Like many organizations, Karsun transitioned to a remote workforce in 2020. Beginning with that transition and throughout the last three years, it has won new awards for culture, diversity, benefits and more. Most recently, it picked up its first-ever Top Workplaces Culture award for Work-Life Flexibility. Karsun received this award in addition to repeat Technology Industry Top Workplaces and Oklahoman Top Workplaces awards. 2023 was also Karsun’s first year receiving a Comparably Best Company Career Growth award. Both Top Workplaces and Comparably are based on independent third assessments of Karsun culture based on feedback from current employees.
Chae Song, the program manager for Karsun’s GSA Fleet Program, received a FORUM IMPACT award from the industry news sites FORUM/g2xchange. This award recognized exceptional women technology leaders from government and industry. Karsun continued to be recognized as a local industry leader, receiving a ranking for the fifth year in a row on the Northern Virginia Technology Council Tech 100.
In addition to industry award recognition, Karsun experts and executives appeared as thought leaders in white papers, panel discussions and industry podcasts. Notably, Karsun released our Design for Every Next white paper detailing our strategy for delivering high-quality UI/UX initiatives on a massive scale and in highly complex systems. Karsun President, Terry Miller appeared on the Federal Tech Podcast to share insights from this new paper.
Finally, Karsun graduated its eleventh fellow from an American Council on Technology-Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) professional development program. Anu Pajjur, a Portfolio Lead for Karsun’s FAA portfolio, completed ACT-IAC’s Voyagers Program in May 2023. This program pairs up-and-coming leaders from industry and government in an intensive one-year program.
From work-life balance to elevating industry leaders, culture shines here. The Karsun team continues its commitment to an employee-centered culture where everyone can learn and grow. And there are new opportunities to grow as a Karsun expert. We are hiring for remote roles nationwide. To join our team and Find Your Next visit KarsunCareers.com.
Karsun has an employee-centered workplace that places flexibility, innovation and collaboration at the heart of our business. For most of our team members, that means they work remotely. And while that is the preferred style of work for many, we also know connecting in person is important to many of our team members. That is why we brought back some of our most popular in-person events this year. These included family picnics, team celebrations and community events. The result was new opportunities for team Karsun to connect with each other, within their communities and with our core values.
One of those core values is fun, and this year marked the return of many of Karsun’s in-person social events. These were opportunities for Karsun families, teams and partners to meet face-to-face while enjoying ice cream socials, farm days and other activities. Additionally, we shared team accomplishments, presented innovative creations and recognized extraordinary work in monthly and quarterly remote events. Nearly 90 people received one of our quarterly employee awards this year alone. While many of these awards celebrated performance, several team members each quarter were awarded for embodying Karsun’s core values.
For our Northern Virginia team members, this resulted in teams reconnecting with their community. The neighborhood clean-up team resumed their Adopt-a-Highway project, focusing on a new area near Karsun’s headquarters in Herndon, Virginia. The Wellness Team also led a Fit for Fall Challenge culminating in Run on the Rocks. This event, sponsored by Karsun, benefits Team AIMS, an organization supporting our local Washington, D.C., region and global communities.
The Wellness Team also ensured that our team had the resources to spend their time away from work in the way that best supports their needs. For that reason, we announced several new benefits this year. These updated benefits added parental leave, enhanced paid time off and new employee perks and discounts in addition to the award-winning benefits already enjoyed by Karsun team members. We were honored to receive our first Top Workplaces Culture award for Work-Life Flexibility. These awards came as we renewed our commitment to an open, transparent, employee-centered culture.
As we prepare for 2024, we are excited to watch our team grow and thrive together. That includes new opportunities to connect and collaborate. We are actively hiring for remote roles nationwide. If you are ready to join us in the new year, check out our open positions and Find Your Next as part of team Karsun.
Big Bang or waterfall development has long been the standard approach to legacy modernization projects. However, government agencies are increasingly turning away from this approach, finding an incremental, agile approach to suit their missions and goals better. For instance, agencies such as Veterans Affairs stating they are moving away from Big Bang projects.
