Edward Carroll – Service Delivery Manager of the Year

Glenn Jones – Linh Pham Team Player of the Year

Miles Simpson – Engineer of the Year

Hannah Taylor – Administrative Excellence of the Year

Hannah joined SMS 5 years ago, starting in Human Resouces and then transitioning onto the security team. She is detail oriented, organized and enjoys a challenge, making her a great fit on the security team. Hannah is now the “go-to” for everything security and ensures all matters are addressed quickly. Additionally, Hannah is helping cross train her colleague on security tasks to provide additional support to the security team. Bringing passion to the job daily, we thank Hannah for her hard work, dedication, and outstanding contributions to SMS!

Anna Anderson – Business Development Executive of the Year

SMS Contractors on this team: Michael R. Richardson, Tristan A. Price, Francisco J. Dominicci-Aponte, Nicholas A. Schrandt.

The AFRL/RVIS ServiceNow development team was lauded by the ServiceNow industry partner as being the most technically competent team in both the Air and Space Force. Their expertise in this platform resulted in a subject matter expert for AFRL to turn to for workflow and architecture implementation across the Enterprise. They integrated the Continuous Improvement and Innovation team into workflow development requiring all current and new processes to first go through a rigorous review to streamline before digitizing, which resulted in tightly coupled teaming between RVIS and continuous improvement resulting in an average of 30% reduction of steps per workflow.

The team overhauled the Logistics Material Control Activity process for accounting for computer assets in a digital environment. They moved all Information Technology assets into ServiceNow providing a transparent, readily available workflow to turn in, transfer, hand receipt and account for all Information Technology Equipment assets in both RD/RV. This enabled customers a true one stop shop for computer issues, including transferring a new computer to the user on demand while current system is being repaired. Their accomplishments are expected to cut lost Information Technology Equipment by $400K and customer downtime by 86% in many instances.

The development team created a more robust communication venue for the helpdesk interactions with the customer. They added the capability to receive emails from the customer that ingests directly into ServiceNow automatically creating a helpdesk ticket for routing, introduced a helpdesk live chat function allowing customer to chat with an agent on demand, piloted a new workspace feature allowing access to all information on a single page, and improved efficiency of helping the customer by 74%, dropping time to resolution from 15 minutes to 4 minutes.

They wrangled the dreaded in processing process at the Phillips Research Site. Taking what was once an arduous drawn-out process taking weeks to complete, the team made it a digital wonderland taking only 3 days by running parallel activities across both Directorates consolidating over 11 different processes for one individual to complete. This allowed long distant remote employees or even teleworking employees to in-process remotely through the Air Force and Defense Research and Engineering Virtual Private Network by integrating 4 different video repositories, detailed maps and instructions to further integrate and provide training to the new employee as they on board. 

Finally, the development team wrote a proposal and received approval for modeling all existing and future workflows into a comprehensive modeling tool (MagicDraw/Cameo). This new tool will show all flows, interdependencies and possible issues as the Phillips Research Site digitizes future workflows moving to a largely digital support environment where managing these interactions between flows would be impossible without the forethought to provide this modeling.

SMS is pleased to recognize Erica McBride with October’s President’s Award for demonstrating our values of collaboration, commitment, and creativity. Erica has been a Sr. Technical Recruiter with SMS for just over 2 years. In this key role, Erica’s tasks include training new recruiters, filling hard-to-fill positions, tracking contingent offers, and attending job fairs. In October, Erica received a wonderful recognition on Spotlight from an SMS teammate celebrating her own 1-year anniversary. The recognition speaks for itself: “I want to recognize Erica for being a top-notch recruiter for SMS. When Erica initially contacted me, I was in a vulnerable position in my career, as a fresh-out-of-service veteran, feeling a little doubtful about my career decisions. The instance we started talking about SMS, as the great company it is, I knew I was going to be in great hands. Thank you for trusting me, Erica!” Thank you, Erica, for your outstanding recruiting, supporting our veterans, and finding high quality candidates/employees!

Alicia Carter is the recipient of the November President’s Award for exemplifying our values of collaboration, commitment, and creativity. Alicia has dedicated over 5 years to supporting our customer at the Air Force Research Lab at Edwards Air Force Base first as a VTC Technician and currently as Telephone Control Officer (TCO) Support Specialist. Recently, she received numerous commendations from customers and end users for her exceptional focus on customer service and her adept problem-solving skills. One customer expressed, “She is always available, takes the time to address concerns, follows up promptly, and provides a seamless interface.” In one example, a Government staff member on overseas travel contacted Alicia via cell phone at 1:30 AM. She promptly answered the phone and assisted the customer before returning to bed. She then followed up with the customer after arriving to work to ensure their international phone services were functioning correctly. Thank you for your tremendous customer focus and teamwork, Alicia!  

