8
List of All Recommendations
The recommendations in the report are repeated here, listed by chapter.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT POLICIES, PROCESSES, AND PROCEDURES
RECOMMENDATION 4-1: The committee recommends that the Department of Energy (DOE) confirm, clarify, and expand DOE Order 413.3B to establish its applicability to all capital asset projects (not just construction and major instruments and equipment and certain cleanup projects) and all Office of Environmental Management projects, whether major systems projects or work carried out by a management and operating (M&O) contractor. The committee also makes the following specific recommendations regarding the Order as well:
- Pending the outcome of the National Nuclear Security Administration pilot project, reduce the threshold value for applicability of Order 413.3B from $50 million to $20 million;
- Continue applying the requirements of Order 413.3B to M&O contract work on capital asset projects—the latter including construction projects, major items of equipment and cleanup projects;
- Clarify the definition related to project performance found at Section 3c(4), point 3 to calculate performance on aggregate value and not number of projects; and
- Shift eligibility for project overruns, currently 10 percent per project, to be applied instead based on the aggregate value.
RECOMMENDATION 4-2: The Department of Energy should clarify Order 413.3B to incorporate best practices with respect to dispute prevention and resolution, which will be of growing significance as the Office of Environmental Management implements the end-state contracting approach. Sources for such best practices include the Construction Industry Institute.
RECOMMENDATION 4-3: The Office of Environmental Management should apply the requirements for project execution plans equivalent to those in Order 413.3B to those projects that are not formally managed under Order 413.3B.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT METRICS
RECOMMENDATION 5-1: The committee recommends that as the Office of Environmental Management increases its project management (PM) and Office of Project Management responsibilities using indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts, it should share and compare best PM practices with others across the U.S. government. To implement this, EM should form a “Joint Task Force” or less formal cooperative structure with Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command (NAVFAC) and other base realignment and closure (BRAC) and formerly used defense sites (FUDS) program management organizations.
RECOMMENDATION 5-2: The Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management (EM) should implement a modification to its earned value management system that captures the project’s temporal status more clearly and explicitly. Specifically, EM should immediately require that a revised Schedule Performance Index, SPI(t), which is the ratio of scheduled time of work performed (STWP) and actual time of work performed (ATWP), be reported to accurately track schedule performance.
RECOMMENDATION 5-3: The Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management should explicitly include the percentage of cost overrun or underrun in the project success metrics dashboard, rather than the current “green/yellow/red” metric, to bring more transparency to cost performance.
CONTRACT STRUCTURES
RECOMMENDATION 6-1: The Office of Environmental Management (EM) should establish well-defined, outcomes-based intermediate end states in its 10-year cleanup contracts. Any intermediate outcomes should have clear, measurable metrics to assess site-based (versus task-based) achievement of the defined end states. EM should report progress on these metrics
across the portfolio of end-state programs on a quarterly basis and such reports should represent a key EM performance measure.
RECOMMENDATION 6-2: The Office of Environmental Management (EM) should structure task orders on a scale that is appropriate for defining intermediate outcomes and award fewer individual tasks. EM should apply to such task orders the same management oversight as currently required for major systems projects exceeding $750 million in total cost.
CONTRACT MANAGEMENT METRICS
RECOMMENDATION 7-1: To increase transparency in contractor performance evaluation, the committee recommends that the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management should ensure that the contracts it issues for cleanup work (1) create a consolidated set of unambiguous “subjective” criteria for similar types of cleanup activities, and (2) use these criteria in the evaluation of all contract performance across its portfolio.
