Lead Architect, BPM and .Net Web Developer for

DHS -TSA – FAMS

• Contract for Federal Air Marshals (FAMS), Transportation Security Agency (TSA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
• Evaluate and propose Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) products to automate workflow and work with current Mission Scheduling Notification System to operate Mission Command Center and Field Operations.
• Gather requirements from clients, create use cases, as-is swim lane diagrams to help automate processes.
• Design with Enterprise Architect UML.
• Develop prototype ASP.Net system with K2 Blackpearl business processes.
• Integrate with existing Federal Air Marshal systems, libraries, databases and infrastructure.
• Develop data model, data-tier, schema, packages and stored procedures.
• Develop business middle-tier.
• Develop standards and templates for presentation-tier.
• Implement Rad Controls into presentation-tier.
• Lead team with completion of project.

Technologies: Visual Studio, C#, ASP .Net, Oracle PL-SQL, Web Services, K2 Blackpearl BPM, Enterprise Architect, SQL Server.

About this project

As I had agreed to help move the Casualty Mortuary Operations Division from Alexandria Virginia to Fort Knox Kentucky I was residing in Kentucky. After some time I needed to get back to Delaware for my daughter. The SAIC division in San Diego had a particular problem. They won a contract with the Federal Air Marshals in New Jersey near the TSA. There was another SAIC team in this location but this contract was for a different SAIC division. The San Diego office didn’t realize that the contract work must be performed on site. They needed a project lead and a technical lead for this project to work at this site. This was an opportunity for me to return from Kentucky and be with my daughter.

SAIC brought me into this project to start and technical lead a new BPM/Workflow system at the Federal Air Marshals site. The FAMs wanted to use a BPM to automate all of their headquarters, branches and Air Marshals scheduling, correspondence, escalations and all flows of information. This system was to work together with their current database and systems. There was already an existing large development staff at the Tech Center but I was brought in from a different division to run this project separately. Besides designing and developing this system I needed to make the system work with the current FAMS systems.

Mari Khener (see references) was hired as a project lead and I was hired as the technical lead. The contract was for the design and development of a portal for the Air Marshals. This portal would be for Federal Air Marshals to check their schedule, change their schedule and coordinate their travels. Also, it would track any incidents and escalate them based on severity. There would be work queues of assignments. Our first task was to evaluate BPM products to present to the customer. We spent a few months evaluating many BPM products. The current SAIC developers at this location were using Microsoft .Net for all development and said that they wanted all Microsoft technologies so we decided on K2 Black Pearl.

Our first assignment was to review BPM and workflow products and help make decisions on technologies and build versus buy considerations.  The first few months I evaluated and worked on proof-of-concepts for many BPM products.  We chose K2 Black Pearl because it provided exactly what we needed on the environment we were working with the budget constraints. It was the perfect solution.

The next task was to design the system. Mari and I traveled to the TSA FAMS headquarters in Virginia, analyzed and documented the operations and interviewed the customers for several months. All of the requirements were put into Enterprise Architect with use cases.

Our small team was totally separate from the New Jersey FAMS team but we had to collaborate with them. We worked for a government customer in Virginia who was not associated with the New Jersey team. There was much resentment on part of the New Jersey office management and our management and the government customer of our project who gave us the contract. It was very hard getting that office to cooperate with us. For example, there was a big SAIC Christmas party at the office which Mari and I were not invited to attend. They went out of their way to not cooperate. There was government infighting and SAIC infighting.

After the technologies and proof-of-concepts and decisions were made I headed building an off-site development team with SAIC developers located in several other states.

We managed to design and develop a portal that would interface with their systems. We designed the entire system with Enterprise Architect UML from use cases to the class diagrams and database design.

As the government customer moved slowly in procuring the hardware, we developed all of the network, servers and system on Amazon Web Services. K2 Black Pearl provided us with this environment.

When it came time to do the development, SAIC San Diego, had a team of remote developers who would help with the development. Mari managed the project and did development of the user interfaces. I interfaced the .Net code with the K2 Black Pearl BPM services. Much of my part was developing work flows with the graphical BPM tool and interfacing the system with the .Net portal for the work queues. Also, I created interfaces to the FAMS Oracle databases and the K2 Black Pearl SQL Server and SharePoint servers.

This project was an awesome experience. Mari and I are still good friends to this day. We left the system to the New Jersey team and went off our separate ways to do other contracts for SAIC. I learned a lot about the politics of conflicting interests and petty resentments. Also, I learned about having timelines without actually ever procuring the hardware. This was my first real introduction of working “on the cloud”. Overall, we left them a very good work flow and portal for the Federal Air Marshals.

Developed much of the prototype system on AWS cloud with SQL Servers, K2 Black Pearl BPM server, development workstations on the cloud as the vendor could provide servers on the cloud while we waited for the government to approve and purchase software and hardware etc.  We interfaced to Oracle servers and other parts of the system that were not on the cloud.

Memories….working with the hostility of the New Jersey team and their managers. Becoming good friends with Mari. Working with the remote San Diego office. Traveling to offices in Virginia and Washington and talking with all kinds of law enforcement employees. Learning how Federal Air Marshals train for close combat. Learning how they fly around inconspicuous on flights. Learning how flights are rated for risk. Creating complicated work flows and escalations. Working for Homeland Security, Transportation Security Agency and how incidents make their way up the the ladder based on their severity.