‘An amazing experience’
Yuma proving Ground Chief of Staff retires
U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground (YPG) Chief of Staff Minerva Peters retired March 28 after 24 years of employment on the post.
A Department of the Army employee since 1985, she held several positions at YPG prior to assuming her final post in 2015.
Born in Texas, Peters’ road to success was difficult. When she was 10 years old, her father was severely disabled in a car accident, placing a significant hardship on the family. Peters credited her mother with keeping the family afloat.
“My mother, a 5’2” woman from Mexico who had married a U.S. citizen and knew very little English, continued to find a way to feed us, get us to school, and make it clear to us that our one and only priority was to succeed in school. It was a very private demonstration of courage that she continued the rest of her life.”
Peters excelled in school, particularly in math, but encountered gender-based prejudice even from people whose supposed purpose was to facilitate her success.
“My high school guidance counselor straight-out told me, ‘people who are good at math usually are engineers, but you can’t be because you are a woman.’ That’s literally what she told me, and this was a female counselor. Why I couldn’t be an engineer, I don’t know, but I was a very obedient Hispanic girl: somebody in authority told me I couldn’t do something, therefore it must not be allowed.”
In college she earned a degree in mathematics, which made her eligible to be an operations research analyst. She started working at the Army’s Operational Test and Evaluation Command in 1985.
In the subsequent years, Peters traveled to YPG to support testing of the Apache attack helicopter. Liking the desert, she randomly applied for a position here and was surprised the lark ended in a job offer. As fate would have it, her husband Bill was retiring from active duty, making it an opportune moment for the family to move elsewhere. She started working at YPG in 2000 in support of the Crusader self-propelled howitzer program. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States and the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, she moved to high-priority heat and ventilation testing of multiple variants of the Stryker Combat Vehicle.
“Most of the people were working 70 hours a week for multiple months. I remember there were times when people were absolutely exhausted, but everybody was doing their best to make sure the program was being tested properly because we knew where they were taking them.”
Following this, in 2006 she was made head of a newly-established process improvement office with six people working under her.
“When you work at a place like YPG, supervisors or directors will select you for a project or an effort based on what you do. The best thing you can do is go with it, because you don’t know where it will ultimately bring you.”
The Army’s Lean Six Sigma program focused on eliminating waste and inefficiency and had the additional dividend of creating a safer workplace as a precursor to productivity gains. As implemented by Peters’ office the program positively impacted a variety of facets of YPG’S workload, from minor projects that simplified the in-processing experience for new employees to major ones responsible for millions of dollars in cost avoidance that were ultimately adopted across the entire Army Test and Evaluation Command. When Peters’ predecessor as chief of staff retired in 2015, she applied for the job and was promoted.
“I don’t know that I knew what I was getting into it, but being the chief of staff was an amazing experience.”
Peters says the decision to retire was made less difficult by the abundance of talent within the YPG workforce.
“It gets to the point where you realize somebody else needs to have a chance. There are good people here at YPG who can have the chance to be chief of staff who could do an excellent job. I feel like I can leave with good people who can apply and succeed.”
Peters is confident that YPG’S combination of infrastructure, institutional knowledge, and can-do attitude will keep it viable into the distant future.
“My main advice is to accept challenges. If a challenge is given to you, take it and do the best you can with it, because more than likely you will succeed. If you are being asked to do it, it is because people already have confidence in you.”