On January 26, Minnesota IT Services (MNIT) awarded employees, partners, and teams for their work delivering outstanding IT service to Minnesota and its executive government. Nominated by their peers, recipients receive the highest recognition for their service excellence, and exemplary performance in fulfilling MNIT’s mission, vision, values, and priorities. Here are this year’s winners!

Project of the Year

This award recognizes a successful project that contributed the success of an agency partner in the executive branch. The Enterprise Scheduling and Time Keeping (EST) Project Team from MNIT partnering with the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs (MDVA) successfully implemented a scheduling and timekeeping system for 1,300 employees in a 24/7 environment. This project helped MNIT identify best practices for implementing large scale technology projects going forward and the implementation received raved reviews from MDVA staff. According to Simone Hogan, the Senior Director for Veterans Health Care at MDVA, "It's hard to believe how successful all has been now. Very few issues came up with the software and staff use when we anticipated there to be so many problems and resistance. With the software system fully in place across all five homes, we are now able to compare data that is put into the system. This ensures that our day to day operations are done in a standardized manner, consistent with union contract language and regulatory requirements, and most importantly ensuring that we meet the care needs of the Veterans served in all homes.”

Employee of the Year

This award recognizes the individual contributions of an employee who embodies MNIT's mission, visions, and values through their daily work. This year's honoree is Melissa Warhol. Warhol is MNIT's Safety Officer. She uses her knowledge and experience around workplace safety to lead, develop, train, support, research and/or participate in countless discussions and initiatives to keep MNIT employees healthy and safe. This past year, she developed online ergonomic training and a digital ergonomic self-assessment tool to ensure that employees are deploying safe and healthy work practices. With many MNIT staff working from home as a result of the pandemic, Warhol launched a new "Working from Home Series" that featured MNIT staff discussing their remote work environments. In addition, she also conducted six safety outreach sessions at six different agency-based locations prior to the pandemic that included instructions on managing an emergency, hands-only CPR, AED practice and fire extinguisher simulator instruction. Her passion and persistence is a reason why MNIT is a much safer workplace and better prepared to take on health and safety challenges moving forward.

Manager of the Year

The manager of the year award recognizes a manager who contributes to the mission of MNIT and lift other team members up as an example of leadership. Emily Shimkus is MNIT's Communications Director and this year's honoree. She promotes MNIT's organizational direction daily by helping develop and communicate MNIT's new strategic and tactical plans, building a collaborative approach into her work, and ensuring a focus on connected culture, customer focus, and innovation in communications across the agency. Some of Shimkus' accomplishments include leading an inter-agency communications team that created the public facing website, mn.gov/covid19, which receives up to 5 million visits a day. In addition, her team received three Northern Lights awards from the Minnesota Association of Government Communicators and a GovTech profile for cybersecurity messaging. Shimkus also facilitated the rapid launch of a second COVID-related website, Stay Safe MN, that provides targeted, post-lockdown guidance for reopening the state. She leveraged vendor resources to meet tight deadlines, and modeled the way that we can turn a problem into an opportunity, to build a user-friendly and engaging design for Minnesotans.

Team of the Year

This award recognizes an operational team across the agency that provides excellent customer service for both our executive branch partners and Minnesotans using the technology. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Unemployment Insurance (UI) Development and Technical Team worked quickly to modify the Unemployment Insurance system to meet the rapidly changing requirements for unemployment insurance benefits. The team modified their schedules and added additional infrastructure to support constant system monitoring in response to the extended system demands and hours. These rapid changes provided stability and consistent system up time. At its peak, the system handled 27,000+ concurrent users. As of Oct. 2020, the UI system distributed $4,749,215,400 in additional $600 and $300 dollar payments to 737,284 applicants. In 2019, the average amount paid per week was $13.8 million. This year, it is $208.4 million, an increase of 1500 percent.

Partner of the Year

The Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) was awarded Partner of the Year for exemplifying one goal area in MNIT's Strategic Plan: cultivate a Connected Culture. DHS leverages a people-centered approach, challenges long-held norms about the way we interact with Minnesotans to modernize state systems, and transforms the way that business and IT work together in order to improve state services and outcomes for the people of Minnesota. They have embraced recommendations and concepts that emerged from the Blue Ribbon Council on Information Technology. Their inclusion of MNIT staff and leaders in their agency culture helps us all strive to achieve breakthrough goals and possibilities in serving Minnesotans.

Nominations for the awards opened September 16, 2020 and closed on October 16, 2020. A team of Employee Recognition Committee (ERC) members reviewed and scored each nomination according to a previously-defined rubric. Those with the top average scores became finalists. From the group of finalists, the Executive Team chose a winner that closely matched the organizations mission, values, and priorities.

Learn more about how MNIT works with its business partners by watching this video or /mnit/assets/Connected%20Culture%20COVID%2019%20Edition%20Transcript_tcm38-466610.pdfreading the video's transcript (PDF).