increases without human interaction.

Challenge: The Armed Services Blood Program (ASBP) provides quality blood products for service members, veterans and their families in both peace and war. As a joint operation among the military services (Army, Navy, Air Force), the ASBP has many components working together to collect, process, store, distribute, and transfuse blood worldwide. A primary mission for the ASPB is to deliver blood into theater to save lives. For years, excessive breakage during shipment to theater (over 14%) resulted in a burden on field medical personnel, increased costs, negatively impacted readiness, and may have put patient’s health at risk. ASBP chose VMD to help.

Approach: We evaluated all aspects of the problem from geography, distance traveled, temperature, equipment manufacture, packaging, bag volume, packing method, and freezing method and analyzed the data. VMD created new SOPs for the full lifecycle process from blood donations to freezing and shipping. Additionally, we worked with ASBP to develop and deploy new materials and methods to package blood to support military and humanitarian missions across the globe.

Impact: The new process and packaging have improved breakage to less the 5% providing significantly more lifesaving units into theater.

Challenge: The terrorist threat to aviation is continually evolving.

Approach: VMD provides passenger and baggage screening services for millions of passengers departing out of the Greater Rochester International airport. Our team is mission focused on security while demonstrating the highest degree of professionalism. In conjunction with TSA, we continually adapt to our approach to address the threat. Our staff is consistently positive, with a professional appearance and behavior. We are in compliance with TSA security standards, and we emphasize interaction with law enforcement. We prepare and plan for crisis, and conduct regular employee training and drills, often exceeding the baseline requirements of our client. We also conduct manpower planning and reporting, and can be responsive to passenger surge requirements.

Impact: The departing flights from the Greater Rochester International Airport are safe and secure, and without an incident since VMD has taken over operations.

Challenge: Securing the computer systems of the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration requires significant collaboration between the security professionals of Team VMD, numerous software engineers, system architects, external cloud computing vendors, senior managers, and the department level governance team. Additionally, DOL is modernizing numerous systems, creating a need to review and update security controls frequently. Team VMD is also required to be responsive in resolving system security incidents, whose timings and complexity are not predictable.

Approach: Team VMD categorized the security tasks as planned and on-demand. Each task has a primary VMD professional and a backup person assigned to it. We collaborate effectively with a dozen other teams and ensured that the agency's information and IT systems are protected in compliance with FISMA, the department’s policies and procedures, and the agency's own guidelines. We have ensured that all of the agency’s systems are assessed and authorized to operate, in accordance with the applicable federal laws and regulations. We have also responded to, and resolved security incidents as per the service level agreements between the agency and the department’s system security governance team.

Impact: Due to VMD’s efforts, the system security posture of the agency is enhanced and sustained at significantly higher levels.