JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-FORT SAM HOUSTON, Texas -- (Feb. 16, 2017) The Mission and Installation Contracting Command relies on a small staff for guidance and innovative solutions to recruit and retain a well-trained workforce to support the command's role in sustaining the Army's No. 1 priority -- readiness.
The MICC human resources staff performs a variety of functions and tasks for developing a workforce and planning strategy to meet the specialized needs of the command's military and civilian personnel that keeps the command ready.
"Readiness drives everything that we do to keep the command at or close to 100 percent strength to ensure contracting Soldiers are in place when the call comes to deploy," said Maria Allen, the principal adviser for personnel issues to the MICC leadership.
Allen, along with her deputy chief of civilian personnel, Dean Michalec, lead a staff that is ready to meet the needs of the command. The personnel team, also known has G-1, is also responsible for many other facets to include military personnel, performance management, labor and management-employee relations, staffing, classification and strength management.
As human resources specialists, the G-1 staff performs a variety of daily, weekly, monthly and ad hoc functions that contribute to the overall performance of the command. The directorate consists of two divisions. A civilian personnel team comprised of Victor Gallegos, Patrick Hill, Letty Walsh, Steven Stacy, Simba Gentry and Lilia Sanchez provide advice and guidance on staffing, performance management, classification and human resources policies. Jason Wild, chief of military personnel, leads the second division along with human resources specialists Gerry Lebron and Katina Recard that manages Soldiers' readiness.
Keeping senior leadership informed regarding the strength and readiness of their units is performed by Beverly Smith, the MICC strength manager. She develops strength reports for MICC leadership awareness. These reports are used to brief the command's state of preparedness. Together they conduct daily accountability of the MICC's contracting teams and report to the Army Contracting Command, the Army Materiel Command and then the Army.
To keep the command's manning up-to-date, Smith produces weekly and monthly strength reports for higher headquarters, tracking the number of personnel on board by category and identifying funding sources as they relate to mission performed. The information from these reports provides a snapshot of the MICC's onboard civilian strength against authorized funding levels. She is also responsible for processing all civilian hiring actions to ensure positions are filled.
"I put faces with spaces," Smith said. "I take accountability of all our positions, making sure requirements are being followed correctly. It provides a reality of who we have filling what positions and where the command sits with its status of readiness."
"Whether it's processing an award for a retiring Soldier or civilian in the command, responding to a request for a critical tasking, or seeking a paragraph and line number change to support a deployment or processing a hiring action, we are handling it," Allen said.
During fiscal 2016, the G-1 staff was involved with several workforce shaping initiatives that included the command's transformation plan and managing its hiring process. The team has actively addressed attrition and turnover rates by developing a recruitment strategy focused on recruiting experienced practitioners and new hires.
Once the G-1 staff has accountability and awareness of the command's Soldier and civilian positions, the next step is to identify their availability to perform the MICC mission.
The staff uses the Medical Protection System, or MEDPROS, to provide MICC leadership with the most up-to-date medical status of the command's personnel. The MEDPROS system is directly linked to the Commander's Portal, which provides all commanders with first-hand, real-time information regarding the readiness of their command. This system is also connected to other systems within the military healthcare system like the eProfile system. This system notifies commanders and their appropriate staff personnel about profiles that directly impact the health of the command and the deployable percentages.
"MEDPROS allows us to give an up-to-the-moment picture of the command's state of readiness to our leaders," Wild said. "It can tell you who is ready to deploy and who is not. Without readiness, you can't deploy."
Another example of supporting the command's readiness is tracking and monitoring all civilian hiring actions and classification of positions.
"Civilian personnel are a vital part of readiness. They provide continuity and often are the subject matter experts training the military members on the entire acquisition process," Allen said. "Keeping jobs filled is critical to the training of the forces and readiness."
As a learning organization, the staff hopes to increase quality hiring and timeliness across the command while maintaining the commander's reorganization goals, enhance their customer service efforts through more staff assistance visits or video teleconference to raise awareness of upcoming changes to how the command does business to support the warfighter.
"We are more than just the people to see when you need to change your personnel records; we are professionals," Allen said. "The G-1 human resources specialists quietly go about their day-to-day business working hard to ensure Soldiers and civilians within the command are supported, and the needs of our contracting support brigades and field directorate office are met."
Headquartered at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, Texas, the MICC is made up of about 1,500 military and civilian members assigned to three contracting support brigades and a field directorate office throughout the United States who are responsible for contracting goods and services in support of Soldiers. In fiscal 2016, the command executed more than 32,000 contract actions valued at more than $4.6 billion across the Army, including $2.1 billion to American small businesses. The command also managed more than 585,000 Government Purchase Card Program transactions in fiscal 2016 valued at an additional $741 million.
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