UC Wins Contract to Run Los Alamos

crlove writes "LA Times reports, 'The University of California today won its hard-fought bid to continue operating the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, beating back a challenge from a Lockheed Corp.-University of Texas team to run the nuclear weapons research facility... For months, the New Mexico laboratory had been shaken by allegations and revelations of theft, fraud, security lapses and lax oversight.'"

Comments

The Real Story?

[Quirk]

If you're interested, Doug Roberts, a computer scientist who retired from Los Alamos run a blog, titled, LANL: The Real Story", further, the same site has a page given over to Running list of wasteful activities at LANL.

Part of the deal that had my parents paying for my education was an undergraduate, course load heavy in Economics, Commmerce and Business Law. Having the tools to gain some perspective in how large organizations run, it's instructive to look into the internals of a giant, once prestigious organization like Los Alamos and try to trace the systemic flaws that led to it's current plight.

Re:The Real Story?

[sane?]

The problems detailed are the same problems that are repeated time and again in all government organisations, all over the world. In total the waste is probably in the trillions. At heart the problem is trust and paperwork. Because everyone is so scared to actually trust people, they create masses of paperwork, hierarchy and approvals to make them feel like they are 'managing risk'. Result is "the answer is no, now what's the question?"

Upshot is either things don't happen, or people go 'around the system' to make things happen. Sometimes that comes back and bites the organisation on the arse.

Fixing it isn't done by changing the captain of the Titanic, its done by clearing out all the existing processes, all the paperwork, most of the arts graduates claiming to be managers and only adding them back where they can demonstrate real value - and then only in the simplest possible fashion. 'Managing risk' as value is a red flag that suggested solution is a bad one.

A good half way house is to insist those that ask for a form to be filled in provide the real money out of their budgets for the time taken to do that work, rather than hiding the pain and cost. At least that way people think before implementing new processes.

The thing I find interesting is exactly the same issues crop up again and again, but the trendy management textbooks never see fit to address these real issues with real solutions - instead focusing on 'enhancing your synagy'. Maybe its because MBAs are at the root the reason these management failures crop up in the first place.

Re:The Real Story?

[mengel]

The other big problem is perennial budget uncertainty -- National Labs never know from one year to the next what their budget might be, as it literally takes an Act of Congress to renew the funding each and every year, and especially the last few years, it's rarely been anywhere near on time. Add to that the fact that sometimes the DOE takes budget back partway through the year...

It means that things you should buy, but that aren't absolutely critical, often get delayed until the Mad September Purchasing Rush, when folks actually know what's left in their budget. This can mean that new database server to let you build the tracking system for something you really ought to have been tracking already is delayed 6 months to a year... Or you don't get training you should, or hire staff you should, not because there isn't budget for it, but because you don't know if there is budget for it.

Just repeat that sort of cycle for 10 years or so, and things can get kind of out of hand.

Not strictly a UC win

[Angstroman]

While the University of California will be deeply involved in the new management of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, it is not strictly correct to call this a win for UC. As the DOE press release makes clear, the winner of the competition was a limited liability corporation comprised of UC, Bechtel, BWX Technologies and others. The difference is very significant in some areas. For example, LANL personnel will no longer be members of the UC staff and participants in their retirement system, but employees of the LLC. The DOE did not release details of the winning proposal yet. As they do, I believe it will become increasingly clear that there is much more to this change than just UC continuing to play the same role.

Re:Not strictly a UC win

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a joke that goes, in heaven the british are the policemen, french are the cooks, and the german's build the cars, the swiss mind the banks and the Italians are the lovers. But in hell, the british are the cooks, the italians mind the banks, the french build the cars, the swiss are the lovers and the germans are the policemen.

Bechtel has a repuation for good facilites management provided you tell them exactly what you want up front and it's not unusual. They also have a reputation for not being interested in the purpose of the task, but rather the task it self, and thus may not perform the task with their thinking caps on. They will be focused on hitting the perfromance marks in the contract just well enough to collect their fee and these pesky scientist will be an annoyance. Conversely, UC is truly interested in promoting long term great science. It goes so far that direction it gets in its own way in achieving that: it management is not agressive and tolerates its own bad managers. People who fail tend to get promoted up to get them out of the way of the front line scientists. And they can manage their own facilities because they never figured out how to manage something that was not their own campus funded by donors. And UC regents never had the time to focus on the lab long enough to deal with this.

So if we get Bechtel facilities, UC science mission guidance, and a strong focused management LLC , this will be heaven. If we get Bechtel science, UC management, a weak LLC managemnt paralyzed by two masters it will be hell. If any one of these organzations is fully in charge it will be not so good either, but if no one is in charge it will be chaos.

