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The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) is implementing a sweeping range of solutions to improve the speed and efficiency of its Personnel Vetting processes while reducing inventory and improving timeliness.
DCSA Director David Cattler approved Personnel Vetting Tiger Team proposals – called “quick wins and immediate actions” – in December 2024 that continue to be applied and embedded into all aspects of the agency’s Background Investigations process.
Moreover, the DCSA Personnel Vetting Tiger Team – upon completing the second phase of its Background Investigations performance review in February 2025 – recommended scores of solutions focused on data-driven decision-making and streamlined processes to enable a more robust and effective technology.
Tiger Team members are engaged with DCSA’s Personnel Vetting Transformation Team, Business Transformation Office and Field Operations Directorate to implement high-efficiency changes that will impact the agency’s end-to-end personnel vetting process – background investigations, adjudications and continuous vetting.
The innovative solutions will “enhance speed, quality, and customer experience,” said Cattler while directing implementation of these solutions in a memorandum to DCSA senior leadership that he signed on Feb. 19, 2025.
The memo directed Ryan Christianson, DCSA Business Transformation advisor, in coordination with Mark Sherwin, DCSA Personnel Security acting assistant director, to take multiple actions necessary for implementing the solutions by April 20.
“We are full-throttle moving into implementation,” said Christianson, who leads the Personnel Vetting Tiger Team. “Our focus is the delivery of quality products and services at increased speed to reduce inventory.”
DCSA’s investigative inventory rises and falls over time depending on multiple internal and external factors. Since the case inventory reached 291,200 investigations in September 2024, inventory decreased to 222,700 cases as of April 21, 2025. “We’re now at 24% and climbing for inventory reduction,” said Christianson. “Projections show that our case inventory will drop below 200,000 by end of this fiscal year and potentially much further depending on the timing of the solutions we are implementing.”
This delivery includes suggestions based on customer feedback gleaned during nine “Agency Listening Sessions” and two “Industry Listening Tours” where the Tiger Team discussed the Personnel Vetting process with the DCSA customers.
“We ensured our solutions are based on quantitative data and metrics,” said DCSA Central Region Deputy Regional Mission Director Tara Flank, a Tiger Team member. “It was also critical that our solutions rely on the lived experiences of those who interact with our program internally within Personnel Security and Field Operations in addition to our customer partners who depend on our products to operate. Customers are clear that they want a stronger partnership with DCSA to include more communication and feedback loops.”
DCSA’s THREE-PHASE PLAN TO TRANSFORM THE PERSONNEL SECURITY PROCESS
The team began its initiative to transform Personnel Security in October 2024 with a “Discovery Phase” as the first of a three-phased approach, followed by “Phase Two – Solutioning” and “Phase Three – Execute, Monitor and Adjust.”
Now, Christianson, Sherwin and over a dozen Tiger Team members are looking forward to the next two rounds of Personnel Vetting Tiger Team initiatives – DCSA Adjudications and Continuous Vetting. The team will identify and recommend improvements in Adjudications and Continuous Vetting while applying the same three-phase process used to transform Background Investigations.
“We will operate with a bias for swift action in a collaborative manner,” Cattler emphasized in his memo, adding that the agency will “focus on delivering impactful outcomes to best serve our customers.”
Once the DCSA director concurs, the team’s solutions and recommendations for Adjudications and Continuous Vetting will be incorporated and delivered to Personnel Vetting for prioritization and execution.
ORCHESTRATING PERSONNEL VETTING FINDINGS, SOLUTIONS AND IMPLEMENATION
In the meantime, Christianson and his team are rapidly making DCSA-approved Personnel Vetting quick wins and solutions a reality.
“Some of them are going to be very simple and easy to implement, but we're also looking at more complex solutions that might change how we operate in the agency,” he said while addressing the concept and impact of using a synchronized Tiger Team of cross-functional experts to optimize the personnel vetting end-to-end process.
“You bring people with different skill sets and you put them together to solve a big problem and that's what DCSA has done here,” he explained. “We have people from all over the background investigations, adjudications and continuous vetting mission areas.”
Christianson – a former Army musician with extensive experience as a conductor – orchestrates the efforts of the Personnel Vetting Tiger Team in real-time as they continue to identify, resolve and remove constraints and contributing factors that led to protracted timelines and a steady increase in the investigations, continuous vetting and adjudications inventory.
As he conducts the Tiger Team’s ongoing performance and tempo of operations to examine, refocus and streamline all elements of the personnel vetting process, the individual team members – leaders in Personnel Security and Field Operations – collaborate to align, or “harmonize” their findings and solutions to four main finding areas:
• Demand: Effective demand management is imperative for program management and resource planning.
• Operations Management: Enables common priorities to achieve agency objectives, program accountability and continuous improvement.
• Throughput: Capturing efficiencies through minimizing indirect time and optimization of capacity to meet demand.
• Customer Service: Listening to customers and acting on their feedback helps to improve services, prepare for the future and better position the agency as the premier provider of integrated security services.
