Mike Nartker
WC Monitor
10/10/2014

A new approach to how the Department of Energy manages its projects is set to be rolled out in the coming weeks, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz said this week, though he provided few concrete details about what changes may be in the works.  DOE has been looking at “redoing our fundamental project management structures," Moniz said at a hearing held by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, describing the “philosophy” behind the planned changes as, “Here are the core principles that must be observed, whether it’s the Office of Science or Defense Programs, or EM [the Office of Environmental Management]. There will be some variations specifically in how that is implemented, but the core principles must be respected. And we will strengthen the way in which essentially the Office of the Secretary engages with that.”

Moniz suggested that the new approach would be influenced by the practices of the DOE Office of Science, which has generally been seen as more successful in managing major projects than EM or the National Nuclear Security Administration. DOE does not want to “not fix what’s not broken, but to use the essential principles being employed there in the other two lines,” Moniz said. “It’s not to say that execution is identical because it can’t be—an EM project and the UPF [NNSA’s Uranium Processing Facility] and a coherent X-ray laser project are different,” he said. “We’re trying to get a lot more enterprise-wide experience, learn from best practices, understand what are the core principles that make that approach effective, have those principles become enterprise-wide and then have the implementation at each of the under secretary levels follow their needs and the kind of work that they do.”

Could New DOE Organization Be In The Works?

DOE has been working for years to improve its project management capabilities, with both EM and the NNSA having come under heavy scrutiny for cost-and-schedule increases seen on major projects.  EM has previously looked to the Office of Science for aid in improving its project management abilities, such as by utilizing Construction Project Reviews of major projects and by bringing on Office of Science personnel to serve as project directors. In early 2013, the Government Accountability Office partially removed EM and NNSA from its biannual “high-risk” list, narrowing its remaining concerns to EM’s and NNSA’s major construction projects and high-value management and operating contracts.

It remains to be seen if DOE’s new approach will entail the creation of a new organization that would be responsible for major line-item construction projects—an idea a senior Department official confirmed early this year was under consideration.  “There are a lot of ideas that are floating around. I think one of the things we try to do on project management is sort of do a blue sky look at ideas of things that might work,” Deputy Under Secretary for Management and Performance David Klaus said in February. “I don’t think I would give greater credibility to that idea or less credibility to that idea other than to say somewhere in that process people have suggested the idea, but it’s not like anything even is closely to the point of rolling in that direction.”