Congratulations to DeShawn Brown, who earned December’s President’s Award for exemplifying our values of collaboration, commitment, and creativity. DeShawn has supported our Army Enterprise Cloud Management Agency (ECMA) program as a Cybersecurity Lead for two years. In December, DeShawn received wonderful recognition from our customer describing the significance and complexity of his recent accomplishment in support of critical application cybersecurity assessments: “We’d like to express our thanks and appreciation for Mr. Brown. He has been a tremendous asset to the team. His expertise and professionalism has been instrumental to accomplishing our team goals. This not only saved time but provided a more streamlined process for accomplishing these assessments. We have been operating under constantly changing timelines but Mr. Brown has continually kept pace. We are very proud to have him as a team member and we are excited about his future.” Thank you, DeShawn, for your outstanding accomplishments and support of the customer, our team, and SMS! 

SMS is excited to recognize Rebecca Geist Latina with September’s President’s Award for demonstrating our values of collaboration, commitment, and creativity. Rebecca has been the Project Control Officer (PCO) for 3 years on a task order supporting the Air Force out of Hanscom AFB. As the PCO, Rebecca’s role includes monitoring and managing the completion of training, timesheet compliance, as well as the tracking of financials, accounting, and purchasing for a contract valued at over $600M. Earlier this year, Rebecca started taking on greater responsibilities including the delivery of crucial weekly, monthly, and semi-annual contract deliverables. In addition, she has been the backup for our purchasing team which had a very significant number of purchases at the end of the fiscal year. Rebecca provides rational and sage input to the management team and has been a key part of the team’s success with her attention to detail, hunger to learn, and willingness to stretch beyond her comfort zone to help and take on greater responsibility. She makes everyone that she meets and works with want to be better both professionally and personally. Thank you, Rebecca!

Steve Youngblood earned July’s President’s Award for demonstrating our values of collaboration, commitment, and creativity. Steve, a member of SMS’ Platform Engineering team, made his first code contribution this July to an upstream open-source project maintained by our partner Gruntwork. Contributing to an open-source project is no small feat. It requires not only technical prowess but also the ability to collaborate with a diverse group of developers from around the world. By making this contribution, Steve has demonstrated a commitment to the broader tech community and a willingness to share knowledge for the betterment of all. Contributing represents countless hours of learning, coding, and refining one’s skills. The feeling of satisfaction derived from such an accomplishment is universal among developers, and it’s a testament to Steve’s dedication to the craft and a sign of potential for future achievements. Steve’s contribution to the Gruntwork Infrastructure-as-Code library is a clear indication of his technical capabilities, collaborative spirit, and commitment to the open-source community. These contributions also strengthen our strategic partnership with Gruntwork as we continue to work together towards innovation in Cloud Computing, DevOps and Platform Engineering. Great work, Steve!

A hidden gem within SMS’s arsenal of engineering support teams is a very small group comprised of five Event Management System (EMS) engineers.  For the past two decades, Tim Blain, Troy Ward, Peter Tang, Graham May and Bill Maron have been supporting some of our largest customers and programs to date. They have established themselves as one of strongest Department of Defense’s EMS support teams by successfully implementing multiple, large scale and global EMS solutions for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the Army.

Recognized as a leader in the Government engineering space, it was no surprise when an industry partner and their stakeholders asked this team to support them with a new program called the Global Management System (GMS). Under the GMS program, DISA is replacing its legacy and outdated EMS solution with a smarter, more intelligent solution, providing DISA’s Global Operations Center (DGOC) the ability to integrate, correlate and enrich networking events occurring on and between their Transport Optical and IP networks – which currently did not exist. Furthermore, the entire solution is to be securely implemented within multiple AWS Gov-cloud enclaves. Our partner simply did not have adequate resources or the knowledge on the GMS program to implement such a complex solution; reaching out to such a well-known SMS entity to advance their EMS solution was a logical choice.

Although the team is actively supporting the Joint Regional Security Stack’s (JRSS) multi-tenant program, they agreed to offer their support the GMS. Since November 2021, the SMS EMS team balanced their efforts and diligently divided their time between the two programs. They successfully installed, integrated and implemented a suite of applications for GMS utilizing IBM’s Watson AIOps and Netcool Operations Insight offerings. In April 2023, the team supplied our partner a fully developed, Government-approved, EMS solution which is actively being used to monitor DGOC’s production backbone and supporting networks today.

