Category Archives: Press Release

August 25, 2020 — Ariel Partners, an IT consulting firm offering software Development, Consulting, Coaching and Training, today announced the win of a Federal prime contract to provide Agile Audit Support (AAS) for the Social Security Administration Office of the Inspector General (SSA OIG). The duration of the contract is one year, with the work to be performed remotely and at Social Security Administration (SSA) offices in Baltimore, MD.

The SSA is the organization that oversees and runs the Social Security program in the United States. The benefits administered include social security retirement income and disability income programs, among others. “We are delighted to receive this award to continue the work we have been doing with the OIG,” said Craeg Strong, CTO of Ariel Partners. “This new award will enable us to leverage the framework for governance and oversight of Large-Scale Agile programs that we developed and apply it to some of the important software development projects SSA is currently executing. Our approach to governance seeks to promote robustness and agility over conformity. It recommends leading indicators and metrics that enable a more proactive stance, including sharing of insights and helpful practices and discussing danger signals before they cause impacts.”

During the course of the contract, Ariel will provide a team of Agile coaches and technical experts that possesses the range of skills required to perform a thorough audit of the Preliminary Claims System (PCS) and a review of SSA’s implementation of Agile methods. The results of the work may be used to help improve SSA’s Agile processes and may inform OIG’s responses to congressional inquiries.

For more information please visit www.arielpartners.com.

About Ariel Partners
Ariel Partners is a woman-owned small business located in NYC, providing cloud-native development, Agile and HCD training, Agile governance, and legacy migration via DevSecOps. Ariel provides services to commercial organizations, NYC mayoral agencies, and Federal agencies. Ariel’s customers include HBO, Fannie Mae, NYC Dept of Social Services, the FBI, the Social Security Administration, the Air Force, Department of Labor, and the EPA. Ariel Partners is appraised at maturity level 3 by CMMI for Development and Services, is an Atlassian Silver Partner, and is a certified ICAgile and Kanban University training facility. Ariel Partners was founded in 2000 by technology experts who continue to be deeply involved in the local NYC IT Community as well as open-source projects, user groups, and worldwide technology conferences.

June 12, 2020 — Ariel Partners, an IT consulting firm offering software Development, Consulting, Coaching and Training, today announced that it has joined the Scaled Agile Partner Network as a Bronze Transformation Partner. This worldwide network includes transformation and platform providers who help enterprises facilitate and accelerate business results through adoption of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®).

“As a Scaled Agile Bronze Partner, we are delighted to offer our expertise in SAFe Coaching and Training to our customers” said Craeg Strong, CTO of Ariel Partners. “There is a reason that SAFe is enjoying significant adoption in larger organizations, and that is because it addresses enterprise concerns such as strategic planning, portfolio management, and budgeting. The breadth and depth of its scope seeks to connect strategy to execution. This is a strength and a differentiator as compared to most other Agile scaling frameworks that concern themselves only with software development. SAFe correctly recognizes that larger enterprises require elements of many practices, including Human Centered Design, Kanban, Scrum, DevOps, Lean and systems thinking.”

Ariel is offering a full suite of SAFe-related training classes and will soon expand its repertoire to include advanced classes including Lean Portfolio Management and Release Train Engineer. Ariel will also provide targeted coaching and consulting for organizations seeking to facilitate a large-scale Lean/Agile transformation by using the SAFe framework. Mr. Strong said: “Although some people consider the SAFe framework prescriptive, there is in fact a lot of flexibility both in how SAFe is practiced and how it is initially rolled out. Ariel has identified a specific set of Agile practices that greatly reduce pain and friction associated with initial adoption of SAFe, and which continue to improve outcomes while using SAFe. We are excited to share these with our customers to help them accelerate their growth and evolution.”

For more information please visit www.arielpartners.com.

About Ariel Partners
Ariel Partners is a woman-owned small business located in NYC, providing cloud-native development, Agile and HCD training, Agile governance, and legacy migration via DevSecOps. Ariel provides services to commercial organizations, NYC mayoral agencies, and Federal agencies. Ariel’s customers include HBO, Fannie Mae, NYC Dept of Social Services, the FBI, the Social Security Administration, and the EPA. Ariel Partners is appraised at maturity level 3 by CMMI for Development and Services, is an Atlassian Silver Partner, and is a certified ICAgile and Kanban University training facility. Ariel Partners was founded in 2000 by technology experts who continue to be deeply involved in the local NYC IT Community as well as open-source projects, user groups, and worldwide technology conferences.

