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Celeste Ford, Stellar Solutions Board Chair and Founder, was featured as a 2021 Trailblazer in Enterprising Women magazine. A winner of the Enterprising Women of the Year Award in 2020, Celeste was cited in the article for her vision of “satisfying customers’ critical needs while realizing our dream jobs.” 

An advocate of women leaders, she has mentored women in STEM across the nation. As a company, Stellar Solutions is exemplary for its hiring and promotion of women: three of its six Vice Presidents are women.

Celeste recalled being the only woman in a control center more than 25 years ago, “Although it was a thrilling challenge, I knew that my voice stood out in the crowd on the console and any mistake would not only impact the mission but my future career and that of the women that would follow me. It focused me on being the best I could be.”

To learn more about Celeste’s Trailblazing career, see Enterprising Women Summer 2021

Stellar Solutions shared its Malcolm Baldrige quality and excellence insights at “Visionary Leadership That Works – Southcentral Foundation with Stellar Solutions,” part of the Baldrige Executive Fellows Program that took place in Anchorage, Alaska, June 21-22.

Jennifer Luce, VP Defense Programs, led with the first presentation for the Conference on Leadership; Janet Grondin, VP Intelligence Programs, headed up a concluding Leadership Panel, and Edward Dane, Senior Systems Engineer and Acquisition/Program Management Specialist, led the Strategy Roundtable providing Strategic Planning Takeaways.

The speakers shared Stellar Solutions’ lasting Vision — to satisfy customers’ critical needs and employees’ dream jobs; its Mission – to provide high impact engineering expertise, and its Values, to do the right thing for customers, employees and the community. 

Jennifer Luce showed how Baldrige practices and processes support the organization’s ongoing commitment to these pillars.  “Stellar Solutions’ leadership team keeps laser-sharp focus on our Vision, and uses the Baldrige Leadership Communication tools and Strategic Planning Processes to keep us true to our culture.” Survey data bear this out:

·      100% of customers say that Stellar Solutions is satisfying a critical program need.

·      99% of Stellar Solutions; employees say that “taking everything into account, Stellar Solutions is a great place to work.”

·      84% of employees are in their Dream Job or working toward it.

·      99% of employees say, “I feel good about the ways we contribute to the community.”

Ed Dane emphasized Stellar Solutions’ ongoing, integrated approach to Baldrige training and communications.  “Ongoing interaction with employees at all levels of the organization and all stages of employment generates the kind of valuable feedback and data that enable continuous process improvements,” he said.

Janet Grondin explained in an interactive session how Stellar Solutions keeps employee teams working cohesively from locations across the country and world.  “Our values define us in who we hire, the clients we partner with, and the culture we develop.  Together we learn from each other and build action plans to achieve our mission success.” 

Ms. Christine Jenkins serves as the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) Business and Technical Integration Specialist. She joined the CoECI team 4½ years ago with seasoned expertise in software management and government procurement practices. She is, in large part, singly responsible for the continued reputation of CoECI and NASA as a high value partner in the use of crowdsourcing within the Federal government. Her commitment to excellence and her ability to forge successful challenge execution teams was evident from the start. She quickly grasped how to apply her seasoned procurement expertise to CoECI’s unique operating model resulting in a significantly improved task order template clarifying the government’s requirements and easing proposal development for the NASA Open Innovation Services (NOIS) contractors.

When assigned the technically complex ARMD Fast Computing challenge, Ms. Jenkins’ intelligent, steady approach to working with the challenge owner and the NOIS vendor executing the competition resulted in a highly successful public launch. Unfortunately, ARMD leadership canceled the competition. This was unprecedented. Ms. Jenkins’ rapid decision-making working with the procurement team, the challenge owner, and the vendor resulted in the best possible outcome for all parties, creating a well-structured and repeatable process for the possibility of future task order cancelations. Her ability to work through the complexities of this effort, demonstrating a commitment to the teamwork required to turn a bad situation good, was uncanny.

Given her proven ability to excel at complex projects, as other agencies sought the services of CoECI to assist with their public competitions, Ms. Jenkins began to assume major responsibility for this work. On the initial NOIS Contract, the reimbursable work CoECI brought to JSC totaled $15M over 5 years. Ms. Jenkins led the majority of those projects. Since the launch of NOIS2, the number of agencies CoECI is working with and the value of the work they are doing has steadily increased. In just the first month of NOIS2, over $5M is already in the queue with a total value of over $43M of other agency work possible via signed interagency agreements. And more is in work. Every project worked with another agency directly benefits NASA in more than the intake of overhead fees.

Ms. Jenkins’ ensures that while she is working another agency project, every aspect of that project is integrally related to the work we are doing for NASA. Ms. Jenkins’ is currently working with NIH, USDA, NOAA, and DOI’s Bureau of Reclamation in addition to the ground-breaking work she is doing with NGA to advance the development of the solutions garnered during the early phases of the multi-million dollar MagQuest challenge. Ms. Jenkins’ ability to tailor CoECI’s general operating principles to meet each specific agency need is amazing to behold. Reclamation has benefitted significantly from Ms. Jenkins’ efforts. She is working over 12 Reclamation projects in various stages of maturity.

Their Prizes Lead recently took time to acknowledge her support with these words: “. . .Thank you for your patience and grace as we continue to work through our business model changes in our prize competition program. . . . I’m not sure I can articulate how much we appreciate you and how your efforts have taken us to the next level in our program!”

Ms. Jenkins’ commitment to the CoECI team and her ability to become a key member of every team she works with is outstanding. Without question she contributes daily to the excellence in NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation. With every project she supports for another agency, she is testament to the teamwork and excellence that contributes to the success of NASA’s mission.  Her achievements are worthy of this recognition. Christine – thank you so much for your service to NASA.

Stellar Solutions is proud to have been a key sponsor to one of the most high impact humanitarian research projects of our time, QuakeFinder. The project’s goal includes developing technology and methods for detection and analysis of electromagnetic earthquake precursors to produce earthquake forecasts based on sound scientific theory and practice.

Despite the significant scientific, technical, political and financial hurdles faced over the past two decades, QuakeFinder has developed a physics-based system for monitoring the earthquake process and made tremendous headway on the noble quest to produce earthquake forecasts.

In this video, presented as part of a local community Nature and Science Committee Speaker Series, Mr. Tom Bleier, the QuakeFinder founder at Stellar Solutions discusses cutting-edge research about the correlation of electromagnetic signals and the occurrence of earthquakes and the monitoring system the QuakeFinder team has developed over the years with the long-term goal of saving and benefiting countless lives.

For those of you who missed the interview of our Founder, Celeste Ford, on the Start Up Leaders Show the links to the recording are below (25 minutes).

It gives a good overview of what we are all about: Satisfying our customer critical needs while realizing our dream jobs as well as crossing the boundaries and the 5 points of the star. Enjoy!