Tensley Consulting

DoD Consulting Firm Turned to TrustStack to Build Speed, Transparency, and Autonomy into Daily Operations

Tensley Consulting, Inc. is a premier prime contractor for the National Security Agency. Tensley’s four central business units concentrate on Cybersecurity, SIGINT Engineering, Systems Engineering and Technical Support (SETA), and SIGINT Analysis. Tensley’s Cybersecurity business unit provides threat-based cybersecurity assessments to the United States intelligence community and the Department of Defense, delivering software and systems engineering services, program management, and technical writing. To provide these mission-critical solutions, Tensley’s staff of 100 relies on secure work management tools previously housed in DI2E to ensure FedRAMP compliance. But when DI2E retired in 2021, Tensley employees and affiliates were without the essential platforms they needed to communicate about client projects, along with countless other teams needing FedRAMP-authorized environments.

“When DI2E went away, we went backward because we could not communicate or collaborate,” said Glenn Gunter, the lead systems engineer for Tensley’s threat-based cybersecurity contract. Tensley's widely-dispersed team struggled to stay in touch with one another and their client, juggling lines of communication across several different tools. In addition, keeping all stakeholders in the loop became difficult without a single source of truth to track project progress.

In August 2022, Tensley began using TrustStack, Contegix’s FedRAMP-authorized DevSecOps collaboration platform. TrustStack unifies leading work management tools in a compliance-ready development environment, bringing together the communication, task management, and knowledge management vital to agile workflows. Using Jira, Confluence, and Mattermost in TrustStack has allowed Tensley team members to access all elements of their daily work in one compliant tool. Monica Crocker, Knowledge Manager at Tensley, put it simply: “TrustStack streamlines anything and everything.”

TrustStack Keeps Employees and Clients Up-to-Date in One System

When DI2E sunsetted, Tensley’s team was in limbo between environments. Employees communicated across five different channels for several months, including Slack, email, and SharePoint. Like many dispersed teams, team members at Tensley require effective asynchronous communication to run efficiently. However, with so many different communication tools in use, employees struggled to find messages containing mission-critical information autonomously, obstructing asynchronous work.

Without a centralized project management tool, a Microsoft Excel workbook became the best place to track and share project progress. Not only did this unwieldy system require manual updating and distribution via SharePoint, but sharing a new file with each status update created version control issues.

Onboarding to TrustStack fundamentally changed the way Tensley’s team operates. “It went from an individual environment to a team environment very quickly,” Crocker shared. The full suite of work management tools available in TrustStack provides a single source of truth, allowing internal team members and client contacts to find important project information easily. As team members at Tensley interface with both internal staff and customer contacts, this centralization ensures that all stakeholders remain accountable to one another. “We don’t call our tools Confluence, Jira, or Mattermost,” said Crocker. “We just say TrustStack, and everyone knows where to look.”

Atlassian Tools Bring Agility Within Reach—Without Compromising Security

With TrustStack, Contegix handles all compliance, licensing, and authorization aspects. In addition, this managed platform makes the industry-leading Atlassian work management suite available to teams requiring a FedRAMP-authorized environment at an affordable rate. As a result, Tensley now benefits from Contegix’s expertise in secure platform configuration and the agile principles at the heart of tools such as Jira and Confluence.

Administrators have wide-ranging visibility into workflows, allowing leaders to evaluate work efficiency across the project. Extensive reporting capabilities provide deep insight into project progress. This transparency also keeps all stakeholders on the same page about timing and statuses. In addition, administrators can manage visibility at a granular level, ensuring this information is only available to those it should be.

With a single sign-on and integrated user interface, team members now easily collaborate without having to log in multiple times or switch between tools and take full advantage of their powerful integrations. For example, the integration between Confluence and Jira allows Tensley team members to put their learnings at their colleagues’ fingertips easily. “It really helps increase awareness across the team,” said Gunter. As customer contacts change over the years and internal teammates come and go, Confluence makes it easy to keep the knowledge base salient and organized.

The ease of integration between Atlassian tools has allowed the team to automate routine tasks. For instance, weekly status reports that previously took several days to assemble and approve now generate automatically using data aggregated by TrustStack, enabling team members to create, share, and approve reports without wasting time on back-and-forth communication.

Contegix's Support Helped Tensley Realize TrustStack’s Fullest Potential

Contegix has provided extensive personal support to Tensley team members, from initial onboarding to ongoing monitoring and issue resolution. For instance, when an access issue arose on the customer’s side, Contegix experts immediately triaged and addressed the problem, finding a resolution within the same morning.

This personal support has proven instrumental in allowing Tensley to get the most out of TrustStack. One-on-one assistance ensures that all stakeholders have appropriate access to TrustStack tools, that tools are configured and maintained to ensure their efficient utilization, and that the agile workflows supported by TrustStack function seamlessly.

With knowledgeable support always available, Tensley’s development environment is no longer holding them back but instead carrying them forward—and the team plans to onboard even more users to TrustStack. “Using TrustStack has really allowed us to maximize our team and their resources,” said Gunter. That means a better work experience for employees and affiliates, easier management for leaders, and more efficient delivery of the quality technical solutions on which Tensley’s customers rely.

Consolidating leading work management tools in a FedRAMP-authorized platform, TrustStack is designed with the flexibility to support every aspect of FedRAMP-regulated teams’ development and collaboration. Learn more about how TrustStack can streamline your DevSecOps operations today.