JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-LACKLAND, Texas – Meet Dustin Dickens, the AFIMSC/A9 Principal Improvement Manager who turns complex challenges into clearer, smarter ways of working. His ability to connect teams, spot gaps, and drive meaningful change makes him this week’s Mission Spotlight.
Q: Describe what your job is here at AFIMSC?
A: As the improvement program manager, I meet with multiple teams and stakeholders to help them identify problems and gaps in their processes with the intent of improving the entire organization. I lead a team of teams; we coordinate meetings with stakeholders, map out processes and identify waste. We create action lists from all the data we gather and deliver a plan for improvement.
Q: Do you give these teams or groups the tools and/or knowledge to evaluate their progress or do you and your team monitor progress?
A: We pair the stakeholders up with someone who is specifically trained for process improvement to help monitor and gage their level of success and make tweaks to improvement. We would like to help people understand how they can utilize tools to measure their own success, because honestly, they are the best people to do that because they have best access to their own systems and workflow. Overall, it’s about training people and building teams to improve the organization and the improvement culture.
Q: What brought you into civil service? How did you get to AFIMSC?
A: I started my civil service journey with the Air Force, moving to major program oversight at the Defense Contract Management Agency, then Army’s Installation Management Command; from there I went to General Services Administration before landing at AFIMSC. I have a lot of acquisition execution and program management experience, and I wanted to apply those skills to the place I started.
It's honestly a blessing to work here. I'm allowed to utilize multiple skillsets from different parts of my professional career and apply them to one goal, moving capabilities forward. In a lot of cases, you don’t get to utilize all of your skill sets in an organization. Here we're doing full scale program management from cradle to grave. Capability development, integration, scaling, and close out, all the way to process and quality improvement for mission support. I'm glad to be here. Proud to be a part of this team.
Q: What do you look forward to doing or being a part of when you come to work?
A: From a process improvement standpoint, it's giving people time back in their day by enhancing their capabilities and their teams’ capabilities. From a project management perspective, it is seeing innovation materialize through small, medium, or large-scale projects – ultimately helping the entire enterprise support the warfighter.
Q: What is your life like outside of the amazing work you do for AFIMSC?
A: Outside of work, my focus is my family. I have two sons in high school and I’m helping one navigate the demands of high school with a balanced approach and the other; we’re knee deep in the college application process. In our limited spare time, my family also manages some short-term rentals and believe it or not I’ve used my process management skills to make that a nearly hands-off hobby.