Improving a Recurring Process: Lessons From Military Service
By Matthew Andrews ·
My interest in improving how teams work began before OmniMint and before my civilian technical leadership roles. During my Army service, I coordinated efforts to improve recurring Continuity of Operations exercises conducted between two agency sites.
The work involved a recurring process whose success rate needed improvement. My Joint Service Commendation Medal citation records the results of that effort:
- A reduction in the defect rate of more than 53 percent.
- More than 128 hours saved per month.
- A reduction in budgetary costs of more than $64,000.
These results were included among the accomplishments recognized in the award, which covered service from July 2021 through June 2023.
What stands out to me is the combination of better outcomes and less time consumed. Reducing defects matters because a process has to produce a reliable result. Recovering time matters because the people doing that work have other responsibilities competing for their attention. A useful improvement should account for both.
This experience also connects to my later work automating quarterly reporting across twelve applications. They were different projects, with different measures and different contexts, but both reflect a recurring interest in my career: finding ways to make necessary work more dependable and less burdensome.
That interest continues to shape what I am building with OmniMint and studying through my software engineering research. My current research explores multi-agent systems that can diagnose mistakes, learn from them, and improve their workflows. It is ongoing work, and the military results described here are evidence of an earlier process-improvement effort—not validation of my current research or OmniMint’s performance.
I no longer remember every implementation detail of the military project. Rather than reconstruct those details from memory, I am sharing the outcomes preserved in the award citation. The record provides a concrete example of the kind of problem I have continued to pursue: improving a process so that teams can accomplish their work with fewer defects and less repeated effort.
Source note: Results are attributed to my Joint Service Commendation Medal citation. The citation identifies weekly exercises and monthly time savings, but does not specify the period associated with the budgetary cost reduction. The $64,000 figure is therefore not presented as annual savings.