FDOC employee, Son Nguyen, has been recognized with NASA’s Silver Snoopy. The Silver Snoopy is one of NASA’s most prestigious awards and is presented to less than one percent of the NASA workforce annually. Son was recognized for his outstanding technical contributions to the design and development of productivity enhancing support tools that have profoundly improved the efficiency of FDOC Operations, Maintenance and Engineering. While Son’s accomplishments are many, they are surpassed by his level of professionalism, willingness to help or teach others and for the level of humility he demonstrates while helping to drive such significant technical expertise.

2FA Team Receives Group Award

The FDOC 2FA (Two Factor Authentication) Team was recently presented with a group excellence award for performing the conversion of 5,000 MCCS Legacy User IDs to Agency User IDs in a six week period with no impact to Shuttle missions. GHG team members are Brenda Morgan, Betty Guidry, Curtis Tater and 2FA Team Lead Geetha Alagappan.

Before the task began, each team member was briefed on the importance of accuracy in indexing and databasing of each record, pointing out that if any record was not handled accurately, it may never be found.  The task was described as one where it was extremely important to work together, provide attention to detail and to deliver high quality products. Any future SSP records retrieval is dependent upon the how conscientious and responsible each member of the team performed the job.  All team members exceeded all expectations.  They took responsibility of the task, asking questions, requesting to learn more about other aspects of the task, working closely together and participating in meetings to discuss better ways to do the task.  Heather and Danielle have been so impressive in their records management, that each has been trained to provide backup support to the Regents and Space Park Meeting Facility coordinators.

Cody and Clayton were put in charge of packing and moving boxes from NASA/Bldg 1, and indexing each file in each box.  Heather and Danielle were assigned as primary data entry  personnel.  In addition, Heather has taken on the responsibilities of the USA MI Records Lead, taking on the task of completing all NASA forms for shipment, requesting Accession Numbers for box annotation and performing customer requested research.

The assumption of the overall task was that this group could pack, move, index, database & ship 600 boxes by September 2010.  Well, this team has broken all milestone records.  By the end of 2009 over 700 boxes of data and over 20,000 records have been processed and shipped to the Federal Records Center in Fort Worth, Texas.  Not only have these employees exceeded the initial scope of the task ahead of schedule, but have done it significantly under budget.  This group has been so successful that additional records have been identified and an additional element was added to the Canofile Replacement System (CRS) application to allow the Orbiter records to be included in the archive records process and entered into the database. Danielle and Heather tested the new Orbiter element for the Information Management (IM) team and provided findings and recommendations prior to release of the application.

Several meetings have been held with the NASA customer to present the status of the job performed by these four GHG employees.  At each meeting, the NASA customer has repeatedly commented on how impressed they are with the accomplishments of this group and what an outstanding job they have done. Cody, Clayton, Heather and Danielle have been successful in providing high quality products, an outstanding work team and high productivity exceeding all expectations.  Each is deserving of this reward for their excellent contribution and efforts in the archival of SSP Configuration Management Records.

Minhhai joined GHG in July of 2005.  During her time here, Minhhai has led the effort to develop and deploy multiple productivity-enhancing support tools, which have significantly improved the efficiency of FDOC Operations, Maintenance and Engineering.

Minhhai led the development of the Multiple Activity Data Sharing (MADS) tool.  This paradigm-changing tool enabled the consolidation of multiple disparate systems and increased overall efficiency through the centralized sharing of data.  By automating these functions, more time is now available to support additional customer requirements such as SR activities in the MCCS and the ITF. This tool also provides the ability to generate metrics, analyze trends and to compare and refine estimation approaches for more accurate future planning of the Maintenance department activities.

In addition to MADS, Minhhai created the Incident Report database which is used to document and track FDOC human error process issues, identify trends, and support the deployment of identified lessons learned and/or process improvement.  The tool leverages other NASA facility scheduling and anomaly tracking systems to further enhance the system usefulness.

Minhhai also created the Daily Operations Reporting and Metrics Automation (DORMA) tool.  The implementation of this tool reduced the amount of time required by the Operations users to capture the daily activity summaries that support the development of the Daily Operations Meeting (DOM) report.  Minhhai was successful in pulling data from a variety of external sources in order to generate a consolidated report that is automatically checked for consistency and accuracy.  Further, a subset of the functionality used to request, capture and process schedule data has been used to support the initial data acquisition for a significant MCC automation efficiency project.

Through her efforts, Minhhai has distinguished herself as a leader by delivering outstanding process improvement and support-function tool sets that ultimately improve and enhance the effectiveness of the FDOC Operations, Maintenance and Engineering communities.  Congratulations Minhhai!

She outlined the program; developed a mission statement and goals. She sought input and advice from her colleagues and firmed up the program. She calls it “Building Blocks to Health”.

She then took this well reasoned “Building Blocks to Health” Program to President John Denny, requested a budget and corporate support. She got it. And we are so proud of her.

It is not lost on us that her “Building Blocks to Health” Program is being implemented as President Obama’s Health Care reform is also being implemented. This is just our small contribution to America’s health.

L’Chaim “to life”(in Hebrew), Israel Galvan CEO

Construction on the new GHG Corporate building is progressing. The unofficial opening date is late July.

Experts agree implementing the right electronic pay stub solution will result in substantial cost savings. Based on research by NACHA (National Automated Clearing House Association), the average cost of printing a pay stub for one employee is $1.90 per pay period. This equates to $49.50 per employee for 26 pay periods. Therefore, a company with 500 personnel spends approximately $25,000 per year just to validate payroll via pay stubs. While costs vary, this is a conservative estimate that does not include the expense of postage or storage. ePSS will reduce your cost of pay stub administration by 50% or greater through:

• Eliminating paper cost i.e., forms, envelopes, and other paper goods
• Substantially reducing printing cost of the pay stubs, envelopes, etc.
• Greatly reducing postage to mail the pay stubs
• Lowering time and costs required to reproduce lost pay stubs
• Minimizing the time expended by payroll and administrative personnel to manage pay stub activities
• Reducing storage costs, no more paper documents to store, everything will be electronic