In recent months, SuprTEK’s Solutions Engineering and Delivery (SE&D) business unit in O’Fallon, IL has acknowledged team members for their leadership, innovation, and teamwork.
Mike Taylor Receives SuprTEK Leadership Award
Mike Taylor, Program Manager of the SuprTEK ITS program, received the SuprTEK Leadership Award for lead
ing his team in the program’s move to the cloud. Due to past performance success and demonstrated technical capability, USTRANSCOM selected ITS to be a pilot program in its “Sprint to the Cloud” – forging a trail for other programs to follow. Mike also played a key role in SuprTEK winning the recompete for the ITS contract.
The Leadership Award is an annual company-wide SuprTEK recognition awarded to an individual who best demonstrates outstanding leadership, exhibiting the personal qualities that motivated and inspired teammates, helped clients and customers to succeed, and maintained a culture of continuous improvement.
ADEV Recognizes I&P Sprint Presenters
ADEV has implemented the Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise (SAFe®), which includes a week-long Innovation and Planning (I&P) Sprint between releases. This not only gives teams a period to prepare for the next build, but also provides an opportunity for team members to explore new tools and processes to improve effectiveness and efficiency. This includes team members creating custom tools to fit particular program needs.
ADEV’s SAFe® implementation includes a knowledge sharing forum at the end of the I&P Sprint. Here team members can share with the entire team new approaches, evaluation of off-the-shelf or open source tools, and custom tools they have developed themselves. ADEV recently recognized several team members for excellent contributions to the I&P Sprint presentations.
From left to right, ADEV developers recognized are: Matthew Mosby, Zach Lambert, Zach Killebrew, Adam Weatherford, Tynan Wyllie, & Justin Stone.
Nick DeTore Acknowledged for being Team Player
When Nick DeTore agreed to take on development tasks associated with the ICODES program, he received assurances from SE&D leadership that when 
the ADEV team shifted its primary development focus from DMR to CAMPS, he would be brought back to be part of ADEV development again. Nick wanted to be part of the team that would be building a large web application development project from the ground up. However, there was one issue. Tapestry, the prime contractor for ICODES, was so impressed with Nick’s work that they insisted Nick stay on the program. This created a dilemma for SE&D leadership: keep a promise to a valued developer, or disappoint an important technology partner? (Tapestry is also a key partner in the ADEV program.) When Nick recognized his managers’ difficult position he did what any good team player would do – he put the success of the team and the mission ahead of himself and chose to remain with ICODES. For his sacrifice for the good of the mission and the team, Nick received the Vice President’s Incentive Award from SE&D VP Ron Howard.
Wes Dumond Receives Tesla Award for Build Plan Tool
Another key element of the I&P Sprint is the Build Plan session, an event that brings all program stakeholders together to finalize 
a plan for the upcoming build. This includes deciding which features to incorporate, how to best divide the features into stories, and which stories to assign to a team during a particular sprint. The team discovered over the course of doing a number of build planning sessions that VersionOne provided a very poor format to present the resulting build plan at the end of the Build Plan session.
Wes Demond, Solutions Architect for ADEV, took the initiative to create the Build Plan Tool. Using the VersionOne API, the Build Plan Tool pulls data from VersionOne, then displays in a reader-friendly overview of the build plan that is easy to see and easy to understand. It presents a lot of complex information in a very simplified way. For this innovative tool, Wes was presented the first Tesla Award for 2019.
Congratulations to all the recipients, and thank you for your important contributions to the success of the war fighter!
Don Reed is a Senior Technical Writer and Project Support Specialist with the ADEV program. His background includes engineering and programing, project management, quality management and process improvement, and business-technical communication. Don has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a M.A. in Communication from Saint Louis University.