Issues with the Big Bang
In the Big Bang approach, agencies spent years gathering requirements and awarded projects to a single contractor. The contract was then delivered based on these requirements, leaving little room to adapt to changing requirements and needs. Further, since this frequently tied agencies to a single, large systems integrator, there was little opportunity to introduce small and emerging contractors with specialized expertise. The result was delayed, over budget, and underperforming modernizations.
Taking an Incremental Approach
Agencies are shifting from Big Bang modernization to agile, incremental, or bit-by-bit approaches. In this approach, they identify a minimal viable product (MVP), ensuring the solution first meets the minimum needs of its users. Then, its agile development teams add enhancements to the solution incrementally. This allows agencies to scale up and down, add new programs and features, and adapt to change requirements.
Modernization to Meet the Mission
The result is modernization that meets the agency’s mission. There are additional strategies teams can employ to ensure mission-oriented development. When experts modernize alongside domain experts, that collaboration supports an MVP that will meet the needs of its users. At Karsun, we use processes like event storming, human-centered design, and others to ensure we receive this feedback throughout our engagement. Moreover, working with a partner experienced in combining public sector experience with modern methodologies and tools enhances this synergy further.
The Karsun Approach
At Karsun, we take this approach to our modernization projects from the beginning. Critically, we also look beyond to understand the application’s purpose and its users’ needs after our departure from the project. This product mindset, which we call Modernization for Every Next, is an incremental approach that allows us to focus on meeting agency missions, introduce emerging solutions at the appropriate time, build secure architecture meant to last, and accelerate transformation with fit-to-purpose toolkits. Learn more about our modernization successes in the Acquisitions, Aviation, Fleet, and Grants industries.
Large-scale, complex transformation projects can be daunting for any enterprise, doubly so for government agencies. At Karsun, we recognize the mission comes first. We consider the technical requirements of our current modernization efforts and the goals and objectives of our agency customers. That includes envisioning every modernization effort as a product, acknowledging the product’s purpose now and its intended use in the future. We call this Modernization for Every Next.
Modernization for Every Next includes enhancing our customers’ capabilities throughout our engagement. Our toolkits play a crucial role in that process. These toolkits provide valuable insights into the modernization process, scale to support new objectives, and prepare the way for future initiatives. They ensure our subject matter experts can access the resources they need to introduce best practices and accelerate transformation. Managed and maintained by the Karsun Innovation Center, dedicated practice advocates within the Center ensure toolkits incorporate emerging trends and technologies, utilize proven approaches, and follow industry best practices.
GoLean for Greater Insights
Some Karsun toolkits build comprehensive insights around the development and transformation process itself. As part of a broader change management process, this enables Karsun and its customers to focus on the best practices and approaches for them. It provides a benchmark for future process improvements.
Imagine if you had a dashboard that could tell you if a particular type of testing was more effective, demonstrate the return on investment for implementing a new DevSecOps practice, or simply reveal your team was completing its work faster than ever before. This is the purpose of Karsun’s GoLean platform. This agile platform combines diagnostic and prescriptive metrics with automations proven to accelerate development, testing, and DevSecOps practices.
We are so confident in this approach that we use this toolkit in-house to identify opportunities to improve our practice. As a result, our software development process was appraised at CMMI v2.0 Level 5 (DEV). At this assessment tier, organizations use data-driven insights to drive their process improvement strategy. Less than a hundred government systems integrators nationwide received appraisal at this level.
Accelerate Migration with Cloud Runways
Another one of our toolkits, Cloud Runways, combines in-depth assessment with repeatable playbooks to accelerate certain migration projects. We begin with an assessment. This includes identifying target applications, determining dependencies, and analyzing available technology. This also includes future state analysis, ensuring the proposed solution can scale with you. Next, we build a “runway” for the project. Each runway uses proven playbooks, tasks, and resources.
We have migrated 40+ applications using these runways. These migrations span use cases from low-code/no-code refactoring to container rehosting. As part of our Modernization for Every Next mindset, we offer runways that help you optimize and build new capabilities as you migrate. For instance, our CI/CD for Windows Apps Runway adds DevOps automations when we migrate Windows apps into AWS ECS or Redhat OpenShift.
While we offer vendor-agnostic solutions, we are also backed by three AWS competencies. To earn these competencies, Karsun proved the expertise of our migration teams through certifications. We also consistently delivered cloud solutions using AWS best practices for government, migration, and DevOps.
