Akosua Ali
Akosua Ali ironed out complex acquisition issues and found millions of dollars in unused funds at DHS.
Akosua Ali is unusually good at making sense of complicated, sometimes disjointed environments. As a management program analyst and contracting officer's representative at the Department of Homeland Security, she ironed out complex acquisition issues and found millions in unused funds.
She led multiple IT contract reconciliation projects that involved analyzing complex financial reports, researching contract actions in DHS' PRISM financial system and meeting weekly with all stakeholders. She meticulously analyzed funds left over from previous years for the CIO office's largest IT services and support contracts and worked with vendors to find unused money that could be made available for other procurements or turned over to the Treasury Department. Her efforts uncovered more than $15 million that might otherwise have been lost.
Her superiors said Ali has improved the process for administering IT services and support funds at DHS. Beyond tracking down unused money, she developed training on invoice processing, and established best practices and standard operating procedures to help contracting officer's representatives in the IT Services Office manage a wide range of operations -- including invoice payments, reports on how quickly contract dollars are being spent and the funding execution of more than 180 contracts totaling more than $700 million.
Ali's training, best practices and programmatic support have resulted in a 70 percent increase in the accuracy of ITSO's fiscal 2015 IT services contract funding and enhanced the monitoring and analysis of contract spending rates.