SMS has a long-standing history in advanced engineering and it is our pleasure to support this highly visible GMS program. We appreciate the engineering effort and support that our small, and talented, EMS team provides for our customers.

Activities included a catered lunch by SMS’ own Phil Apodaca and his family in their VIX Re-Phil Food Truck, a dunk tank to cool the unlucky recipient, and a win by the Kirtland Softball team the prior evening.

Thanks to the great employees at Kirtland AFB!

Read about SMS ranking #15 by the Albuquerque Journal: SMS Ranks #15 Top Workplace for Albuquerque, NM | SMS

SMS is pleased to recognize Francisco (Frank) Gutierrez with June’s President’s Award for demonstrating our values of collaboration, commitment, and creativity. Frank has been supporting SMS’ AIT Army contract for three years and was recognized recently by one of his teammates for his leadership in guiding and working with new employees. Among Frank’s many strengths is his commitment to ensuring that his teammates have a clear path to understanding all the requirements for their team trips abroad, as well as procedures for site surveys, team meetings, and any other necessary activities in providing customer support. In addition to helping his teammates learn the necessary aspects of the AIT program, Frank also makes sure to guide his teammates in becoming integral parts of SMS. Frank’s willingness to travel across the world to support various foreign governments to improve and modernize their IT posture is a small example of his dedication to the customer and its mission. Thank you, Frank, and keep up the great work!

We present Glenn Jones with May’s President’s Award for demonstrating our values of collaboration, commitment, and creativity. Glenn has been a Sr. engineer with SMS since 1995, currently supporting the Pentagon. Though Glenn has never sought attention for his accomplishments, SMS engineers have routinely demonstrated tremendous respect for his skills and ability to solve our customers’ toughest challenges. In May, a Pentagon stakeholder who had been trying to stand up a network for nearly two years summed up succinctly and powerfully what Glenn has been providing for nearly three decades with SMS: “We were met with ‘No’, ‘I don’t know’, and road blocks. We were met with people ignoring us and pushing us to the side…Thank you for making all the No’s into a Yes! For individuals you will never meet and goals you will never know were achieved. Thank you for keeping us Mission Ready!” SMS also thanks you, Glenn!

SMS also proudly recognizes Cheryl Sibbett with April’s President’s award for demonstrating our values of collaboration, commitment, and creativity. Cheryl has provided operations and executive support since joining SMS in April 1993, and we celebrated her 30-year anniversary at last month’s 2022 Awards ceremony. With a keen ability to both connect with fellow SMS employees as well as understand our operational needs, Cheryl is integral to keeping SMS corporate running smoothly. One of her key roles – managing travel and airline logistics for all SMS employees – has increased significantly in both time and complexity over the past decade as SMS has expanded into supporting Government sites in more than two dozen states, as well as worldwide installations. Nearly every week Cheryl deftly accommodates last-minute travel needs and requests at all hours of the day and night. Cheryl will also be a key part of managing our upcoming headquarters move this Fall. Congratulations and thank you, Cheryl!

Congratulations to this quarter’s Presidential Awardees! Well-earned and thank you! 

Below are some highlights from the celebration! 

SMS is pleased to recognize Anthony Owens, Sr. Desktop Support Specialist, with the March President’s Award for demonstrating our values of collaboration, commitment, and creativity. Since joining the ARTEMIS Team in October 2022, Anthony has been silently, but effectively, providing critical Linux support to the AFRL-West Linux Community. Within months of joining the ARTEMIS Linux Team, Anthony was responsible for building, testing, maintaining, provisioning, deploying, and deprovisioning all AFRL-West Linux workstations (including High Powered Workstations), as well as managing the RDT&E High-Performance Computing (HPC) Cluster. Anthony takes the time to create automation scrips that help the other technicians, shares his Linux knowledge, and inspires other technicians to start exploring Linux. Anthony also creates Linux specific processes and procedures for the ARTEMIS Continuity Handbook (which is a contract deliverable), assists with monthly vulnerability management, and creates Linux Inventory for the Service Desk to assist with managing the machines’ MAC addresses on-location after DHCP and DNS issue on the Linux RDT&E network. Thank you, Anthony!  

