Richmond, Virginia – August 1, 2022 – Genesis Consulting’s Agile Teams at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) were recently presented with two prestigious awards as part of the 2021 USCIS Director’s Awards.
The Pinnacle Award was presented to our Person-Centric Identity Services (PCIS) tea
m for exhibiting superior achievements in providing efficient and accurate immigration benefits and information services. This includes superior accomplishments in achieving the following objectives:
Achieving and maintaining timely and accurate processing of immigration benefits.
Providing superior information resources and services to appropriate individuals and entities.
Fostering the development of a service culture in the agency’s approach to delivery.
Developing seamless, IT-supported processes that efficiently support immigration benefits, adjudications, and information sharing.
PCIS demonstrated value as the trusted source of unique identities, displaying a timeline view of a subject’s complete immigration history. It also proved to be the only service across the federal government capable of converting unstructured biographic data to verified identities and statuses in support of the Department of State.
The Ingenuity and Innovation Award was presented to our Customer Profile Management System (CPMS) and National Appointment Scheduling System (NASS) teams for their inventiveness and creativity in developing or implementing a new and substantially improved way of carrying out a portion of the USCIS mission. The Immigration Records and Identity Services Directorate CPMS team partnered with business stakeholders and NASS team to reuse biometrics data, reducing the backlog from over 1.3 million appointments (approximately 13 week wait) at its peak to the current backlog of roughly 80,000 (approximately 1 week wait) in response to shutdowns caused by the pandemic.
For the past 3 years, Genesis has provided agile coaching support to USCIS programs that are building the state-of-the-art identity management system called Person Centric Identity Services (PCIS). PCIS serves as the single person‐centric authoritative source of trusted biographical and biometric identity information for USCIS. Genesis has implemented a methodology derived from the SAFe® (Scaled Agile Framework) that allows the government to increase business agility and enable USCIS to pivot quickly as emerging priorities arise. As a result, USCIS has been able to successfully increase their business agility and commit to a product delivery plan by setting quarterly objectives based on forecasted capacity. Product delivery predictability has increased from below 50% to 92% over the course of the year which allows Product Managers to build long term roadmaps that support the vision and mission of USCIS.
Now, Genesis continues to lead the agile transformation at the USCIS to embed lean thinking to accelerate product delivery to customers. The Genesis team created an innovative agile framework that enables the government to pivot from their ongoing initiatives to respond to high priority initiatives like Operation Allies Welcome (OAW). In August of 2021, President Biden directed the DHS to coordinate the effort of processing Afghan refugees. Over 100,000 Afghan refugees were processed and vetted through our immigration systems. This initiative solved a human rights crisis, met the demands of a global concern, and accelerated services to refugees.
The same month President Biden announced OAW, USCIS was tasked to conduct immigration processing, screening, and vetting in coordination with the Department of Defense (DoD), Department of State (DoS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other Federal agencies, with the goal of bringing to the United States Afghan nationals who worked for the United States, as well as other vulnerable Afghan Nationals. The screening and vetting process involved biometric and biographic screenings conducted by intelligence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism professionals. As a result, the Genesis Team supported the client to tackle the challenge in short notice and lead the development of a strategy to migrate all refugee data from DoS Database, Hummingbird, to PCIS. Due to this, USCIS was able to process over 100,000 Afghan refugees in the span of 2 months while safeguarding the United States. Now every Afghan refugee from OAW has a record in the USCIS system and all immigration activities can be tracked to ensure the ease of processing.
About Genesis Consulting Partners, LLC
Genesis is a SWaM certified small business headquartered in Richmond, VA with offices in Reston, VA, Washington, D.C., and São Paulo, Brazil, with employees located globally. Genesis offers training and consulting services in the areas of Business Agility, Digital Transformation, and Advisory Services. Genesis areas of expertise include Lean, Agile, SAFe, Scrum, Kanban, Lean Portfolio Management, DevOps, DevSecOps, Cloud and Software Development, which are complemented by implementation and system integration services related to SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Infor, and Pega. Genesis also specializes in Organization Change Management, Data Management, Business Process Management, Project Management, IT Strategy, and Independent Verification & Validation.