Forest Service: Culture, History, Morale, Organization, Future

I think this is a good idea, but someone ought to watch the contract for intellectual property issues..

Here’s the link and below is an excerpt..

The U.S. Forest Service wants to contract with online retailers so it can sell digital and digitally-enhanced versions of its national forest maps and atlases along with forest map-based mobile apps, according to solicitation documents posted Thursday.

The Forest Service produces numerous hardcopy maps that it sells to about 250,000 tourists and hikers each year, the request for proposals said, but its sale of digital maps through its own websites has been more limited.

The agency hopes to remedy that by selling maps through a vendor such as iTunes or Google’s e-Bookstore, which could digitally enhance the agency’s base maps to make them more interactive and user friendly.

The Forest Service plans to offer 18 digital visitor maps of national forests in California, Arizona and New Mexico to start along with about six full digital atlases, the agency said.

The price per map may vary, the agency said, because it is required by law to at least break even on any map-selling ventures.

Great piece by Stephanie Ogburn in High Country News here (Thanks to Matthew for finding it).

Yet the switch comes with its own set of costly hassles — and questions about the value of government outsourcing meant to save money. While the Forest Service won’t comment on the decision to switch to eRecruit, a service offered by an Australian company NGA.net, or on its dealings with Avue, employees within the agency currently aren’t able to access any data from Avue, including thousands of job descriptions it needs to populate the new system. (Known as position descriptions, or PDs, these are key for matching applicants with jobs.) And not only are are Forest Service employees unable to access old data. If they have downloaded copies of position descriptions from Avue, they aren’t allowed to use those either. An agency memo lays it out:

“In no event … can you use a PD (position description) from the Avue system, in whole or in part, to create a new or modified PD in the new eRecruit system.” The Forest Service is also in ongoing negotiations with Avue about accessing that old data, but won’t comment on that either.

Linda Rix, CEO of Avue Digital Services, says the focus on the missing position descriptions misses the point, though. She says eRecruit isn’t able to do many of the complex tasks that Avue did, and that is partly why the transition has been difficult. “What eRecruit is doing for the Forest Service is about 40 percent of what we were doing for the Forest Service.”

And despite the difficulties of using Avue, its complexity had a purpose, she adds. When the Forest Service contracted with Avue, says Rix, it was at pains to implement a system where “you can definitely show that you are not practicing discriminatory hiring.” Avue’s system does this, she says, because it “auto-calculates” matches based on specific job and legal criteria like the Fair Labor Standards Act, matching people — regardless of race or gender — based on the position needs and their own skill set. The new system, says Rix, lacks these capabilities.

Forest Service employees might argue that the auto-calculation was precisely what they wanted to get rid of. Avue’s automated application screening process, according to a 2011 GAO report, “frequently result(ed) in situations where highly qualified candidates were wrongly eliminated from consideration or unqualified candidates were listed along with qualified candidates.” Employees, particularly those in the wildfire program, complained about these baseless disqualifications as well as the overall difficulty of the application process.

Admittedly, it’s not easy to be a giant federal agency, with thousands of applications for seasonal openings needing to be evaluated every year. Yet, by 2013, one would hope that the U.S. Forest Service would have figured it out. The Bureau of Land Management, NOAA and a number of other agencies use jobs giant Monster.com, but instead of joining that system, the Forest Service’s jump to eRecruit is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s overall shift to a comprehensive human resources management program called “OneUSA,” which aims to provide a simpler way for the whole Agriculture Department to hire qualified candidates.

Sharon’s questions: What is the USDA thinking? And why can’t they tell Forest Service folks why they need to buy solutions that appear to be second-rate compared to other agencies? And if you tick off all the diverse candidates due to your application process, how does that help you meet your goals? Is there some research that shows that diverse people are more likely to put up with bureaucratic bizarreness? Not to speak of all the dedicated employees who are simply trying to hire qualified people and you are torturing… I had a boss once who wanted to outsource the administrative part of our region to the BLM, which was located right down the road from our Regional Office. He seems wiser, in retrospect, on that issue, as time goes on.

This story came up in my internet searches about the Forest Service: while it’s off the general topic, it does raise some interesting questions related to morale and administrative changes.

Here’s the link and below is an excerpt:

Hager left the INFRA program manager position in 2003, and the opening was advertised in February 2004. However, an intervening change in agency policy prohibited the Forest Service from posting interchangeable listings, so the job was advertised strictly under the professional series.

Here are ssome questions this story raised in my mind:

“if it was OK for a long time to advertise in multiple series, why was the policy changed?”

“Does the new policy help or hinder stated goals to get more diverse applicants available on certs?”

And “given the likely gender ratios in administrative compared to technical series, did that policy change have an unintended discriminatory effect?” (not related to this specific case, but worthy of examination on a broader scale)

Note: back when I was working, this cap on number of series caused a great deal of unnecessary work and annoyance. Hopefully, the policy has been changed back and this is now gone. There may be a good reason for this change, but if so, I am not sure that that was ever communicated to the rank and file.

I was also interested in these statements:

That is because she would have us ignore the time period shortly following her protected activity–the precise period when we ordinarily would expect any anger or resentment that her activity engendered in the Forest Service to be at its apex–and instead focus on a period almost two years removed from her protected activity merely because it was at that point that the Forest Service had its first opportunity to retaliate against her by taking a very specific adverse action,” Holmes wrote.

“[O]ur ability to draw … a causal inference from an employer’s adverse action” based on temporal proximity alone “diminishes over time because we may reasonably expect (as a matter of common sense) that the embers of anger or resentment that may have been inflamed by the employee’s protected activity–emotions that would underlie any retaliatory adverse action–would cool over time,” Holmes wrote. Conroy’s proposed approach, which focused on events nearly two years after her protected activity, “stands at odds with this temporal-proximity, causation rationale.”