We are delighted to recognize Cedric Hall with February’s President’s Award for demonstrating our values of collaboration, commitment, and creativity. Cedric provided outstanding support as a Sr. Systems Engineer on our Air Force NCC/NOS program in Montgomery, Alabama. In February, our customer highlighted to SMS leadership the fantastic support Cedric provides on a daily basis and, in particular, his performance during a recent outage: “He has always been exceptional since he has been here and he has always demonstrated outstanding leadership with the Air Force team ensuring NetOps Leadership has the latest status on all outages/requirements. He is the Team Lead when we have an outage, ensuring the problem is resolved with effective problem solving and reducing downtime for any network issue that we have here in NetOps.” Thank you, Cedric!  

SMS is proud  to recognize George Selby and Bryon Hairston with January’s President’s Award for demonstrating our values of collaboration, commitment, and creativity. George and Bryon have been dedicated for more than twenty years combined to SMS’ warehouse and logistics requirements, including receiving and managing inventory, shipments, and making deliveries. In January 2023, they received a recognition from the Pentagon’s Joint Service Provider (JSP) Program Director for their dedication to the JSP mission. In the past year, impacts from supply chain issues resulted in a large number of incomplete JPS project deliveries, causing a major increase in the volume of inventory in the warehouse to support the program. Even with the physical constraints of the warehouse footprint, the team has been able to ensure that project materials are organized, labeled correctly, and are readily available for delivery when required for the program. Thank you for your hard work and dedication, George and Bryon!  

Congratulations to this quarter’s Presidential Awardees! Well-earned and thank you! 

Miles currently works as a network engineer at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). Miles serves as the Chair of Engineering Review Board, and his job is to review, improve, and approve all Engineering Implementation Plans and associated configurations to ensure they follow the overarching architectural design and standards. He also serves as a Director in the SMS’ Technology Leadership Program (TLP) to cross-pollenate knowledge from SMS’ best and brightest technical leaders across the different contracts and geographically across the US. The TLP is a growing program where those with high technical potential can make a difference across SMS. 

When Miles applied to SMS seven years ago, he already began studying for the CCIE. After passing the written portion of the CCIE certification in 2020, he found himself in a unique situation that he couldn’t take the lab portion of the CCIE certification because of the COVID lockdowns. Additionally, not only had Miles been studying and now unable to test in the lab, but Cisco was also rewriting the exam to update material, meaning that Miles would have to study new material, a substantial 40% of the lab, without testing his knowledge on the written exam. In the summer of 2022, SMS’ Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Chuck Luedke asked for a volunteer to test the ETP program, and Miles volunteered to finish his CCIE. Chuck agreed and tapped Ryan DeBerry, already a CCIE, to be Miles’ mentor through the process. Chuck gave Miles a framework training plan and asked Miles to complete the details, asking for commitment to follow the training plan. They agreed that Miles will study for three hours per day to prepare for the lab. In Miles’ mind, he signed up for 21 hours per week – the equivalent of a part-time job, for the next eight months. With this commitment Miles had to prioritize his studying over spending time with his fiancé and English Bulldog, over going out with his friends on the weekends, and over doing his own hobbies like fitness and bodybuilding. From August 2022 until March 2023, he fully invested and maintained his 21-hour studying routine until he could take the CCIE lab exam. 

The CCIE lab exam is very exact and demanding. It is eight hours of supervised configuring and troubleshooting in a networking lab. Some of the exam questions are multi-task questions, with each task getting more precise. If the question is worth X points, and you miss the fifth task in the question, then you lose all X points on the exam. In addition to the extreme technical challenge of the test, labs are only offered in select locations, so an examinee usually flies across the US to another state to take the lab, adding a psychological stress of timed and evaluated testing environment. With an estimated pass rate of 26%, the lab is grueling to undertake. Miles flew to Dallas, took the lab, and was in the airport to return home when he was notified that his CCIE account updated. While sitting in the airport terminal, Miles read that he passed the lab, earning the coveted CCIE certification.  

How did Miles accomplish this? He says come up with a plan and set study goals. Twenty-one hours per week for eight months was barely enough for someone who had already passed the written test, so be realistic in your plan. Find support groups of others with the same CCIE goal; go to a CCIE bootcamp; actively participate in study groups; join Discord and Slack chat groups to help hold each other accountable and encourage each other. You have to say you are going to do it, because once you “put it out there, then it’s real” Miles reflected. 

What is next for Miles? “I want to learn more Cloud, DevNet, and Platform Engineering” as well as help spearhead some of the technology initiatives. He looks forward to being a mentor for someone else who wants to undergo the CCIE journey and help mentor them. But for right now, Miles is still breathing a sigh of relief at passing the lab and planning to catch up on some overdue rest and relaxation. 

Congratulations, Miles, on your hard-earned accomplishment!