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what would you say to upper Lab management on how to turn the Lab around ?
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13 comments:
August 21, 2008 8:40 PM
"what would you say to upper Lab management on how to turn the Lab around ?"
1) Flatten the organizations. Give modest exit incentives to get rid of middle managers, or allow them to take a pay cut and go back to being researchers. This is the only way to reduce overhead. No scientific leadership is being offered by these people who mostly never had a notable scientific achievement in their careers, and who stopped thinking about anything more complicated than an org chart years ago.
2) With the Pu out the door shortly, reduce the security perimeter, converting about 50% of the lab into white space with science focus similar to LBNL or maybe more responsive to industry (CRADAs and the like). Current staff scientists who can't cut it in an environment where actual deliverables are required should be dismissed similarly to the middle managers.
3) ULM should meet with the real technical leadership- principal investigators and scientific experts and engage them in strategic planning. Stop the scientifically incompetent, power-grubbing middle managers from preventing you from getting to know the real creative engine of LLNL. It never ceases to amaze me that ULM don't know which scientists are well-regarded by the external scientific community and by sponsors, but instead coddle a few inbred, scientifically destitute shoe-shiners.
4) Get away from the model of trying to have huge projects only. Moderate-size ($0.5-5M/year) projects should be the mainstay.
5) Stop the special treatment of NIF. Starting tomorrow, NIF pays the same taxes as everyone else, they get RIFs, and their ranking falls in line with the rest of the lab.
6) We've had excessive, costly safety and security oversight for many years, with the threat of losing the UC management given as the reason. Well, we've lost UC, even though we never had any serious incidents at LLNL. So now let's cut back on the safety and security oversight personnel, since they do nothing anyway, instead putting all the responsibility back on the scientific staff.
(Very good points - best post that ever made it on to this blog - I'll add a few more - likely more minor.)
7) Figure out what all those expensive managers/lobbyists in global security actually do. Maybe get a ratio of the amount of money they've actually bought into the lab from WFO versus their salary.
8) Make the middle management that are left actually go to scientific seminars. It always amazes me how little the managers know about the science that they're supposed to a) manage, and b) sell to sponsors.
9) The lab has always used postdocs as a hiring tool. But they seem to use flex terms as a firing/failure tool! If a 200 is converted to flex they need to be given ER funding to support 100% of themselves for 2-3 years. This is equivalent to start-up funds for a professorship. (Since there is no real leadership, PIs work like expensive professors anyway!)
10) Get some real leadership! Quit with these grand visions with no backing. Come with a plan and go out and get it funded in a way that does the science that you proposed and pays the scientists that you have to do it.
11) As soon as you hire a foreign national - sponsor/process a green card from day one! This is the only way to ensure that this person will ever (in less than 10 years!) be able to obtain Q clearance and work on parts of the program that you need them for. They will need this to survive as a flex. Waiting until they are career converted and have already been at the lab for 8 years is too hard and too late. If you can't do that - don't hire foreign nationals at all!
12) Projects are often designed to have classified and unclassified parts due to the need for outside peer review and also partly to have foreign national talent work on the science. This is good. But why then do this with the same cost structure that the fully secure lab has?! Put outside the fence (i.e. like (2) above) or even just connect with university professors/companies and pay them to do it.
13) If you want to do biosecurity at the lab, the biggest biosecurity sponsor is NIH. They have a budget that is 10 times bigger than the DHS/DTRA/DARPA agencies that the lab goes after. But NIH cannot take our overheads. If we can't get NIH money, with lowered overheads on those contracts, the lab should be honest with itself and stop trying to do biosecurity at all because it's a big waste of resources and is just damaging the career of the scientists that you are pushing to failure.
August 22, 2008 9:39 AM
Close the gates, it's over. NIF will be the only remaining project at LLNL. The rest can be done at other facilities where DOE can get more bang for the buck. I thought the goal here was to assure we didn't have duplicate efforts at other like facilities. It's time DOE starts looking at these redundant projects and puts a halt to excessive spending.
ULM needs to look hard at LLNL's future business and research model.
And if they do this they can't model LLNL after NNSA sites like...
Pantex: LLNL does not store or handle nuclear weapons...
Y-12: LLNL's SNM in Superblock will all be gone in a couple of years, and LLNL have very little hazardous materials or safety/physical security issues compared to the other NNSA sites...
Savannah River: LLNL is one square miles, SRS is 100s of sq miles in size and has nuclear material production facilities...
LANL: LLNL does not produce weapon pits or have a nuclear reactor, LANL is also spread out over 40 sq miles...
SNL: LLNL is a basic science/physics lab, Sandia is an applied engineering lab that builds stuff very well. SNL is also on track to have over 50% of its work be non-NNSA funded work...
Kansas City Plant: LLNL does not manufacture things...
