Contributed by the Pooper Scooper:
I recently posted about the changeover from discipline based job classification to the MTS classification at LLNL.
See
http://dogchurch.blogspot.com/2010/02/mts.html
Feel free to link to it from your LLNL the True Story blog.
3 comments:
It would have been nice if they could have beefed up the "D" without sacrificing the "R". I would argue that the two parts of R&D take different kinds of people and organizations. The Lab did some great research but could not develop products.
2:39 PM,
I would agree with you. Historically LLNL has not been effective at product development - this is really the mission of Sandia Labs and why it was originally established. When SNL was broken off from LANL, this was specifically done to bring in engineering management to run the lab. I've always thought of LLNL as a Research and "Science" lab. Project management skills needed for development were never the strong points of LLNL - although UCOP lead some major project management improvement initiatives at all 3 UC national labs after the NIF headaches associated with the management of the project (and others at all 3 labs).
The whole idea/justification behind LLNS and LANS was to allow Bechtel to bring in real "engineering" project management skills to the overall operations side of the 2 labs. I would argue that this has not been as successful - or really needed - as NNSA thinks. Done more for show, and getting a higher management fee.
The idea that people are interchangible is a myth from management who really don't understand what they are doing.
And it can result in great harm to progress, to the organization, and especially to people.
LLNL has for years be squishy about getting people with proper qualifications, politics was always more important.
Unfortunately Hazards Control was one of the worst offenders.
Do "Leaders" still want to promote techs because of their sex, without regard for whether they can do the work?
They are writing standards that permit only one or two of a flock of people to be qualified, even though all do the same stuff.
Some of those upper "Leaders" were taken out to the side by the Bectel folks when they first started- what has happened to them since?
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