While the coronavirus pandemic continues to keep many contractors’ employees separated, Paradyme Management Inc. is looking to drive more collaboration across its business.
The Greenbelt-based information technology consulting firm is still adhering to its social distancing policies while launching an innovation lab, dubbed Paradyme Labs, within its new Tysons office. The goal is to incorporate insights from different portions of the company — from engineering to sales to recruitment — to better design operations.
“Really, the idea behind the labs is an effort on our part to make a real capital investment in how we approach technology and solutions,” said Paradyme Chief Technology Officer Luther McGinty. “We also wanted to be able to influence the culture of the business, taking this innovation and learning mindset that we have fully embraced within the lab environment, but also inundate that across the business.”
The method is not unlike the popular design philosophy of DevSecOps, where IT solutions are collaboratively and iteratively developed by engineers, operations personnel, security specialists and others to ensure each group’s specialties are baked into the application.
Paradyme Labs takes the philosophy a step further, bringing DevSecOps to its business structure and channeling it through the lab. It will do this through strategies like bringing in the company’s sales department to better understand how the company's innovations work and how they can be better positioned for federal agency customers.
Executives will also leverage the lab to better strategize how to integrate the different segments of the company, such as talent management, based on the DevSecOps mentality. The strategy allows Paradyme to integrate all parts of its business to iteratively and collectively improve them rather than working in silos.
“Twenty years ago, everything was a methodology. You do A, you do B, you do C. Everything was a march in a straight line and, notionally, the customer won't fail because of that," McGinty said. "Being agile and DevSecOps, it’s about always looking for that improvement, there is no true done, per se. We’ve inundated that within our lab and we have, in many ways, used that to influence our sales, our recruiting, our training, all the different facets that comprise our business.”
Paradyme recorded $48.41 million in 2019 revenue and employs more than 200, according to Washington Business Journal research.
McGinty said the concept of an innovation lab space at Paradyme got its start as far back as 2016, with a handful of interns conducting market research, and expanded into a team of 170-plus DevSecOps practitioners backed by capital investment.
The burgeoning growth of that team led to the plans to develop Paradyme Labs in its 4,000-square-foot Tysons office. With the pandemic grinding on, McGinty said that Paradyme has worked to recreate that collaboration virtually until it’s safe to return to the office, which the company currently projects will be in the first quarter of 2021.
Until then, McGinty said that Paradyme has allowed staff to come in as they deem necessary, but has limited the number people that can be present and how many can gather in select meeting spaces in the office.
“We have a reporting system whenever we are going to be in the office,” he said. “We just have to notify, that way, if there is some kind of incident or exposure, we can just basically go down that call tree, make sure people are alerted and given indicators to be safe.”
In the meantime, Edward O, Paradyme’s chief strategy officer, said that because DevSecOps is becoming the common currency of federal IT circles, it’s essential that all functions of the company, from tech on down, keep pace.
“The urgency of having integration across all of the operations of the company, from business development, tying into how we capture our work and down to how we recruit talent, it’s becoming more and more important that those touchpoints are intentional and more clearly defined,” he said. “It’s becoming very important for us as a company that, hey, not only do we say it on our website, but as you talk to one individual and that individual conveys their expertise about what we do and how we do it. And every person supports it, driving back to how we even recruit delivery talent, it all has to tie.”