‘I love to solve problems’: Awards program honors feds who improved the delivery of public services

Joanne Woytek works for NASA, but as the manager for the Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement program, she often has to clarify that she doesn’t work on rockets. 

“What I do is I help the government procure technology products and services in the most efficient way we can. That's the bottom line,” she said. “So it's not as jazzy, but it has a big impact on, not just NASA, but the entire government. It is cool when you learn about it, but at first sight it's not as fun as going to the moon.”

While SEWP is part of NASA, it assists all agencies with acquiring certain information technology, communication and audio visual services through contracts. 

Woytek is one of several federal employees who on Friday will receive a Service to the Citizen award, which recognizes “public servants and their industry partners who excel in delivering impactful, efficient and effective government services, while rebuilding public trust in government.” 

Honorees for the awards program, which was established in 2018 by the Public Service Leadership Academy nonprofit, are selected by a committee of private sector leaders and former federal executives. This year, Service to the Citizen is recognizing around 100 federal, state and local government officials as well as government contractors. In total, 18 federal agencies are represented among the recipients. 

Woytek, who is retiring in December after 49 years with the federal government, is receiving a lifetime achievement award. During her tenure, SEWP has developed into a $12 billion annual Best-in-Class contract vehicle, according to Service to the Citizen’s website, which also said that she has used webinars, individual assistance and digital tools to improve her program’s customer service. 

“I am now impacting every federal agency,” she said. “It boggles my mind that little old me has this much impact on so much acquisition and so much money. I take it very seriously.” 

While Woytek doesn’t work on space operations, despite working at NASA, she did initially aspire to become an astronomer. 

“So the first half of my career, NASA hired me not to be an astronomer, unfortunately — or fortunately, it would have been a different life — but when I was hired back in 1977, they put me into a room and said, ‘Write programs to help scientists (my customers) interact with technology that is brand new.’”  

Then, that experience led her to work on what would become SEWP, which she became project manager of in 1999. Woytek said that she’s grown significantly as a leader since then. 

“In 1999 and 2000, I was a horrible manager. I was technical and I thought everybody should just be like me. When I turned the corner, when I learned how to be a good manager, was when I realized I can't make people be me or be what I want them to be,” she said. “I have to figure out how I'm going to change to make them successful, not how to make them change to be successful. I realized that probably halfway through this time period, so it took me a while.”  

From NASA programmer to leading a contracting program with a governmentwide impact, Woytek said that the through line of her career has been solving problems through technology. 

“It's bringing together both that procurement contract piece and the technical community and finding solutions to make it easy for those two to get what they need,” she said. “What excited me in all that is — it was a problem to solve, and I love to solve problems.”