Design for Every Next
Karsun’s Digital Transformation toolkits are among the most recent additions to our toolkit library. Included in this set of toolkits are our UI/UX toolkits. This pairs our human centered design process with a component library to quickly identify and develop user interfaces as part of transformation efforts.
Building on the lived experiences of application users, we apply a domain driven design approach to UI/UX. That includes engaging technical and domain experts in collaboration from the start. We also build in feedback loops throughout application development. This way, domain driven design allows us to model and identify specific aspects of complex systems. For instance, using domain driven design with one grants management customer, we identified opportunities to build eligibility evaluation, fund distribution and reporting as sub-parts of the grants platform. In the next domain driven design step, we take the model one step further. Each of the platform subparts is comprised of the modular building blocks. These include the user interfaces.
We can then apply resources from our extensive component library to each of these UI building blocks. The resources in this library utilize proven REACT, Angular and other frameworks to quickly create new interfaces. Additionally, a modularized approach lets our teams extend or enhance capabilities as we receive feedback from users as part of the human centered design process. Throughout the design process we are Modernizing for Every Next.
We found using our toolkits dramatically accelerates the digital transformation process. Our experienced technical teams start engagements with proven tools, playbooks and resources. Our data driven processes further empower these teams to receive feedback, adapt and elevate capabilities as they build. Dive into our Innovation Center toolkits to discover how this process gives your agency the power to Modernize for Every Next.
Karsun was named by employee rating site Comparably among the Best Companies for Career Growth. Key to our commitment to growth is Karsun Academy, our professional development program run through the Karsun Innovation Center (KIC). The Karsun Academy team ensures people of all experience levels, from interns to subject matter leaders, can learn and advance their skills at Karsun.
Growing from the Start
Karsun’s extensive internship program combines codeathons, research, and real-world problem-solving. Likewise, Karsun employees of any tenure can work with the KIC research and development team. Anyone may submit a suggestion for an improved process, new tool or application, or extraordinary idea through the Innovation Radar. Experts in the Innovation Center select submissions each month, work with the submitting teams, and showcase prototypes and their implementation at monthly town hall meetings.
Interested Karsun team members may also participate in different coding challenges, such as those held during Innovation Weeks. Here, they apply emerging technologies to known industry problems. Some Innovation Weeks pair expert panels and certification tracks during these weeklong events.
Growing as Experts
With the many opportunities to experience new technologies, approaches, and tools, Karsun also ensures every team member has the opportunity to earn the professional certifications relevant to them. Karsun hosts various training workshops every month. A combination of external industry experts and Karsun subject matter experts teach these. After training, Karsun employees are eligible for subsidized certification fees.
Additionally, while many training workshops are taught in a remote-hybrid arrangement, Karsun Academy also provides a virtual training library. These include industry-standard training for key certifications such as the AWS Associate and Professional Certifications.
Growing as Champions
Karsun team members who are confident in their expertise may also improve their instructional, people leader, and collaboration skills. Weekly brown bags feature employee-to-employee sharing on both technology skills and professional development. Topics range from writing and speaking to emerging AI trends. For team members passionate about a particular discipline, Karsun Practice Areas empower advocates to build resource libraries, connect with technology partners, and introduce industry experts to their teams.
Career Pathing tools transparently reveal the technical and managerial skills required to advance at Karsun. For new and growing supervisors, managers, and team champions, Karsun offers resources and an expanding training library. It also invests in forums, like Brunch Leadership, to receive employee feedback in this career stage.
From early career through established professionals, Karsun has a growth program designed to support their skill development. Each team member has multiple avenues to grow their career through Karsun Academy, the Innovation Center, and other resources. An ongoing commitment to this growth is how every team member can Find Your Next at Karsun.
To learn more about opportunities to grow at Karsun, visit KarsunCareers.com/jobs.
We recently completed one of our favorite annual traditions at Karsun, our intern presentations and celebration. Our onsite interns joined our local Washington, D.C., area employees for an ice cream social this year. We concluded the day with project presentations to our executive and leadership team. Working inside our Karsun Innovation Center, we are constantly inspired by the new approaches to government technology our interns develop.
