AFCEC IT team lends a high-tech hand

  • Published
  • By John Burt
  • AFCEC Public Affairs
TYNDALL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. --  The Air Force Civil Engineer Center's Readiness Directorate supports Air Force emergency responders. But when the readiness team needed high-tech help, it was the center's information technology pros who came to the rescue!

AFCEC's Readiness Directorate Expeditionary Engineering Division, located at Tyndall, oversees Air Force civil engineer contingency training for more than 32,000 active duty, Guard and Reserve CEs. This diverse training program encompasses 317 classes at 15 locations world-wide and is critical to preparing civil engineers to carry out their wartime mission.

"We have more than 7,000 students go through contingency training each year," said Maj. David Jane, AFCEC's chief of contingency training. "This training provides our students experience establishing and maintaining a base at a forward-deployed location or in a contingency environment."

In 2013, the web-based legacy system used to manage the training program was shut down, leaving AFCEC's training experts without resources to sufficiently handle the workload.

"We went from a system easily managed by one person, to a system which required two people to manage full-time," said Jane.

The class scheduling and registration process involved constant attention to try to keep the information current. For the training managers, it was a giant leap backwards in capability.

"We had to manually enter every registration for every student," said Michael Thomas, contingency training scheduler. "This data was compiled in spreadsheets and uploaded so major commands, units and training managers could see class availability to manage their training requirements. Every day, every hour, we had to be in that system making schedule and roster updates."

Fortunately, the IT gurus at AFCEC headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, responded.

"They were drowning in spreadsheets," said Jennifer Pifer, SharePoint architect. "There was nothing in place anywhere to allow them to do this type of schoolhouse management. We wanted to create a system for them that was efficient and would free up their workload and be easy for the users."

The IT experts began to work with Jane and his team to build a training management solution on the SharePoint 2010 platform.

"This project was a top priority," said Deborah Mills, AFCEC SharePoint program manager. "It had a significant mission impact and was more complex than the normal business process solution we might typically put into place."

One of the challenges the developers faced was creating and managing access for the training system's different types of users.

"Their users are spread across the Air Force enterprise, including the Air National Guard," said Pifer. "We wanted to give them the ability to register for training themselves. Some users, like unit deployment managers, also had to be able to register others. We had to incorporate this and still give the AFCEC guys the ability to control the roster."

To expedite the development process, the IT team created a virtual staging area on SharePoint where concepts, additions and changes could be seen and reviewed in real-time by the expeditionary engineering team at Tyndall. The two locations used Microsoft Communicator to bounce ideas back and forth.

"That was a lifesaver," said Jane. "We had never used Communicator before. We could have quick chats with the developers, get updates and provide feedback. We could ask questions and they would shoot an answer right then and there."

One of the requirements was that the SharePoint system could be expanded to manage new areas of training. For example, in 2014, AFCEC took on the management of new RED HORSE courses.

With the developing and testing phases complete, the new CE Contingency Training SharePoint site was rolled out May 30 and Jane said he's pleased with the results and the collaboration.

"They made this project a top priority," said Jane. "It was almost like they dedicated themselves to us at that time. It was a great partnership, cooperation and support from the AFCEC IT team."

"From the beginning, I challenged our IT folks to give our readiness team members something they could be proud of," said Steven Barker, AFCEC chief information officer. "I wanted them to make it better than their old legacy web-based system. Our developers knocked it out of the park!"