“By focusing on delivering value, improving effectiveness and efficiency, our leadership is confident we can achieve remarkable results that will benefit everyone involved in the vetting mission space,” said Amy Nané, DCSA Mid-Atlantic Region senior program analyst and Tiger Team member.
Nané anticipates that customer experience will significantly improve as DCSA investigators apply enhanced feedback loops in their customer outreach to reduce complex or time-consuming process steps wherever possible. “The result is faster and more effective service delivery,” she said. “An upgrade in the forms that populate National Student Clearinghouse schools is also expected to reduce submission errors and increase case processing speed.”
ENGAGED TO DELIVER BACKGROUND INVESTIGATIONS FASTER
Meanwhile, the team has provided analysis and answers to the overarching question that Christianson poses in relation to the background investigation process: “Why have we been unable to deliver background investigations faster?”
The team uncovered multiple intricate, systemic and obvious inefficiencies affecting timeliness. However, quick wins and solutions have started to streamline the security clearance process, resulting in a significant decrease in standing inventory and processing times since the Tiger Team was commissioned. Current solutions and those pending implementation include:
• A key National Background Investigation Services (NBIS) eApp (electronic application) improvement reduced Periodic Reinvestigations by 54% while increasing enrollments in continuous vetting, resulting in faster onboarding for critical government positions.
• Further modification of eApp to prevent unnecessary, automatic ordering of periodic reinvestigations that would require extensive field work. The modified process will send the eApp application to the continuous vetting team to meet the periodic form update requirement specified in Trusted Workforce 2.0 policies. NBIS eApp contains the Standard Forms applicants and covered individuals use to submit information required to process their background investigation and maintain federal personnel vetting records with current information necessary to perform time-based checks and continuous vetting automated record checks.
• The Tiger Team developed a report to inform OUSD(I&S) and PAC PMO about instances of potential unnecessary demand to include periodic reinvestigations, duplicate investigations scheduled where an existing investigation at equal or higher level is already scheduled, and investigations continued when a loss of jurisdiction is identified. The Tiger team asserts that this report provides transparency to the agency’s key partners who assist efforts in reducing friction at the front end of the process. It enables an increased focus on resources to complete the necessary cases for DCSA customers.
• Tiger Team efforts bolstered eApp functionality to improve user experience and enable future automation. The DCSA Program Executive Office collaborated with the Federal Information Records Enterprise to update eApp and the recently released Personnel Vetting Questionnaire to provide structured data for education and federal employment. This capability will support automation advancements and increase operational efficiency impacting over 520,000 federal employment and record checks annually.
• Reduction in duplicative reviews of work products.
• Decreasing time spent performing non-mission essential activities.
• Since Trusted Workforce 2.0 provides measures that will improve DCSA’s performance, efforts are being made for early incorporation of certain TW 2.0 measures. This action was recently approved by the security, suitability and credentialing executive agents.
PERSONNEL VETTING SOLUTIONS BASED ON DATA AND CUSTOMER FEEDBACK
In all, the Tiger Team identified more than 40 recommendations in background investigations alone that will improve timeliness and reduce inventory.
“We're following what the data is telling us and that's rooted in our recommendations,” said Sean Bernardi, DCSA Background Investigations program analyst.
In effect, the data revealed inefficiencies to Bernardi and his colleagues. In turn, they proposed specific quick win solutions and longer-term strategies related to field work, capacity, demand management and operational efficiency to improve the clearance process. The Tiger Team member pointed out that his team at DCSA’s Boyers, Pa., location is using data analysis, statistical models and process mapping to locate and resolve problems. IT modifications to reduce unnecessary periodic reinvestigation demands are one of the quick wins his team implemented. What’s more, their enhanced collaboration played a key role in maximizing efficiencies.
DCSA PERSONNEL VETTING TRANSFORMATION AND TRUSTED WORKFORCE 2.0
“DCSA continues to seek opportunities to improve,” said Steve Postle, DCSA Eastern Region senior program analyst and Tiger Team member. "We constantly seek new ways of doing business, ways to improve timeliness and ways to deliver value. As a Tiger Team, we are uniquely postured to help the program deliver on these commitments.”
The Personnel Vetting Tiger Team sees background investigations, adjudications and continuous vetting as an interconnected and unified DCSA Personnel Vetting Mission positioned to meet upcoming performance targets for TW 2.0 while complying with regulatory standards.
TW 2.0 – the whole-of-government approach to reform the personnel security process and establish a single vetting system for the U.S. government – began implementation in 2018. NBIS is the backbone of TW 2.0, serving as the secure IT system that will coordinate and connect the systems, interfaces and databases that support the end-to-end personnel vetting process.
NBIS – the personnel vetting IT system that is transforming the personnel vetting process to deliver stronger security, faster processing and better information sharing – will replace a suite of outdated, legacy IT systems that no longer meet the needs of the U.S. government. It is the future of personnel vetting, enabling the federal government to fully meet necessary TW 2.0 policy reforms.
| Date Taken: | 04.23.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 04.23.2025 20:03 |
| Story ID: | 496038 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 18 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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