Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
10/24/2014
AMELIA ISLAND, Fla.—The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management is taking steps to overcome its challenges and become a “healthier” organization, acting Assistant Energy Secretary for EM Mark Whitney said here this week at the Weapons Complex Monitor Decisionmakers’ Forum. EM “needs to be a healthier organization than it is right now,” Whitney said. “I’d like to see us build an organization where people trust one another, where peers trust peers, where employees trust supervisors, where managers trust the employees and where ultimately people admit their mistakes and ask for help to try and overcome them. We want to be an organization where people respectfully voice their perspectives on issues, and voice their disagreements when they have them.”
Additionally, EM should to become an organization where “informed decisions are made on a regular basis and where we can actually articulate the rationale for those decisions,” Whitney said. He added: “We need to be an organization where we hold each other accountable, where workers will help each other stay on top of issues, where first line supervisors will provide honest and helpful feedback to one another, where the leadership in our department and our contractors both in headquarters and in the field will challenge each other but also help each other make sure we are doing the things like consistently applying policies across the entire complex.”
However, Whitney also emphasized the progress EM has made since it was launched. “We have come a long way since the EM program was created about 25 years ago,” he said. “We started with 107 contaminated sites in 35 states and now we have 16 sites in 11 states. We reduced the footprint of the EM cleanup program by about 90 percent. We’ve done a lot of work, a lot of good work, and we should be proud of that.”
‘The Challenging Work is Ahead of Us’
EM is looking to build upon the current foundation to overcome some of the issues that have troubled the program. “The challenging work is ahead of us, so we have to really position ourselves. An organization gets to 25 years, and some stagnancy and complacency sets in,” Whitney told WC Monitor on the sidelines of the forum. “So we are trying to counter that and provide a foundation to get healthier.” The process is beginning with basic steps such as clarifying roles and responsibilities across the complex. “We’re making sure that the work we do, the processes we do at headquarters and at the field actually add value to try and reduce the burden on folks doing the work,” Whitney said.
Five-to-Ten Year Budget Planning
Longer-term budget planning is another step EM is considering to address these challenges. “We are looking at a methodology and approach to do better long-term budget planning, five-to-ten year budget planning. That’s going to have a much greater impact than people might perceive when you look at it as a planning activity,” Whitney said. “It’s making sure that we make decisions today that are the right decisions, at least informed decisions based on a reasonable expectation of what our budget is going to be five years from now.”
Another part of that will be a review of the “hotel cost” for DOE sites, the base costs to maintain sites and facilities for minimum safe essential services, which Whitney said can consume over half the EM budget. “We trying to get a better understanding of that across the complex and make sure we are all measuring the same thing and then taking lessons learned from across the complex on sites that have had success reducing some of those costs. We want to be able to apply that to other sites,” he said. “Quite frankly, our job is to clean up and close portions of site. We should be driving that down. It should be a normal part of our process so we can apply more work to clean up and capital projects.”
EM Launching Internal Project Management Review
The cleanup program is also starting up an internal review to look at project management and project execution, in addition to other efforts ongoing in the Department in that field. “We have had several meetings with headquarters leadership and the field leadership really focused on making EM a better organization, so we have a lot of things in process right now to do that,” Whitney said.
For example, EM is focusing on avoiding the “reactive” mode that has come about on major projects that have suffered issues because work was started before technical concerns were fully understood, Whitney said. “We’ve come to a realization that we need to have our technical capability to look at this from a process engineering perspective to make sure that early in the phase of the project we know what we are doing, we know the challenges and we know how to address them and then provide solutions,” he said. “So right now we are in the process of being reactive and we need to get out of that.”
‘We Have a Great Foundation, But We Have Work to Do’
Whitney emphasized that strengthening EM will take cooperation from all parties involved. “We need to be an EM organization that delivers results safely and efficiently, and that’s the organization that I want to build with you all,” he said. “We have a great foundation, but we have work to do. I expect all of us to work together, headquarters, field, contractors, feds, senior management and front line workers alike to really work together to focus on the steps that we need to take to build this type of organization.”