NTS: LLNL is no longer in the business of high hazard research or testing....
So it seems like LLNL is not a good match for the rest of the NNSA complex and ULM should look towards other DOE sites as models...
LBNL... ANL... PNL... BNL... ORNL...
First, management needs to understand how past WFO projects outside the weapons area have started -- a scientist or group of scientists had an idea and convinced their division leader to support it. They then developed it and found sponsors. A main motivator was that they would be rewarded by their division leader with higher pay, responsibility, and prestige in their division.
The current situation is completely counter to the the process that has worked in the past.
We now have middle managers whose primary responsibility is to bring new money in the door. This means that any efforts or initiative to do so by "lower-level" scientists/engineers are not rewarded. Indeed, the credit is usually stolen by the middle managers and they will take away control of any funding. The scientist's division no longer sees any of the money -- so they can care less. Scientists who rely on these middle managers for ranking get low grades (or else they would have to admit who actually brought in the money). The problem is now exasperated by the fact that the middle managers now often sit in different organizations than the scientist. As alluded before, this means that the division has less incentive for the scientist to bring in new money.
The increasing trend towards pure "matrixization" at the Lab that has occurred over the years is leading to less and less financial control in the hands of line-level divisions. They no longer have the flexibility to deal with their local needs (employee development, bringing new funding) because they rely or compete with organizations that they support for "overhead" funds. These latter organizations, by the way, have their own people as their highest priority.
An unintended, but serious consequence, is that scientists who bring in projects in subject areas, whose funding stays inside his organization, will get rewarded more highly than those who bring-in money in subject areas where funding control is under the support organization.
It only makes sense that WFO opportunities require subject matter expertise at the division level where management directly works with scientists. This has worked before. Now the Lab has created a broken system that disincentivizes workers and prevents divisions from bringing-in new work.
A personal experience -- the division, in which I belong, used to be a world leader in its scientific area until it was arbitrarily declared to be a matrix organization and it's own programs were given to another organization. Now the division is literally disappearing and leadership is lost. Employees in this division are scrouging around for work here and their. A colleague brought in several millions of dollars in a new subject area but his efforts were ignored and complete project management was taken away. His annual ranking was mediocre. Another colleague has a new idea and works to find several gov't sponsors. When word gets around, he is promptly contacted by a middle manager in another organization who is eager to "manage" his project.
If the above fundamental problems are not fixed, obviously, the Lab won't last very long.
Mass firing of everyone above group leader.
Then turn the Lab into an employee-owned and managed business.
The lab could position its self well to rebuild biosecurity in the non-classified area by bridging collaborations with academic institutes for this work. That may also be a better use of LDRD to pay postdocs at these other institutes. Peer reviewed publications and grants is the only way forward. We would could then mostly focus on classified biosecurity.
Also fix the LDRD review process, which does not peer review projects with real experts from outside and within the fence.
Congress needs to name LLNL as the primary national lab of the US Department of Homeland Security. The S&T efforts inside DHS are a mess at the moment because no one is in charge and the research work is spread all over the place. Every government agency (DOE, NIH, DOD, NASA, etc) while sponsoring work at universities and national research centers, has its own dedicated national lab - with the exception of DHS. Remember the original White House bill setting up DHS had LLNL being transfered to DHS and responsible for coordinating DHS's R&D work. It then got political in Congress with other labs wanting a big slice of what they thought would be a big homeland security R&D budget. Senator Pete D from New Mexico forced the change in the final bill that then put all DOE/NNSA labs on equal standing for DHS lab status. This is not working. DHS needs a national lab to call its own.
With RRW dead and SNM leaving - in less than 5 years, I predict that LLNL's workforce dealing with nuclear weapons design research will be only 1/4 of what it is today. If LLNL were to become a DHS national lab, it could easily continue to do this NNSA work as a sub mission to a much larger DHS R&D mission.
If the California congressional delegation (House and Senate) got behind the plan to move LLNL (and SNL-CA) to DHS, it would happen.
"If the California congressional delegation (House and Senate) got behind the plan to move LLNL (and SNL-CA) to DHS ..."
Unfortunately, our delegation doesn't go to bat for the Lab. We are a small part of their constituency -- they would rather use their time, effort, and "allocation" of funds and pork to spreading it around. After all they aren't stupid. Why waste your efforts for a small group of Lab employees when the majority of your core constituency hates what the Lab stands for ?
The New Mexico delegation is another story. I'm sure they will fight tooth-and-nail to make LANL into THE DHS Lab.
Senator Pete D retires in January. We'll see what happens then.
How about ULM simply tell us the truth - no matter how bad it hurts?
"How about ULM simply tell us the truth - no matter how bad it hurts?" - 2:42 PM
The truth?
The truth?
You can't handle the truth!
(Col. Nathan R. Jessep - "A Few Good Men")
Work harder, clap-less
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