June 11, 2020 – Ariel Partners, an IT consulting firm offering software Development, Consulting, Coaching and Training, today announced the win of a Federal prime award with the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) Business and Enterprise Systems (BES) Directorate to provide Jira Training. The duration of the contract is two years, with the training to be conducted at the Maxwell AFB-Gunter Annex, AL, Wright Patterson AFB, OH, and Randolph AFB, TX.

“As an Atlassian Silver Partner, we are delighted to offer our expertise in Jira Training to the Air Force through this new contract” said Craeg Strong, CTO of Ariel Partners. “BES has launched an impressive and ambitious effort to transform their organization by adopting Agile and DevOps practices, and we are honored to help them drive these efforts forward. This new business with the Air Force is the latest in a series of high-profile Federal contracts for Ariel, furthering our mission to help the government realize the goal of ‘better, faster, cheaper’.”

Ariel is expected to train approximately 1000+ Air Force personnel in Jira Fundamentals and Advanced Jira features over the two-year period of performance. Ariel’s training will reinforce Agile principles and demonstrate best practices for Jira, as well as pointing out common pitfalls to avoid. The training courses will 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.

Ariel’s expertise in facilitating Jira and Agile trainings is a good fit for BES’s requirements. Mr. Strong said: “Ariel’s deep experience coaching and training Agile methods, designing agile governance leveraging Kanban and SAFe, positions us as an ideal training partner for the Air Force. We know what good and bad Agile looks like. Beyond just recording daily work, Ariel’s training demonstrates how to use Jira to understand progress, proactively detect risks, and see the big picture.”

About Ariel Partners

Ariel Partners is a woman-owned small business located in NYC, providing cloud-native development, Agile and HCD training, Agile governance, and legacy migration via DevSecOps. Ariel provides services to commercial organizations, NYC mayoral agencies, and Federal agencies. Ariel’s customers include HBO, Fannie Mae, NYC Dept of Social Services, the FBI, the Social Security Administration, and the EPA. Ariel Partners is appraised at maturity level 3 by CMMI for Development and Services, is an Atlassian Silver Partner, and is a certified ICAgile and Kanban University training facility. Ariel Partners was founded in 2000 by technology experts who continue to be deeply involved in the local NYC IT Community as well as open-source projects, user groups, and worldwide technology conferences.

New York, NY, Feb. 21, 2020 – Ariel Partners, a leading IT firm offering IT Development, Consulting, Coaching, and Training announced today that its operations have been appraised at level 3 of the CMMI Institute’s Capability Maturity Model Integration for Services (CMMI-SVC) and for Development (CMMIDEV).

CMMI is a capability improvement framework that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes that ultimately improve their performance.

An appraisal at maturity level 3 indicates the organization is performing at a “defined” level. At this level, processes are well characterized and understood, and are described in standards, procedures, tools, and methods. The organization’s set of standard processes, which is the basis for maturity level 3, is established and improved over time.

These appraisals highlight Ariel Partners’ commitment to quality and customer satisfaction, delivering on their specialties in digital transformation, IT services, training, and management consulting services. The successful joint appraisal-audit was performed in early February 2020 by Acme Process Group and The Process Company, LLC.

“These achievements reflect our foremost commitment to quality, continuous improvement, and dedication to providing quality consulting services for our clients,” said Craeg Strong, CTO of Ariel Partners. “Specifically, it demonstrates that our execution of projects, services, and operations are based on standards, procedures, and methods that are well defined and understood. This indicates that customers can expect consistent results and excellent quality, time after time.”

The CMMI model equips organizations with an approach to continuous business process improvement that considers a wide range of practices for establishing mature, effective processes.

Strong continued: “Ariel celebrates this achievement as a major milestone along our journey of constant improvement and relentless innovation. We will continue to invest heavily in research and development into new ideas and better, more efficient processes for the benefit of our customers. Two recent examples are our adoption and advocacy of the Kanban Maturity Model (KMM) and our new Governance and Oversight framework for Large-Scale Agile programs. We are pressing onward and looking forward to continuing our advancement to increasing levels of maturity, bringing our already mature processes and procedures to the highest level for our clients’ benefit.”

For more information please visit www.arielpartners.com.

About Ariel Partners
Ariel Partners is a woman-owned small business located in NYC, providing cloud-native development, agile and HCD training, agile governance, and legacy migration via DevSecOps. Ariel provides services to commercial organizations, NYC mayoral agencies, and Federal agencies. Ariel’s customers include HBO, Fannie Mae, NYC Dept. of Social Services, FBI, the HHS Office of Emergency Management, and the EPA.

