Employee Spotlight
Zenna Buffone-Fisk
Administrative Logistics Coordinator, Department of Veterans Affairs
Zenna Buffone-Fisk Makes a Difference in Veterans’ Lives on $91 Wi-Fi Project
Zenna Buffone-Fisk is a study in contrasts. An open, gregarious woman who likes to laugh, Zenna also reveres tea ceremonies and gardening, two hobbies that require concentration and patience. “Patience is not my middle name,” she says, “but gardening taught me how to be patient.”
That’s a virtue that is serving her well at Catapult, where as Administrative Logistics Coordinator for the $91 million Wi-Fi project for the Department of Veterans Affairs, she orders equipment and tracks and oversees delivery. There are a lot of moving parts on this project.
“We’re on the cusp of technology, working on one of the most significant Wi-Fi deployments in the federal government,” Zenna says. “We’ve been offered the chance to make a difference in many veterans’ lives.”
Zenna has tremendous respect for her teammates, and that respect is reciprocated. Damon House, the Project Manager on the Wi-Fi project, says Zenna is “the glue that keeps my team together.”
Zenna joined Catapult in 2003, as project control specialist for a Housing and Urban Development (HUD) project. Since then, she’s been assigned to different projects at Corporate Headquarters as well as project sites. With the small staff Catapult had then, Zenna was able to move around among several project sites and project teams, and she credits that experience with learning firsthand the concerns that the project teams face.
Zenna left Catapult briefly after an odd turnaround on a project with the Department of Energy (DOE). Zenna’s labor category was switched to a competitor, which was then Catapult’s subcontractor. When Catapult became the subcontractor, she joined another company. But it was a short-lived separation. When Dave Lyons, Catapult’s Senior Vice President of Technology and Management Solutions and Chief Technology Officer, asked Zenna to join the Wi-Fi team, she took the offer.
It’s the comfort and familiarity of Catapult that Zenna enjoys, along with watching projects achieve maturity. That feeling is also what draws her to her hobbies. She tends to a one-acre plot of land at her home in Annandale dotted with ornamental plants and trees. Her husband, Craig Fisk, appreciates the garden but is more interested in construction, where the work has a definite beginning and ending. A garden, however, never stops growing and demands a different type of attention—and patience—as Zenna waits for the garden’s beauty and elegance to unfold.
Maybe Zenna isn’t a study in contrasts after all. Whether she’s focused on the needs of her garden or zeroing in on the demands of the many Catapult projects she’s worked on, Zenna Buffone-Fisk is a presence that provides a steady sense of calm concentration.
