SAN FRANCISCO, California – South Pacific Division’s Programs & Integration Analytics manager, Tom Bueno, received the STEM Hero award from the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Corporation during the 2024 National Defense Awards ceremony in Fort Worth, TX, Nov. 7. The award recognizes the achievements of America’s top engineers and scientists from the Hispanic community who are STEM leaders, innovators, and champions.
Bueno currently leads the SPD PDAD team which provides business intelligence performance management information to the region for informed decision making to safety deliver quality projects on time and within budget. He is the leader of the SPD’s regional program and project management community of practice, providing training of project managers and project analysts for the project delivery business process, risk management training, and forecasting workload.
Bueno is not only an instructor for the “Project Management in USACE” course, but also co-developed the SPD regional workload workforce dashboard, which supports the Regional Forecasting Project workload and workforce business process for the division.
While Bueno is humble about the accolade, his SPD team members feel he is more than deserving of the award.
“Mr. Bueno has been a driving force in our organization’s drive to leverage data to effectively improve our regional business processes, balancing future workload against our required staffing levels and through teaching, coaching, and mentoring technical staff,” says Col. James Handura, SPD commander.
“He is a supremely dedicated mentor, generating, presenting, and clearly articulating training to over 325 members of our programs and project management community of practice,” adds Handura.
Brian Kamisato, SPD regional business director says Bueno’s knowledge is essential in allowing SPD to prepare today to face the challenges of tomorrow.
“Beyond technical focus and ability, he has a masterful ability to communicate and train both our workforce and our executives,” says Kamisato. “Tom is a tremendous advocate for our project management community of practice, teaching in our USACE-wide courses, and building trainings on risk management and workload forecasting.”
Even with 45 years in project management – with fifteen of those with USACE -- Bueno feels the award is more reflective of his teams’ aptitudes and talent, than his own accomplishments.
“You know, I’m more a generalist who guides the PDAD team. I'm working with some of the best and brightest in USACE so I’m proud to be part of a team of whose combined gifts are helping our districts win by providing quality information in the data systems.”
Bueno says his team is leading the Corps of Engineers in their creation of data visualization dashboard creation.
“We are innovating by creating dashboards and performance analytics that help our districts make informed decisions on project execution, said Bueno. “These innovative tools help our districts safely deliver quality projects on time and within budget. We're integrating all of that knowledge and ideas to help move us forward on a path of innovation and - not just for our region, but for the Enterprise (Corps of Engineers) at large.”
“With everything in life – it takes a team. You can effectively operate alone if you must- but you're never going to get where you could have gone without a great team. You just can’t.”