Will the labs really improve when LANS and LLNS are out?
1. Will funding priorities, operational efficiency, safety culture, Contractor accountability, and employee morale, materially improve and remain improved, when LANS and LLNS are replaced with new for profit LLCs?
2. Is waiting and hoping for a change in management at LANL and LLNL for "better times" like saying, "my next marriage will be better, so in the meantime....". Is this a constructive and healthy approach?
7 comments:
From the "employee morale" topic but applicable here:
"...Perhaps crazier to believe LANS will be replaced with an improved LLC by Devine intervention. You can wait for the polished HR Power Point presentation introducing the next for profit LLC to the worker bees at LANL, or systematically capture the strengths and weaknesses of LANS and make constructive suggestions and reasonable expectations to DOE and NNSA before hand. Way way way before..."
"...Same goes for LLNS down the road. Otherwise both labs will give birth to LANSLLNS 2.0 and employees will play the low morale record again in a few years time..."
Employees are hanging on at LANL but it appears the place is done for.
Can't blame the remaining employees for wanting to keep the glorious past alive but that is not going to happen. The decline has been relentless and ongoing for many years. Exchanging one LLC for another LLC isn't going to improve things.
Two different questions. LLNL WORKS FINE. It always has.
Congress learned last time that changing the LLNL contact 48 to contact 44 was a mistake.
LLNL will be left alone. Its performance to metrics are more that acceptable, its contact durations will be extended.
The two companies are separate.
"...LLNL will be left alone. Its performance to metrics are more that acceptable, its contact durations will be extended..."
A 68% (D+) at LANS and a 78% (C+) at LLNS? Grading on a curve you are technically correct. LLNS is top notch. Not.
"...The firm that manages the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico “received only 68 percent of its possible at-risk award fee of $46.5 million for the last budget year, primarily because of cost overruns that ballooned a security project from $213 million to $254 million,” according to a press release from the organization..."
"...Lawrence Livermore National Security earned 78 percent of its “available at-risk incentive fee, still short of the gateway of 80 percent,” the group said. “However, acting NNSA Administrator Neile Miller overrode that too, giving the lab contractor an extra $541,527 to help it meet the 80 percent mark and extending the management contract another year.”..."
http://www.nti.org/gsn/article/nnsa-defends-contract-extensions-congressional-scrutiny-expected/
Wow, 7:51 AM that is old news. Who knows what Neile Miller was doing when she overrode the local NNSA office decision on the LANL contract extension. Who cares? That was years ago. LLNL scored higher than LANL in the most recent annual reports, and it was not even close.
Yeah, February 26, 2015 at 7:51 AM's "news" predates the WIPP problems and subsequent loss of 90% of award fee by LANS.
LANS and LLNS have different missions, deliverables, and different NNSA Field Office "graders". Also, it is not clear that each NNSA Field Office has comparable influence on the end product annual performance report. One must normalize these grades for these factors to extract a real comparison. Yes, LANS did blow the bottom out with WIPP. No question there.
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