Rising Star: Akoua Enow
Management and Program Analyst, Office of Information Technology, Transportation Security Administration
Akoua Enow has a talent for sifting through detailed budgeting and planning operations and collaborating with managers on complex acquisitions at the Transportation Security Administration.
Although she has been in the federal workforce for eight years, Enow is only two years into her job as management and program analyst at TSA’s Office of IT. In that time, she has emerged as a major contributor to the complex coordination of value-added process improvements for OIT’s Applications Development Division. She manages the division’s $50 million budget by collaborating with project managers, contracting and procurement staff, OIT’s budget and finance team, and the IT acquisition review team.
The discussions require finesse and an intricate understanding of how those functions interrelate. Additionally, the work requires a sense of intangibles and everyday workplace events, including shifts in senior leadership priorities, fluctuating funding sources and changing requirements.
Enow completed 45 procurement packages in fiscal 2018, including some requiring painstaking market research. She accounted for an additional 20 procurement requests totaling $35 million in the same period — more than half of the requests processed by the division. Each package requires collaboration with various budget teams, branch managers and other stakeholders.
Her work on the $400 million, four-year Flexible Agile Scalable Teams blanket purchase agreement has been particularly remarkable, according to her managers. FAST will provide TSA offices with a centralized contract for application development and design services.
Enow led the team that developed the contract from the statement of work and cost estimates, then gathered input from various agency offices to make sure their needs were covered. She also worked with the Office of Contracting and Procurement on the overall procurement strategy for FAST.