Photo By John Freese | The 88th Readiness Division received the top Army Communities of Excellence award for...... read more read more
Fort McCoy, Wis.—The 88th Readiness Division was presented with a gold medal from the Army Community of Excellence at the U.S. Army National Guard Bureau headquarters in Arlington, Va., on May 23, 2019, making the 88th RD the overall quality winner for organizations of the U.S. Army Reserve.
The 88th RD provides base operations management and services to about 35 percent of the U.S. Army Reserve force. With resource and programs management of Army posts, reserve centers, maintenance shops, public affairs and Army band units in 19 states, the 88th is one of four units of its kind in the U.S. Army Reserve, and is a key contributor to Army Reserve readiness, important to overall Department of Defense preparedness strategy. It also takes on additional management and leadership roles, such as for tactical vehicles, family programs, and it conducts promotion boards for its 19-state footprint.
“An important thing about the 88th is that we’re respected across the Army, Army Guard and Army Reserve,” said Steve Keivel, an administrative specialist with the 88th, and a key writer for the incorporation of the quality principles into 88th practices and policies that led to the award.
“We’re extremely respected, and other Army organizations like to emulate us,” Keivel said.
The ACOE recognition award was presented to the 88th RD commanding general, Maj. Gen. Jody J. Daniels. It is based on a robust list of Malcom Baldridge quality criteria structured in the form of questions that organizations ask of themselves, and that they use to assess who they are and how well they are doing in their respective mission. The answers to those questions are potentially foundational.
The award recognizes organizations with outstanding achievements in areas of leadership, strategy, customer service, analysis, people empowerment, and operational efficacy; all key components of the Baldridge criteria. It includes a trophy, and a $100 thousand dollar injection into funding for the command.
But it’s those questions and answers are where the rubber really hits the road. Operational methods and ways of working are assessed on the basis of their approach, implementation, the extent to which they are products of learning, and how well they are integrated with and account for organizational developmental needs, and support the overall strategy.
“The Baldridge criteria [itself] is not our strategy as much as it the tool we use to record the 88th's story,” said Gina Barton, with the logistics maintenance division and ACOE writer, describing the series of steps and processes that emerge and are morphed into a management document guiding the path forward.
In terms of process, are you measuring, are you assessing to help determine whether it is being done efficiently and effectively as it can be? Barton asked, in example of the how the Baldridge mechanism works.
Of the four readiness divisions in the Army Reserve, the 88th is the only one that can claim development of foundational processes based on Baldridge that have come to define the organization. In other words, there is a strong extent to which the 88th has organized its management practices around these principles. It hasn't forgotten its Army heritage; but, it has leveraged Baldridge to aggressively enrich that legacy of efficiency. The consensus opinion from the 88th’sACOE program leaders is that recognition for the effort is great, but the effort is bigger than that.
“It's not about the award,” said Tom Helgeson, who has been the Army Community of Excellence Program Director for the past 15 years; but has recently welcomed new program leadership. “We've won the award, pretty much every year we have been eligible to compete for it,” Helgeson said.
“During the years in which we are not even eligible to compete, we work just as hard, and do the exact same things,” he said.
That includes something Baldridge does, and what the 88th has done with it; empowering the workforce. It's one of the seven criteria for performance excellence.
If workers at even the lowest level are empowered to suggest and forward improvements to the way that things are done, “you can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization because they’re the ones that implement the processes into action, wherever it is,” said Barton. “They gain ownership of that process, and ownership of the mission. So, what they do matters.”
Eventually, with repeated successes like the 88th has experienced, and for which it has been recognized more than half a dozen times, things become cultural, and organizational behavior demonstrates it.
Helgeson couldn't agree more, noting in the workforce something beyond the criteria itself, as he told the story of what mechanics did in one of the Fort McCoy vehicle maintenance shops.
In 2013, a mechanic was tragically killed by a tipped open truck cab, which unexpectedly slammed shut upon the engine compartment in which he was working. His fellow mechanics spent some time grieving, and then they took action on the process.
That process called for the use of a crane to assist in propping up the cab for access to the engine bay, as back up for the cab’s inherent hydraulic lift, typical to many cab-over designed trucks. Because cranes are not always available, or because they sometimes cannot always fit in the work spaces in which the trucks are maintained, short cuts were sometimes taken, and in that case a crane was not used. The teammates designed a simple, foolproof hood prop that was effective, made the need for a crane irrelevant, and became widely used throughout Army maintenance shops.
“They didn’t reference any Malcom Baldridge criteria. They saw something was wrong and they said, there’s got to be a better way to do this,” Helgeson said.
That will prove important in coming years. The Army Community of Excellence awards program is going away completely in the active Army, and is soon to see changes in the Army Reserve, as this was the last year that the award was actually presented. Micah Komp, the new ACOE program director sees that underlying dedication to quality as vital. Citing an important Army regulation for governing organizations he sees that path forward.
“Army Regulation 5-1 (Management of Army Business Operations) still requires commands…and organizations to do some of those things that ACOE was promoting,” Komp said. “It still speaks to a lot of those functions addressed in Malcom Baldridge,” he continued.
“Regardless of the monetary award, or trophy, it’s the processes behind it that have gotten us where we are today,” he said
| Date Taken: | 05.23.2019 |
| Date Posted: | 06.11.2019 16:34 |
| Story ID: | 326610 |
| Location: | FORT MCCOY, WISCONSIN, US |
| Web Views: | 333 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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