Any time now the Army will announce the winners of the Army Communities of Excellence Program, in which Fort Riley was named a finalist.
"We haven't been a finalist in 10 years," said Heather Stewart, an analyst, Plans, Analysis and Integration Office.
Stewart was the driving force behind the 50-page report, which detailed processes within the garrison from the child development centers to how training needs were handled on the ranges to determining the commanders' intent and how that plan was executed.
"I'm looking at our garrison processes and how they all go to create this service-oriented environment that is efficient, lean and communicates," she said.
The Army Communities of Excellence program is a Chief of Staff Army sponsored initiative that promotes continuous process improvement and fosters excellence in installation management, according to www.army.mil/standto/2018-05-17. This program uses the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Program Criteria for Performance Excellence -- an internationally recognized integrated management system -- to evaluate competing installations.
Stewart said all installations are eligible to compete for the ACOE, it just depends on how competitive they are and if they have the manpower to put the packet together to promote their installation.
"It's not mandated anymore, it use to be," she said. "They said, 'Look, unless you are really competitive or have the manpower to do this to go ahead and send up.' So there was between 30 and 40 installations. You also have to think that those 30 to 40 installations all came to win. It's sort of, if we have the manpower to support this we are going to submit a packet that we will hopefully win with."
The size of the installation does not matter either, Stewart said.
"We are even (competing) with some installations that are not division-level installations," she said. "Like Fort McCoy, (Wisconsin), where they deal almost exclusively with National Guard troops -- they were also a finalist this year. It has nothing to do with what your mission is or the size of the installation. It has to do with the internal process oriented environment."
The process the packet goes over has six categories; leadership, strategy, customers, measurement, analysis and knowledge management, workforce and operations -- and how they each link back to each other.
"It really is as much of a mapping process as much as anything," Stewart said. "Anything that I wrote about in the packet, I had to make sure it was mapped to every single other category. It's almost like a spider web with leadership right there in the middle -- it intertwines. Everything I spoke about in there had to be relatable to the other categories. It was definitely analytical and had to do a lot with process mapping."
Stewart said she is thrilled Fort Riley was named a finalist -- especially with the time invested in the packet.
"I started working on our packet six months out, I really started putting it together and framing it," she said. "It's typically on top of our regular job duties to put it together."
Stewart has training in the Baldrige processes, which allows her to see what was done in previous years and how to adjust that to meet the criteria listed to help the Fort Riley packet standout above the rest.
"About three years ago we submitted a packet, I wasn't the program manager at that point, but I went to the Baldrige training and really saw what they were judging," she said. "It was really insightful. We thought we were sending up a packet with one thing, but when you get in there and start tearing other people's packets apart and critiquing them you realize, 'Oh I made that same mistake.'"
After taking a year off due to staffing shortages, the plan was to start from scratch and redo the entire packet from the ground up, Stewart said.
"So, we strategically took a year off and just did an organizational profile and just did a quick look (at ourselves)," she said. "This year we really came back to win. We came on strong. We threw out our packet we had been using for (the) previous years and just started fresh."
Stewart and the PAIO staff took the saying, "Fort Riley is a great place to live, train, deploy from, come home to and retire at," and broke that down for the judges looking at Fort Riley processes from the outside.
"For my packet, I really focused internal to the garrison and what we have to do day-to-day whether the Soldiers are here or not," Stewart said. "These are the things we have to do. It has to do a lot with our operational environment."
Among the items mentioned in the packet was Fort Riley's adoption of the Strategic Plan 2030 which highlights accomplishments for the post in the future.
"It was very crucial in making sure we placed as a finalist this year," Stewart said. "Making sure that plan was published and also that it had Baldrige verbiage in it and it aligned with what we were wanting in our packet. And our packet was written to align with our strategic plan."
After the packet moved through the initial judges, a virtual site review was done, Stewart said. Here leadership and employees were asked questions to make sure what was in the packet was what was actually happening on the installation.
"They met with various individuals all the way up from leadership to our workers and all the levels in between," she said. "They were looking to see if the different layers within our organization could speak to what was in the packet. In other words, you say you do these things now lets see if you do them. We went through the virtual site visit and now we are just waiting for our results."
That process ended in October 2018 and the results are expected anytime, she said.
"We expected them two weeks ago, so I do not know when they will come in," she said. "We are literally just waiting for the [Army wide announcement] to be published by ACSIM. That's why everyone is kind of prepping ahead. Hopefully we will be told something good. We're hoping that we will place somewhere."
The finalist will be awarded either a gold, silver, one of two bronze or one of two honorable mentions.
Fort Riley won bronze in 2011.
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