Ariel Partners was founded in 2000 by technology experts who continue to be deeply involved in the local NYC IT Community as well as open-source projects, user groups, and worldwide technology conferences. Ariel’s CTO is a frequent conference speaker, and several team members are well-known contributors to high profile Apache open source projects in ubiquitous use today. This involvement has proven over the years to be a key success factor for Ariel, as top technologists generally want to work with other top technologists. Ariel consultants have introduced numerous best practices to organizations including agile, development operations, continuous integration, continuous deployment, automated code-level testing, automated GUI-level testing, automated infrastructure configuration and validation, process automation, and document generation.

Jan. 18, 2020 — Ariel Partners, an IT consulting firm offering software Development, Consulting, Coaching and Training, today announced its teaming partner is among the awardees of a $110M Blanket Purchase Agreement by the U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division (WHD) to provide Information Technology Modernization. The duration of the contract is five years, with the work to be done within the US, in various locations based on the specific task orders.

“We are thrilled to continue our partnership with prime awardee Collabralink to support the Wage and Hour Division’s important mission. We look forward to supporting the WHD’s work enforcing federal labor laws that protect more than 135 million workers nationwide” said Craeg Strong, CTO of Ariel Partners. “DOL has launched an impressive and ambitious effort to transform their organization, and we are honored to help them drive these efforts forward. This new business with the Department of Labor is the latest in a series of high-profile Federal contracts for Ariel, furthering our mission to help the government realize the goal of ‘better, faster, cheaper’.”

Ariel will leverage its deep and diverse expertise in applying Agile, Human Centered Design, and DevOps principles to help the WHD modernize their mission-critical systems, enabling them to work more efficiently and effectively. Mr. Strong said: “Ariel offers a more mature approach to infusing Agile methods that leverages systems thinking and results in steady, sustainable and long-term improvements.”

For more information please visit www.arielpartners.com.

About Ariel Partners
Ariel Partners is a woman-owned small business located in NYC, providing cloud-native development, Agile and HCD training, Agile governance, and legacy migration via DevSecOps. Ariel provides services to commercial organizations, NYC mayoral agencies, and Federal agencies. Ariel’s customers include HBO, Fannie Mae, NYC Dept of Social Services, the FBI, the Social Security Administration, and the EPA. Ariel Partners is appraised at maturity level 3 by CMMI for Development and Services, is an Atlassian Silver Partner, and is a certified ICAgile and Kanban University training facility. Ariel Partners was founded in 2000 by technology experts who continue to be deeply involved in the local NYC IT Community as well as open-source projects, user groups, and worldwide technology conferences.

BALTIMORE, MD, Nov. 12, 2019 — Ariel Partners, a leading IT firm offering IT Development, Consulting, Coaching and Training, today announced the win of a Federal bid for Social Security Administration OIG for Consulting Services for Agile Development. The duration of the contract is one year, with the work to be based in Baltimore, Maryland.

“We are delighted to offer our expertise in Agile Development to the Social Security Administration Office of the Inspector General through this new contract” said Craeg Strong, CTO of Ariel Partners. “This new business with the SSA is the latest in a series of high-profile work between Ariel Partners and the Federal Government.”

Among the services and expertise provided by Ariel Partners will be a review of the body of work the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has done with respect to auditing agile software development projects, providing training and coaching to OIG staff, and developing a comprehensive Audit Program. Ariel Partners will be training the SSA OIG in best practices for Agile, enabling the OIG to better perform audits on agile-based projects the SSA is running.

Ariel’s expertise in facilitating digital transformation and instituting Agile at Scale is a good fit for SSA’s requirements. Mr. Strong said: “Agile methods historically have generally been applied at a small-team level, and agile at large or very-large scale is still a fairly tricky proposition. Many organizations have struggled to identify best practices around governance and oversight for large-scale efforts. Ariel provides a pragmatic and metrics-based approach that can teach organizations to detect warning signs early.”

For more information please visit www.arielpartners.com.

About Ariel Partners
Ariel Partners is a woman-owned small business located in NYC, providing cloud-native development, agile and HCD training, agile governance, and legacy migration via DevSecOps. Ariel provides services to commercial organizations, NYC mayoral agencies, and Federal agencies. Ariel’s customers include HBO, Fannie Mae, NYC Dept of social services, FBI, the HHS Office of Emergency Management, and the EPA.

Ariel Partners was founded in 2000 by technology experts who continue to be deeply involved in the local NYC IT Community as well as open-source projects, user groups, and worldwide technology conferences. Ariel’s CTO is a frequent conference speaker, and several team members are well-known
contributors to high profile Apache open source projects in ubiquitous use today. This involvement has proven over the years to be a key success factor for Ariel, as top technologists generally want to work with other top technologists. Ariel consultants have introduced numerous best practices to organizations including agile, development operations, continuous integration, continuous deployment, automated code-level testing, automated GUI-level testing, automated infrastructure configuration and
validation, process automation, and document generation.