Foreign Service Institute (FSI) – Corporate Systems Division (CSD)
The Client
The Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is the Federal Government’s primary training institution for officers and support personnel of the U.S. foreign affairs community. FSI prepares American diplomats and other professionals to advance U.S. foreign affairs interests overseas and in Washington. FSI provides more than 600 courses—including some 70 foreign languages—to more than 100,000 enrollees a year from the State Department and more than 40 other government agencies and the military service branches.
FSI’s programs include training for the professional development of Foreign Service administrative, consular, economic/commercial, political, and public diplomacy officers; for specialists in the fields of information management, office management, security, and medical practitioners and nurses; for Foreign Service Nationals who work at U.S. posts around the world; and for Civil Service employees of the State Department and other agencies. Ranging in length from one day to two years, courses are designed to promote successful performance in each professional assignment, to ease the adjustment to other countries and cultures, and to enhance the leadership and management capabilities of the U.S. foreign affairs community.
Scope of Work
Ventura was awarded a contract by the Corporate Systems Division (CSD) of FSI to provide IT services and support including:
- Provide infrastructure support to training management and reporting applications, used by 47 government agencies and FSI, to archive all completed courses, improve training, logistics of scheduling, and access to content for the instructors, students, and staff.
- Design, development, and delivery of dozens of websites containing thousands of pages in MS ASP and SharePoint; these applications support over 10,000 FSI users.
- Provide help desk support across the various CSD functions.
- Responsible for the creation of the FSI LearnCenter Helpdesk, which has since doubled in staffing and seen increased response times due to cross team collaborations with colleagues in other FSI divisions.
- Design, develop, and deliver websites and web content management systems across FSI to support training reporting requirements.
- Support and management of the project, technical support for the servers and the creation and installation of ISD Development Network (DEV) copy of LearnCenter for product validation and testing.
- Provided in-depth knowledge of commercial, as well as custom-made courseware.
- Developed Disaster Recovery plans for the FSI learning management system in order to ensure the lowest risk scenarios for loss of data.
- Adherence to Cybersecurity policies and implement changes to COTS and GOTS software applications as needed.
- Maintain the data integrity of the HR Award & Recognition application. This application is critical to and directly impacts the mission of FSI.
- Maintain data integrity with current distributed learning applications, interface usability elements, 508 accessibility standards, SCORM, and integration of streaming media for CD & Web-based training resources developed internally for FSI.
- Assist with the verification of compression rates for use of the current streaming media server
- Test and analyze results, and research and prepare strategic guidelines for implementation of a mobile delivery architecture that adheres to CSD security and delivery standards.
The Results
Ventura has accomplished a number of important improvements on this project, including:
- Implemented process and tools for monthly program workbooks; Re-architected CS monthly program reviews to focus on delivery and effective program management, taking full advantage of the data captured in the program workbooks.
- Transitioned 23 ShareSites that were affected by the DMZ outage to eHomerooms, restoring normal operations for those customers.
- Team Ventura has a demonstrated above-industry retention rates of critical personnel. Our retention strategies focus on “right fit”, highly competitive career opportunities, and benefit packages for our employees.
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