Using the latest information-sharing technology, the 93d Signal Brigade, headquartered at Ft. Eustis, Virginia, recently released a new application to track mandatory training requirements for their personnel. U.S. Army personnel, both Soldiers and Civilians, must complete many mandatory training courses each year, to safeguard data, ensure discrimination-free personnel practices, and prevent workplace accidents, among other purposes. Army units everywhere have long been challenged to track completion of these requirements. Finding a solution that works for everyone has been elusive, until now.
Paul Calihan, 93d Signal Brigade Training Manager, wanted to reduce time-consuming manual processes for tracking training, and enable personnel to view and track their own requirements more easily. He also wanted staff and leadership to have better metric and reporting capabilities. The Brigade’s process was time-consuming and confusing, with personnel not knowing when training was due, and submitting training certificates in different formats that couldn’t be uploaded to the official training system (DTMS). The only way to track training was on a single spreadsheet, requiring supervisors to check with the Training Manager to track their employees’ completion.
Mr. Calihan sought out IT experts within the Brigade who could work with him to develop a solution. The 93d’s Business Management Office (BMO) Team—Earle Lindfors, Director; Dawn Agee, Knowledge Manager; Gareth Campbell, Lead Software Developer; Parker Copeland, Database Developer; and Gary Tang, Power BI Developer—worked together to create a new application using Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft SharePoint Online (SPO), hosted in the Army 365 IL5 cloud environment.
The new application introduces a standard method for submitting and tracking all mandatory training for the Brigade Headquarters/HHC and Regions that have chosen to implement it. It allows personnel—Civilians for now, but the goal is to use it for Soldiers as well—to track their own training and allows supervisors to check for completion at any time—meeting both of Mr. Calihan’s original goals.
The new application goes beyond those goals to incorporate technical controls that limit training certificates to .pdf documents, and includes workflow notifications to dramatically reduce rework, point-to-point communication, and processing delays. It provides personnel with a real-time look at their completed, due, and overdue training. The application also sends out an automated e-mail 30 days out as a reminder to complete the training. Moreover, it has integrated links to all the training locations, and directions on how to access and complete the training.
On the administrative side of the application, the Training Manager can add and remove training requirements, onboard new personnel, designate training managers and supervisors, and manage other training details. Training managers can see their unit’s completed training at any time. The application is mostly automated, minimizing the potential for human error.
In the past, the Brigade was manually tracking all submissions and now with the use of technology, they no longer track individual completions. Mr. Calihan and leadership can now pull live completion rates using Power BI or the audit tab in the application. They can see who has completed what training, the status of the overall Brigade, and what section or staff member may be lacking in training—allowing them to target weak areas or acknowledge high performers.
Several Network Enterprise Centers have chosen to implement the new application, and the 93d BMO team has demonstrated it to TRADOC, 7th Signal Command, and the 106th Signal Brigade. They will soon provide it to NETCOM for the higher headquarters to consider implementing it more widely.
The 93d Signal Brigade continues to lead the way in developing ways to streamline manual tasks and yield sustainable and scalable solutions at all echelons, using new technology solutions. The Training Tool Tracker Application demonstrates the power of teamwork and innovation in developing code for process improvement.
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