NEW EM ORGANIZATION ADDS THREE DAS SLOTS

By ExchangeMonitor

The leadership of the Department of Energy’s cleanup program is set to roll out a reorganization of DOE’s Office of Environmental Management later this week. Details of the reorganization, which has been in the works for the past few months, are set to be provided to EM employees during an all-hands’ meeting scheduled for Dec. 8—notably, the same day as EM’s holiday party. During a meeting of the EM Advisory Board in Washington, D.C., yesterday, however, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Capital and Corporate Services Sandra Waisley provided the most in-depth look to date at what EM’s new organizational structure will entail, including the creation of three new deputy assistant secretary positions to oversee tank waste cleanup; site restoration, including soil and groundwater remediation and D&D; and waste management. “Each one of those offices will be responsible for oversight of … Project Baseline Summaries. So each office looks at the budget structure, which is the PBSes, and they have oversight over those PBSes,” Waisley said. “These are not just technical offices. They’re also going to have oversight of budget, acquisition [and] project management. So they will be working very closely with the support offices.” She added, “We hope these three mission units are one-stop shopping for the sites. If they need help with a CD-4 package or a CD-3 package, they can go to the DAS for site restoration or tank waste like for a construction project.”

The reorganization will also entail the creation of new assistant deputy assistant secretary positions that will report to the new DASes. While the DASes will be located at DOE headquarters in Washington, the assistant DASes will be located at DOE’s Germantown, Md., office, according to Waisley. “We want our DASes to really elevate themselves in terms of leadership and setting an example,” she said. “We find too often that our DASes [and] our senior leadership, they act too much like subject matter experts. They get down to too deep a level in terms of the work and we need our DASes to really start being leaders and doing more in the human capital area, such as team building, customer service [and] communications.” As part of the rollout of the new organization, EM senior leadership plans to hold a meeting with field office managers on Dec. 8 to discuss “protocols and interactions and how we’re going to communicate,” Waisley said.

In addition, EM is set to eliminate its DAS for Program and Site Support position and site liaisons as part of the new structure, Waisley said. “That office was blown up and those people will be moved into one of the business lines,” she said. “We found that the site managers … didn’t like the site liaison concept. It never worked. No matter how hard we tried, it’s never worked.” Waisley added, “We hope that this concept will work. The site managers seem to like the idea of a matrix organization.” Another planned change is the recombination of project management and acquisition under one DAS, according to Waisley. The positions had been split into a DAS for Project Management and a DAS for Acquisition and Contract Management by previous DOE cleanup chief Ines Triay. “We just need those people to work together,” Waisley told WC Monitor on the sidelines of the meeting.

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