Ariel Partners has partnered with a diverse range of organizations across state, federal, and commercial sectors to deliver innovative solutions for more than twenty years. Since our founding in 2000, we’ve had the privilege of supporting mission-critical programs and strategic initiatives to help government agencies and private enterprises alike overcome complex challenges and achieve measurable outcomes. Our client engagements reflect both the depth of our expertise and our commitment to long-term success across industries.
In 2020 Ariel, received a Federal prime award with the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) Business and Enterprise Systems (BES) Directorate to provide Jira Training to personnel in the Randolph, Wright-Patterson, and Gunter Annex Air Force Bases. BES is rolling out the Atlassian products suite as part of their initiative to transform their organization by adopting Agile and DevOps practices. Ariel created 36 hours of highly interactive custom training material, supported by a thoughtfully configured Jira instance encompassing several simulated projects having with over four months of highly-realistic data. Ariel has trained over a 1000 Air Force personnel in Jira Fundamentals and Advanced Jira features. Ariel’s hands-on training has reinforced Agile principles and demonstrated best practices for Jira, as well as pointed out common pitfalls to avoid. These training courses were specifically designed to guide students through a number of different scenarios covering the diverse needs of a large organization like BES, including Scrum, Kanban, scaled and hybrid approaches.
We have worked with the FBI CODIS program since 2003 and continuously since 2012. CODIS is a critical biometrics law enforcement tool that leverages advanced forensic science to help identify violent criminals, missing persons, and unidentified human remains. CODIS is used daily by the FBI, State and Local forensic labs, and law enforcement agencies throughout the US and around the world. Ariel assisted the FBI with transitioning the CODIS program from a traditional Waterfall development methodology to an Agile/DevOps approach. We also provided Tier III operational support for 450 labs in 50 countries, while delivering bug fixes and major system enhancements. During our tenure we established Continuous Integration, Infrastructure as Code, and significantly improved the performance of the CODIS software reducing the time it takes to prepare DNA records for cross-searching from 10 hours to 20 minutes. We helped establish test automation on CODIS using SpecFlow to automate acceptance criteria and enable full automated traceability to requirements (features). Ultimately, the program achieved approximately 50% functional coverage starting from zero, on a 15-year old codebase of 2 million lines of Microsoft .NET-based code written in five programming languages. Awarded a 10-year contract in 2016 for new development and maintenance of CODIS with Lockheed Martin and ECS Federal.
Since September 2019, Ariel Partners has been working with the Office of the Inspector General of the Social Security Administration (SSA OIG). Ariel is designing an audit program for large-scale Agile projects and delivering a comprehensive training program covering all aspects of large-scale Agile software development. Ariel is providing the following training courses to SSA OIG:
The SSA is currently executing a large (>$100M) Agile project to replace the mission-critical disability system; a complex system that interacts with 54 state-based systems (including Puerto Rico, Guam, US Virgin Islands, and American Samoa). Ariel is helping SSA OIG to identify better practices for forecasting, planning, DevOps, and reporting and to flag poor practices such as using non-normalized Story Points and assuming that cycle times follow a normal distribution/bell curve when constructing schedule forecasts.
Ariel assisted in the development of an application to maintain a registry of first responders for the Office of Emergency Management. Ariel consultants performed functional and technical analysis, design, programming, testing, support, debugging, and maintenance of mission critical web-based software components.
Supported the EPA’s Information Resources Management Division located in Research Triangle Park, NC. Ariel performed IT operations and telecommunications services, including network engineering and administration, Lotus Notes development and administration, LAN support, service desk, training, computer and workstation support and web applications/software development. We provided application development support to maintain more than 30 currently used applications in addition to the design, testing, and deployment of new applications. Ariel ensured high system availability of the EPA IRMD infrastructure supporting 3,000 users, 40 servers, 51 applications, and four geographic locations on a 24×7 basis. We also provided local and remote training including in-classroom instruction, webinars and recorded content. We supported the Online Library System (OLS) that provides access to thousands of EPA library resources through a consolidated web-based database system.
Since June 2016, Ariel Partners has provided a wide range of services to the New York City (NYC) Department of Social Services (DSS)/Department of Homeless Services (DHS). Ariel is assisting the NYC DSS Information Technology Services (ITS) division in its efforts to streamline and modernize its operations, which includes the establishment of a new virtualized and hardened software infrastructure, adoption of Agile and DevOps practices, building and extending an Enterprise Data Warehouse, improving safety and services at intake centers, and development of a significant portfolio of new web and mobile applications. These improved capabilities are instrumental for DSS/HRA/DHS to respond to a mayoral mandate to significantly improve services and to open 90 new shelters over the next eight years. The initiative requires DSS to improve the quality of care, improve success rates for clients leaving the shelter system and re-entering the workforce, reduce “overflow” usage of commercial hotel rooms, and close older shelters that offer few services and exhibit dangerous conditions.