Presenting, demoing, and describing their work is crucial to the Karsun internship experience. Our interns presented to their Innovation Center colleagues twice a month during our “Show Don’t Tell” meeting. In addition to contributing to Innovation Center projects, each intern completed a specialized learning path and received mentorship from an Innovation Center leader. As part of their learning path, each intern worked toward a professional certification related to their internship project.
This information technology internship cohort covered topics ranging from AI/ML and data driven decision-making to driving engagement through well-designed applications. We covered these projects in our blog over the past month. If you missed it, we summarized their incredible work below.
Applications That Drive Engagement
Mithran Mohanraj strengthened his UI/UX skills, built prototype applications, and experimented with approaches to improve engagement with those apps. As part of his internship, he adapted to changing requirements while training alongside design experts in the Innovation Center. In the question and answer portion of his final presentation, Mithran revealed his internship allowed him to experiment with human centered design principles like incremental changes to form designs based on ongoing user feedback. Learn how his experience helped him develop Applications That Drive Engagement.
Building Better with Business Automation
Sinduja Sankar, a computer science graduate student, explored automating dynamic workflows for her internship. Working with experts in the fast-paced Innovation Center, she built a proof of concept using the open source business automation platform Kogito. As she researched the implementation of this tool, she also engaged in bi-weekly Innovation Center “Show, Don’t Tell” sessions. She not only received recognition for her work, she learned from the work performed by other experts and innovators at Karsun. Learn how Sinduja was Building Better with Business Automation.
Exploring Code Generation for Contracts Management
Luca Moukheiber was part of a team developing an AI-assisted contracts management proof of concept. Using a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate code, he built custom interfaces for reporting. In this immersive experience, as Luca studied prompt engineering, he worked closely with teams using AI-assisted development methodologies. Learn more about Luca’s project, Exploring Code Generation for Contracts Management.
Leveraging Data for Agile Decision-Making
Soumya Nambi Ganesh worked with our Innovation Center team to develop a dashboard for executive reporting. The dashboard will ultimately be used for strategic decision-making. She assessed business needs and objectives while participating in every step of the process as part of this project. That included gathering requirements, building data pipelines, transforming the data, and constructing visualizations. She also deepened her understanding of Python as part of her learning path. Read her project and profile to discover how Soumya explored Leveraging Data for Agile Decision-Making.
Applying DevOps Skills to Real-Life Problems
Our final internship project spotlight is Nikhil Davangere Basavaraj’s application of DevOps to a platform developed by the Karsun Innovation Center. As part of this project, he leveraged tools like Terraform to enhance application logging and improve threat detection. While learning real-world security strategies, Nikhil worked with his mentor and prepared for his AWS certifications. Join Nikhil on his cloud journey and learn about his internship experience Applying DevOps Skills to Real-Life Problems.
Each summer, Karsun hosts an internship cohort. Once applications are open, they are listed on our career site, KarsunCareers.com. We hope you join us and Find Your Next in our Innovation Center next year.
A Master of Science in Business Analytics student, Soumya Nambi Ganesh tested her data science skills working with the Agile Decision Dashboard team as part of her Karsun Innovation Center internship. In taking on this project, which reports key metrics to executive and management-level decision-makers, she tackled everything from requirements gathering to data pipelines to transforming the data and constructing visualizations. Discover how Soumya worked with the Innovation Center Research and Development (RnD) team to build this dashboard and find her next.
First please tell us about yourself. Where are you going to school? What are you studying? What do you like to do in your free time?
Hi, I’m Soumya Nambi Ganesh. I’m pursuing a Master of Science degree in Business Analytics at the University of Southern California in LA. In my free time, I enjoy reading, writing, playing badminton and watching all genres of movies.
Could you share a little bit about the project you worked on as part of this internship? What challenge does it solve? What technologies and tools are you using?
As part of my internship at Karsun, I worked on building an Agile Decision Dashboard. This dashboard includes interactive visualizations built on company – data in terms of Objectives, Key Results, Costs, Management, Quality and Schedule. I was given the opportunity to be a part of the project right from the beginning – where I met with the executives of the company for personal interviews on their requirements for the dashboard. I worked on the entire data pipeline, which involved identifying various data sources, building scripts to extract data and transforming the data into desirable formats. I then worked on computing new metrics and eventually constructing visualizations that are to be used for intuitive decision-making by the executives.
