Commander's Blog

Happy New Year to everyone! Hopefully, all of you had a wonderful holiday season, spent with friends and family – and now you're ready to tackle 2019 with lots of energy! If you're like me, you probably made some New Year's resolutions, although I know some of these are sometimes very difficult to keep (like staying clear of the dessert tray!). But the truly important resolutions are usually much easier to accomplish. Some of my personal priorities include taking care of my family and my health, and making sure that USAMMDA remains a great place to work. I'd say that family, health and career are probably at the top of the list for many folks when it comes to resolutions each year, and hopefully we're all able to make sure these don't get missed.

Speaking of priorities, from the strategic planning offsite meeting that we held this past October, we continue to solidify our organizational goals as we move forward. The top themes from our meeting involve helping our people and improving our processes. On the staff side, we're certainly looking to enhance our career-ladder development programs and implement a proactive system for award nominations, while we also continue to focus on our "Culture of Safety." With regard to our processes, we've improved our on-boarding system for welcoming new personnel to our team, and we're working on critical upgrades to our tasker process to ensure that it's much more efficient going forward. We're also looking to better define the role of Quality within our organization, to make sure we continue to provide the best products and service to our customers. In addition to all of this, we're focused on improvements to increase our level of acquisition excellence, and the way we communicate our USAMMDA message to the public. I'm very confident that all of these efforts will help to strengthen our organization, which certainly will help to maintain USAMMDA's reputation as being a great place to work in support of our nation's Warfighters!

"Creating Success and Healing Lives" is the theme for what we hope to achieve at USAMMDA going forward. As we all know, our organization works to help protect, treat and heal not only our wounded Warfighters, but everyone who serves this great country of ours. Along with this, we hope to ensure that our USAMMDA family members are poised for success, in their personal and professional endeavors. I sincerely believe that USAMMDA truly is a great place to work, and I'm sure that many of you feel as I do, when I say that we're very fortunate to play a part in the great mission we've been given. I couldn't think of a better, or more important, role than this.

Finally, with the end of the year comes a plethora of college football bowl games. I've counted about 40 on the schedule so far, and many of these have been great contests. For me, I'll be glued to the TV tomorrow night when #5 Georgia takes on Texas in the Sugar Bowl. Unfortunately, my Bulldogs just missed the playoffs for the National Championship, but hopefully they'll come away with a bowl victory tomorrow. And of course, all of this leads up to the Championship next Monday between #2 Clemson and #1 Alabama, so I'm really looking forward to a great week of college football. I hope many of you can relax and enjoy some of these games as well!

Thanks for all you do all year long, and I wish everyone health, happiness and prosperity in 2019!

COL Ryan Bailey