Teri Cleland sent this in as a comment, and she was closer to centralization of business services and how it all happened, plus some additional info on ASC HR starting up that I hadn’t heard before. Thanks Teri!
I appreciate Rains’s review of that consolidation, which I don’t even recall happening although I was in the WO at the time. Sounds like a success in that regard! In 2006 the Bush administration was forcing us through competitive sourcing exercises. Those were terrible times! We had to determine what was “inherently governmental work” and what could be outsourced to the private sector. I sat in on a study done for Communications and it was rough, very emotional, and fortunately never happened. I believe that some of our internal consolidations were an effort to get ahead of having it done to us by the Department.
I was there when we consolidated Business Operations to Albuquerque. It was largely successful after a bumpy time. Working in legislative affairs, I remember telling congressional staffers looking into payment problems that hurricane Katrina staff evacuations left the NFC in New Orleans abandoned with reams of unpaid bills sitting in cubicles. It always worked, but that was shading it a bit. It took awhile to get up and running in the new consolidated center, but by all accounts I heard it worked well and was more efficient, especially fire payments. It was also much smaller than HR.
As I remember it, the business ops consolidation went so well that the agency looked at HR next. What could go wrong? I had worked on forests that had great personnel officers and those with terrible ones. I figured that the best would move to the new consolidated center and provide their excellent service to more forests from there. And the bad ones–bye bye. Duh.
I sat in on a very lively national leadership team meeting where Dale Bosworth asked Regional Foresters their opinion on HR consolidation. There were passionate arguments made on both sides of the issue, but Dale did decide to move forward with it. I think he really wanted to save funds to focus on field work, and also move the agency forward as systems made it easier to work remotely.
They worked hard on developing the consolidation plan. There were many reasons that it failed. Some had to do with those great experts not wanting to move to Albuquerque so we got hires, many from the military, who didn’t know the FS culture. It also revealed that there had been inconsistent interpretations of the rules across the agency that resulted in wrongful promotions, hiring, etc. And the opposite was also true, new interpretations of things that were always done a certain way. Most can come up with their own opinions on why it failed. A big one is that in both consolidations, wonderful administrative folks at the forest and district level lost their jobs. It was heartbreaking. Change is hard! And once initiated, there’s no going back.
But at least there was a rationale and a process for it. I’m not sure what the question is here or if I’ve shed any helpful light on things, but the only thing that never changes is that change happens.
I’m going to look at the USDA proposal seriously and provide some comments that I hope will be helpful for the process. Any of us who have had to respond to public comments of any kind in planning should know how to at least make this Administration work a little harder to ignore us.
I never worked in the WO for any time except a few short details, but I can tell you from the field perspective; three Regions (during consolidation), four National Forests and five RD’s, there was no greater disaster in the FS than ASC – HR specifically! I had staffers hang up on me while trying to hire seasonal employees, because yes, I knew way more about it than some of the “off the street” geniuses.
Permanent hiring was usually a disaster in incomplete Certs, applicants not making the Certs due to HR errors, etc. My DFS with a degree in Range was told he couldn’t be an RO acting Range Director because he didn’t have the education! Good grief….
I saw special favors applied to certain people because they knew the DRF, and a few silly mistakes could be overlooked, after all! The business operation of ASC seemed to work pretty well; HR – still, STILL a damned disaster! As a good friend of mine in the Chiefs office said, “they’ll keep pouring money to it until it works, or the lease expires”!
So.. for a time, maybe when ASC HR was new, our Region grew increasingly frustrated.. we had hired a new Forest Supervisor who wasn’t getting paid (not that that’s worse than anyone else not being paid). We set up a strike team in the RO to bring pressure to bear.. don’t know exactly what it did but it seemed to help.
Meanwhile our RF, Rick Cables, suggested we move hiring to the BLM Denver Service Center for our Region.. they don’t seem to have the problems and drama (or maybe they do but we don’t hear about it.) Anyway, of course that couldn’t happen but..
Teri, can you shed light on the “deal” that led to Albuquerque? I heard that it was some kind of quid pro quo with (Domenici? other members of the delegation?). Seems like you would have been in on the ground floor since you were in legislative affairs. I wonder what the “quo” was that the FS got out of it.
Now that you’ll have heard about the HR & BizOps stories turning into ASC, I can share some info on IRMs part in the mess, I was part of it. I was getting kind of tired/bored on a R3 forest with my position in planning/Nepa/GIS, the WO was offering a couple higher pay grades, so I bit, and they hired me. Instead of sending me to ASC, which was only a little bit out of commuting distance, I was TOSd to the R6 RO in Portland, where I was assigned to hold the hands of regional leadership as we changed everyones IT environment. As a new 12/13 I was supposed to take the functional place of the recently retired GS-15 Regional IRM Chief, but I was a WO employee.
I thought since I had worked for 25 years in R6 and knew a lot of folks it would be “alright”. I found out early about “Service First” in R6, there was no such thing in R3. R6 folks expected the “new” FS IRM to provide integrated IT services (computers/servers/phones/radios,etc). I was tasked with telling them “no can do”, at least not anytime soon. This didn’t go over well. I had to call in my boss from the WO to help me hold some hands. IRM was not highly thought of after that.
After that an oppurtunity to go back to R3 after only 3 years came up, so IRM TOSd me to ASC, and every Monday morning R3 RO leadership held my hand. IRM gave me a blackberry, and sent me to work at home, the ASC IRM space was quite a mess. The 2 ROs were as different as night
and day. I guess the moral of this story is to work for the FS you have to be reorganized some, and it may not be fun, your famiy needs to be there for you, and remember you work with a bunch of great folks everywhere.