What is your favorite part about working with the Karsun Innovation Center? Is there a weekly meeting or ritual you enjoy? The opportunity to learn more or get a new certification?
My favorite part of working at KIC is the opportunity to meet with colleagues with different skills and expertise, in a close-net team and learn of their various perspectives. I love a good challenge and working with the KIC team offered me new tasks, with changing requirements in a sort of RnD environment. This pushed me to get out of my comfort zone, quickly learn new tools and methods and implement the same.
I also was able to enhance my data science skills by undertaking a course on Udemy, through Karsun, which was a bonus to my learning here!
What is your biggest takeaway from your experience as an intern at Karsun?
My main takeaway would be bridging the gap requirements and data. This involves understanding executive-level and management-level requirements and then finding a way to clean messy data, transform them into meaningful metrics and display them as visualizations to answer specific business questions. I was also able to improve on this process through the continuous feedback I received from various members of the team, for which I am grateful.
Soumya completed her internship as part of the Karsun Innovation Center. Learn Karsun accelerate Data Solutions adoption. Connect with Soumya on LinkedIn to learn more about her experience.
Nikhil Davangre Basavaraj’s Innovation Center internship not only helped him prepare for an AWS certification, it also gave him real-life DevOps experience. Nikhil, a Computer Science Masters student, advanced these skills while working on tools used by Karsun teams. Along the way, he built Terraform scripts, assessed costs for AWS services and developed on Karsun’s AI-Asssisted Redux Platform. Take a deep dive into Nikhil’s process and his experience during his internship in this interview.
First, please tell us about yourself. Where are you going to school? What are you studying? What do you like to do in your free time?
Hi all !! My name is Nikhil. I am currently doing my Masters in Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). In my free time I like to play cricket or go for a swim. I love watching movies and anime as well.
Could you share a little bit about the project you worked on as part of this internship? What challenges does it solve? What technologies and tools are you using?
Initially, I built an Appsheet app called “Fedelivery”, which helps Government Organizations spread across the US to handle deliveries of confidential items. After this I was working with a fellow intern on implementing push notifications for the KIC Konnect app using Firebase.
Later on, I started working on DevOps tasks. My first task was to configure logging in the Application Load Balancer level in AWS using Terraform. Although it was my first time working with Terraform, with the help of my mentors, I was able to understand and complete the task successfully.
The next task that I took over was to enable Application Logging in the EKS level, where data is logged in AWS Cloudwatch from EKS using Fluent Bit. The logs in CloudWatch are to be stored for 7 days which will then be moved to an S3 bucket for further storage for 30 days. Later on, the data will be moved to Infrequent Access Storage for 60 days, and finally, the logs will be transferred to Cold/Glacier Storage for a year. I had to use Fluent Bit for log forwarding to Cloudwatch, and I wrote the script for the above in Terraform. I was successfully able to complete the task and push the code to [Karsun’s] Redux Platform.
Right now, I am working on implementing a Terraform script to deploy WAF (Web Application Firewall) to the Load Balancers on AWS. WAF protects applications from web-based attacks and hence is very crucial. I even have to do research regarding the pricing of the WAF service to help the company plan budget-wise. So far, the tasks are going well, and I am enjoying the work I am doing here at Karsun.
What is your favorite part about working with the Karsun Innovation Center? Is there a weekly meeting or ritual you enjoy? The opportunity to learn more or get a new certification?
I think the best part about working with the Karsun Innovation Center is the opportunity to solve real-world problems and get mentored by top-notch developers. I even got the opportunity to prepare for my AWS certification because of the Udemy course offered by Karsun. I like meeting with my mentor weekly to discuss various things, like what we did during the weekend or what blockers I am facing. The people are what make the company, and I am delighted to be a part of this wonderful team.
What is your biggest takeaway from your experience as an intern at Karsun?
My biggest takeaway from Karsun is the insights I received from this internship. It has helped me to grow both personally and professionally. My entry into the field of DevOps was made possible because of this internship. Initially, I had to do a lot of reading and research to get the tasks done, which helped me learn a lot.
Nikhil’s internship was completed with support from the Karsun Innovation Center and the DevOps Practice Area. The resources in our Innovation Center’s practice areas are available to all Karsun teams. Connect with Nikhil on LinkedIn to learn more about his experience.