Ariel Partners developed and delivered a comprehensive two-day “bootcamp” workshop for Human Centered Design for approximately 20 people for IT and non-IT stakeholders. The workshop introduced new and better ways to understand the customer and develop more intuitive and user-friendly solutions. The HCD workshop teaches techniques including stakeholder mapping, empathy mapping, scenario mapping, persona definition, journey mapping, How Might We (HMW)? and pain point identification, brainstorming and ideation, future state design, and others. Ariel Partners is helping DYCD identify a small set of metrics to help quantify their improvements as they enhance their adoption of agile, DevOps, and HCD methods going forward. We have identified several important metrics that will help DYCD understand how well they are delivering and how satisfied their customers are.
The New York City Department of Education is the department of the government of New York City that manages the city’s public school system. The City School District of the City of New York is the largest school system in the United States, with over 1.1 million students taught in more than 1,800 separate schools. We are providing expert business analysis consulting support for the Division of Instructional and Information Technology.
Ariel Partners partnered with Samsung to streamline and modernize their global IT service operations by transitioning from Jira Software to a purpose-built Jira Service Management (JSM) solution. Samsung had previously used Jira Software to handle service requests, incidents, and change approvals—an approach that resulted in delays, backlogs, and missed escalations due to the lack of service-oriented functionality. Ariel led a comprehensive migration effort that involved reconfiguring selected Jira projects into JSM environments with minimal downtime, while introducing a centralized customer portal that allowed users to submit requests without a Jira license—significantly reducing licensing costs.
To ensure timely resolution and prevent service disruptions, Ariel configured automated SLAs and escalation protocols, and set up smart routing rules that directed tickets to the appropriate teams and approvers. The project also included the integration of Atlassian Confluence as a self-service knowledge base, empowering users to find answers and resolve issues independently, which reduced ticket volume. In addition, Ariel integrated JSM with Samsung’s existing BMC RemedyForce platform, ensuring seamless continuity across systems while enhancing overall service delivery. The result was a dramatic improvement in operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and responsiveness across Samsung’s vast IT landscape.
Ariel Partners developed a microservice integrating Bright Power utility reporting information systems with Fannie Mae for disclosure reporting and data warehouse reporting, supporting Fannie Mae’s $50B Green Loan initiative. Fannie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association, FNMA) created the Fannie Mae Green Financing program to provide preferred pricing to borrowers who a) Implement energy and water-saving upgrades (Fannie Mae Green Rewards), or b) obtain a green certification (Green Building Certification Pricing Break). The information provided by the integration microservice is used, in part, to support Fannie Mae’s disclosures to investors.
Ariel consultants work with HBO’s Digital Products division building tools and technologies to support HBO’s flagship HBO GO, HBO NOW, and website media streaming platforms. Ariel provided Full-Stack Developers working with cutting-edge technologies on the PERN stack (PostgreSQL, Express, ReactJS/Redux and Node.JS). Ariel consultants developed a set of tools to facilitate on-boarding and off-boarding of new staff that automates and centralizes provisioning of Enterprise tools such as GitHub, WebStorm, Slack, VictorOps, YouTrack, BlueJeans, and Artifactory. Ariel consultants created a permissioning micro service to centralize authorization across internally-developed applications. Ariel consultants are working with HBO teams to develop a platform for capturing and reporting performance metrics that will be used to analyze service usage, detect outages, watch deployments and generate alerts. The platform uses custom analytics and leverages Grafana for visualizations. All applications are developed using an AWS-cloud based DevOps pipeline that enables rapid development of new applications with development, staging, and production instances all running in cloud-based Docker containers. 100% automated test coverage is maintained for every application and micro-service using a combination of unit tests (using mocha/chai/sinon) and feature-based integration tests (using CucumberJS/selenium/protractor). This approach (100% automated testing coverage, 100% DevOps automation from development to production) has drastically reduced HBO’s system administration costs, enabling HBO to focus more on developing compelling new user experiences.
Ariel placed some of the most specialized financial technologists for Liquidnet. We have retained Full-Stack Developers and Architects with PM/BA skills, UX/UI Designers, and a Senior WPF/C# developer to augment Liquidnet’s Trading Technology with a real-time front-end trading application.
VectorMAX provides a one-of-a-kind carrier-grade software solution at a fraction of the cost of other alternatives. Their IPTV software based multicast offers a quick and cost-effective pathway to IPTV thereby avoiding the complexities of traditional hardware solutions.
Ariel is providing Kanban and Agile coaching across the entire IT organization consisting of multiple teams, multiple sites worldwide, and more than 100 people. We trained teams on agile requirements, metrics, User Stories, estimation and planning, and the systems thinking approach to implementing Kanban.
For PBF Energy, Ariel Partners taught multiple workshops on user stories, story splitting, reducing work in progress, and the systems thinking approach to implementing Kanban (STATIK), and worked directly with the teams to redesign their Kanban process. This was done post initial assessment to determine gaps in client’s Kanban practice implemented within 2 large IT teams in comparison to industry practices and other lessons learnt from Ariel’s practical experience.