No one has seen the management structure plan as the contract has not been negotiated. But repeatedly the bid advisory board and bid selection folks kept volunteering the phrase that the best attributes of these institutions were to be combined under a single LLC roof with sole responsibility. That's the perfect recipie for success. The question is if they can pull off the creation of such an organization.

Another burning issue is that los alamos is a remote city. It does not reside in an ocean of interchangable labor or contracting companies. If this is to succeed the management needs to import some new leaders, and then figure out how to not rehire the same contractors or at least how to incentivize them.

The othe rpart of the problem is NM is a small state which gives at lot to the governement. It provides two national lab, multiple air bases, testing ranges, and an unusually high fraction of its citizens join the armed forces. It burys the nations nuclear waste, and one time even let an atomic boms to be set off. As a result it gets a lot of federal dollars that it has a hard time protecting from other congressmen. Hosting military bases and national labs is not pork like say a bridge to nowhere but a legitimate national service. The trouble is it's only got two senators and three congressmen. THis makes Los Alamos a target for exaggerated claims of mismanagement. Most of these are ludicrous. For example the Loss rate of unaccountable inventory is smaller than almost any government institution or industry. It's far from the only National lab to mislay a sensitive data disk, but it's the only one you have ever heard mentioned in the press. And you never hear the follow-up stories. Like the famous mustang bought on a credit card--didn't happen turns out. Like the famous "Lost" hard disks that turned out to be simply a keystroke error that printed out more labels than there were disks.

There's plenty of problems at los alamos but nearly all of them come from a combination of congressional funding that gets redirected when stronger congressmen redirect it to their state , DOE carpiciousness and insane levels of oversight, and UC's weak management structure. The new LLC is supposed to remove DOE oversight and make it more of a performance contract in hindsight. And we may be getting rid of UC's spineless management style.

So we are guardedly optomistic this could be heaven.

Abivalence

[putko]

There's been a lot of ambivalence at Berkeley in the past about it running labs like this. One line (not that I believe it) goes that it is better for the Univeristy involved than leave it strictly to the defense contractors.

I think it provides UC with some serious money and opportunity to do major research, so the geeks get attracted to it and tend to brush over any ethical concerns.

E.g. who else has the budget and inclination for some serious computin'?

Similar stuff happened at MIT in the beginning of computing. It was somehow harmless when it was just Ma Bell wanting telephone switching technology -- but the defense contractors have budgets and interesting requirements, so it is easy to look the other way.

Other labs

[WindBourne]

The postings are interesting. It appears that other labs are being grabbed by the original university that managed it AND a large company. For example, BWXT teams with University of Chicago for Argonne Lab. This makes me wonder if this is the wholesale sell-off of our R&D labs to private enterprise. IOW, will these companies now have unfettered access to all the ideas that comes from these labs and will declare them their own? I only mention this because of the large system support contract that GWB awarded Accenture (a company of crooks and inepts) a HUGE contract that takes place overseas. They not only pull the jobs away but much of the code is now being done elsewhere. IIRC, Accenture will have partial ownership as well as will be in control of a large number of federal systems.

Re:Other labs

[bullsbarry]

As an employee of a private contractor who works at a R&D lab for the DOD, I can tell you that all of our work is considered government property. We are allowed to get patents/retain rights to any "intellectual property" we develop, but for the most part our work becomes the government's work.

Certain it's not the uncertainty ...

[beer_maker]

Let me start with a Arguement from Authority - You should listen to me, because I work at LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) so I know all about this stuff ... LOL.

But seriously, my opinion is this: Your first point (about not knowing the next year's budget numbers) is true, but the management minimises that problem by saving some funds into any number of accounts, so they can shift them as they need to. I also have to disagree with your second paragraph somewhat:

1. You ignore the issue of scale - the Labs' budgets are so big that most day-to-day purchasing isn't affected. It's the things like not replacing the million-dollar photo spectrometer every year, or not buying updated software (I still have to support a few WinNT/98/ME systems because the controller's software was written to run only on that platform, and we can't afford to buy a whole new electron microsocope.*)
2. The "Mad September Purchasing Rush" still happens, but most funds are allocated quarterly (or more often) so we've never had to wait 6 months - the wait time seems comparable to what I remember from the private sector (though they ARE longer than those at the dot-bomb I once worked for.)
3. And we DO miss out on training that we would like, but not because of direct budget uncertainty. The problem here is that everybody in our organization draws against the same pot of training money, and when it's gone, it's gone.

No, the biggest management problem is balancing "Security" and "Efficiency". If it's easy to do, it's probably not secure, and vice versa. And the security side wins most decisions (which is usually a GoodThing(tm), given the stuff people play with at the Labs.) Nobody MEANS to cause a problem, but they break one little rule ... and it gets easier to do it that way, or it encourages somebody else to break one little rule too ... and as you say, "things can get kind of out of hand."

(*And nobody seems to want to write such software for OSX/Linux/etc ... why is that?)