Our people at Karsun Solutions, power possible for government agencies. That includes our modernization experts currently building new solutions for complex systems. It also consists of the people that lead and champion their efforts. At Karsun, whether you are building solutions or cheering on our teams, we empower you to Find Your Next.
In this final post in our series on how problem solvers grow while supporting our customers’ missions, we share the experience of team champions and leaders at Karsun. Our team champions are an integral part of our collaborative, problem-solving-oriented culture. That includes providing the resources and tools they need to grow in their practice. Our Karsun Innovation Center has a Lean Practice Area dedicated to this mission. Like the toolkits and other resources provided by our other Practice Areas, this team advocates for project management, process improvement, and operational excellence.
Champions Grow With Karsun
We also support the growth and ongoing professional development of our champions. Every Karsun employee has access to paid training and subsidized professional certifications. We also host people leader workshops and workshops important to emerging leaders. For example, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) scrum master, product owner/product manager and agilist are among our most popular training options for growing leaders.
Karsun sponsors senior team leaders for industry fellowships and mentorship programs as well. We are a longtime supporter of the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) professional development programs. Eleven Karsun leaders are ACT-IAC fellows and several have returned to their programs as leaders and advisors.
ACT-IAC is a premier forum for collaboration between the government and the technology community. Each of our industry fellows partnered with a government fellow as part of their professional development program. Supporting our team champions’ engagement in organizations like ACT-IAC is how we ensure your growth is part of our commitment to serving our agency customers’ mission.
As our leaders cheer on their teams, we cheer on their growth at Karsun. Our teams grow together, serving the government and building new, exciting technology solutions. Whether you are one of these champions or someone looking to experiment and build with us, Find Your Next at KarsunCareers.com/jobs.
This blog is our fourth and final our series our how problem solvers grow at Karsun. Check out our previous posts and discover where we find our next, we experiment for mission success and how our teams collaborate with toolkits.
Sinduja Sankar’s internship pushed her out of her comfort zone, letting her experience building workflow solutions with new software and automation tools. In this interview, the Georgia Tech graduate student shares her experience working alongside the Karsun Innovation Center (KIC). Learn how working in the fast-paced center enriched Sinduja’s practice as she built a proof of concept using the open source business automation platform Kogito, presented at bi-weekly Innovation Center “Show, Don’t Tell” sessions and grew as an intern at Karsun.
First please tell us about yourself. Where are you going to school? What are you studying? What do you like to do in your free time?
I am Sinduja! I am currently pursuing my master’s in computer science at Georgia Tech. In my free time, I love exploring museums in the DMV area and trying out new local restaurants with my friends. I also enjoy reading and playing video games.
Could you share a little bit about the project you worked on as part of this internship? What challenge does it solve? What technologies and tools are you using?
My project involves creating a proof of concept for a federal agency application using Kogito, an open source business automation platform for managing workflows. This would reduce the amount of code written significantly to manage the automation of workflows. The task involved understanding the existing workflow in a large code repository and redesigning the workflow iteratively with other developers. The workflow automates processes and decision-making, thereby making it more efficient and adaptive.
What is your favorite part about working with the Karsun Innovation Center? Is there a weekly meeting or ritual you enjoy? The opportunity to learn more or get a new certification?
The best part about working at Karsun is the supportive atmosphere. I am genuinely grateful to be part of such a wonderful group. The “Show, Don’t Tell” sessions which happen every two weeks are very interesting and give us a bird’s-eye view of what everyone is working on. I also really appreciate the intellectually stimulating nature of every project undertaken by KIC and the opportunity to work with the latest tools and technologies.
What is your biggest takeaway from your experience as an intern at Karsun?
As an intern, my key takeaway is that change is constant. Throughout the internship, I’ve experienced various forms of change, from adapting to a new environment to taking up responsibilities out of my comfort zone by experimenting with new software. I am grateful for this experience as it has taught me to be open-minded and adaptable.
Sinduja’s internship supported work performed by the Karsun Innovation Center. Learn how the Research and Development teams in the center created proof of concepts, prototype solutions and investigate emerging technologies. Connect with Sinduja on LinkedIn to learn more about her internship experience.