Staff Reports
NS&D Monitor
1/16/2015
The year-end performance evaluations for NNSA contractors did not include any information on the first six-month period of Consolidated Nuclear Security, but top officials at CNS have indicated they think they’re doing a pretty good job. CNS’ first evaluation will be released as part of Fiscal Year 2015 evaluations. “I think first of all, the most important thing is we are delivering on the mission … doing it safely and securely with the quality that we need for the mission we have,” CNS President Jim Haynes said.
Haynes said the contractor made the quickest and most comprehensive transition ever done in the complex. “We took the baton and then all of a sudden you have to deliver flawlessly this critical mission and yet at the same time you’re combining the sites, you’re bringing 8,000 employees on, you’re modifying benefits, you’re changing the IT system, you’re changing the HR system. It’s just a huge amount of change,” he said. “It’s what we signed up for, but it’s a lot to do and still keep the mission going safely and securely. That’s what we’ve really been focused on hard, 24/7, and so far I would say we’re doing well.”
Haynes conceded that there have been operational incidents, like the chemical spill in December that has kept the Purification Facility closed ever since, but he said the plants are on the right track to improvement. “Any time you operate plants like this, that are 70 years old, you’re going to have incidents,” he said. “What we want to do is make sure that we’ve got processes that work and people that are working through the processes and that we’ve got everyone in the game, really focused. And, given the amount of change, it’s hard to keep people really focused. But I think, in general, we’ve done really well.”
Wide Variety of Responses from Employees
Bill Tindal, the contractor’s site manager at Y-12, said he thought the transition had gone “incredibly well” considering everything—including the change from management of one site to a multi-site enterprise. There was plenty of potential for confusion, he said. The contractor has matured in the first six months, according to Tindal, who said he and his counterpart at Pantex—Michelle Reichert—talk at least once a week about what’s going on. “What I really didn’t count on that has been a real positive is just the speed of something happening at one site and we can go turn that around with, ‘Hey, have you thought about this?’ at another site that very day.”
Tindal said there has been a “wide variety” of responses from employees, but nothing that he hasn’t seen before. Tindal said he thinks employees are starting to see some of the positives of the multi-site enterprise. “There are people who find change a challenge; people who embrace it and move on. What we’ve got to keep in mind, of course, is what hasn’t changed,” he said. “Our mission hasn’t changed. The deliverables that are terribly important to the nation haven’t changed. How we execute hasn’t changed. … Maybe some of the strategic directions, in my mind, have improved.”
