I’m going to do a historical tour of various FS organizational improvement and efficiency efforts through time, with help from the National Museum of Forest Service History and the Forest History Society.
But one effort we seem to be missing documentation of is the most recent effort.. Transformation (2007, or almost 20 years ago). Perhaps there have been more recent efforts as well, after I retired, that I just didn’t hear about.
Transformation was an enormous project with a full time team and much work and analysis all around, or at least in ROs and the WO (and to be sure, a certain amount of resistance in some quarters). But all I could find online was this from a presentation at NRCS.
I’d really like to see the final report and any accomplishment reports. I remember our R-2 Engineers taking it seriously, and I think that’s the reason WO Minerals moved to the Region 2 RO (I assume they wanted the move and it was great for us.) Even snippets of experience and memories from retirees would be helpful. Perhaps some retirees have a copy in a box somewhere?
Anyway, there was much great work by excellent employees put into Transformation, and it could be valuable information- both to find good ideas, and to avoid organizational and political pitfalls. What worked and what didn’t? Was there a Lessons Learned? Perhaps there’s also some public administration literature on the topic. Below are a sample of the slides, the link above has the complete presentation.