Would that strong emotions always had that rate and trajectory of reduction! There would probably be fewer armed conflicts if it were that simple.. glad to know that legal organizations don’t have long-term simmering resentments..

Thanks to Matthew for finding this and posting as a comment..

Last September, the United States Forest Service decided not to renew a longstanding contract with Avue Digital Services, a privately held firm in Tacoma that had been hosting the agency’s online jobs database since 2005. The Avue license cost the Forest Service more than $34 million in the past seven years. But the data created from that pricey partnership is now lost to the federal government; under contract, Avue retains proprietary ownership of the position descriptions it generated for the Forest Service. Now the agency faces the incredible task of rewriting potentially 40,000 position descriptions from scratch.

This development recently came to the attention of Andy Stahl, executive director of the Eugene-based nonprofit Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. A friend of Stahl’s from within the Forest Service complained to him of the seeming waste of taxpayer dollars over the years, and of the frustration of having to draft new position descriptions from a blank slate.

“She was upset because she thought that the money spent with Avue had not bought the government anything,” Stahl recalls. “All the work had to be redone.”

Stahl promptly requested copies of the Forest Service’s Avue contract as well as the agency’s payment records to Avue, all of which he later shared with the Independent. The development is particularly galling, he says, because Avue generated much of its data using previously existing Forest Service position descriptions—meaning the agency can’t use those as a template in redrafting either. Stahl wrote a scathing blog post about what he calls the “Avue debacle” in early January.

“The notion that you should…have somebody outside the government writing the document that says what government employees are supposed to do strikes me as bizarre,” Stahl says. “Here at [Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics], I wouldn’t contract with the Sierra Club to write the position descriptions for the people who work here.”

The Creation of Silliness

On the first day, Forest Service employees wrote position descriptions, and they saw that they were good, and that was the evening and the morning of the first day. The second day administrators came and said “you must take your position descriptions and convert them to AVUE. Even though it seems ass-backwards to make people do things to feed a computer program, that is what you must do, or we won’t let you hire anyone.” The third day there was much mourning, weeping and groaning by employees and the plaintive wail of “but is the PD in AVUE?” arose from the valley. On the fourth day employees had accomplished the task.. almost all PDs were in AVUE. There was peace and the buzzing of happy electrons around employees’ computers. On the fifth day, the administrators returned to the valley and said “we’re getting rid of AVUE, and by the way, all the PDs that you labored over, with such great effort so that your head was spinning, even though you know that PDs can’t possibly keep up with the real world of changing responsibilities, retirements and budget cuts, and you know you don’t have the time to keep them up as living documents, you now must not use the ones you developed so painfully, yea, only a short time ago. Because despite the fact that you wrote them, they do not belong to you.”
On the sixth day there was much weeping, groaning, and wailing in the valley again, plus incredulity that their work could belong to someone else. There was some joy that AVUE would be gone; but fear that the replacement would be worse. The optimists argued that it couldn’t be worse; the pessimists were not so sure.

Later that day, Glinda, the Good Administrator, put out an email. “We are searching the network for all documents with “PD” in them. We will date those and provide them to you if they were pre-AVUE; we are also setting up a task team to organize standard PDs, and help people who need it in writing them. Finally, if AVUE actually takes us to court over this issue, we plan to launch a public relations campaign to boycott AVUE products. This is BS and we are not going to take it lying down.” And the people in the valley rested on the seventh day, content that Glinda had their backs.

If I were still an employee, I would like administrative problems that affect multitudes of employees and take lots of taxpayer bucks to have the same scrutiny as forest fires. So for example, this issue would have an outside review, with the idea of not placing blame so much as learning what to do better next time. Perhaps it was something in the procurement regulations, and finding out what happened will save all the Feds beaucoup bucks. This outside review would be posted publicly and perhaps open for comment. To me, if this doesn’t happen, the behavior says “we really don’t care.” Fires are important, but you all, wasting your time on a recurring basis, is not. Even though I am absolutely sure that in their hearts, all the people running the FS do care very much.

I think this is an important topic to discuss. I certainly can’t force people to discuss it. BUT I can repeatedly post things and ask people their opinions.

Here are my hypotheses for why no discussion thus far (except Mike and Larry, thank you!)

1) People in the FS are afraid of posting their concerns publicly. Based on my pre-retirement experience, that is a well-founded fear. So..
2) Recent retirees, and observers, need to have the conversation, IMHO.
3) Retirees don’t want to be seen as criticizing the current people; they would not have wanted to have been criticized by their predecessors (well, and sometimes were, but that’s another story). And there’s the whole “we might want to ask a favor sometime, so we don’t want to tick them off.” That cultural paradigm doesn’t go away just because we retired.
4) Lack of “straight talk” was one of Dialogos’s findings as I recall.

I know that I often disagree with Cindy, with other FS people, and with just about anybody on just about anything. Yet I think we are each richer for having shared our opinions. And I don’t think the FS can improve by “not talking about it” or the ever-popular strategy “complaining behind people’s backs.”

5) So I think we might do better, rather than critiquing Cindy’s paper per se, reflect our own perspective of the FS and what it might do better in terms of morale and leadership.

I look at this like the old story of the blind man and the elephant. Perhaps if we describe the toenail, tail hairs or saliva that we have experienced, we will jointly be able to describe this unique creature, the Forest Service.

To that end, this is Sharon’s perspective. Hopefully, this is the beginning of a discussion. I’d like to focus, as Cindy did, on the National Forest System.

I think, like Cindy did, that one’s background is significant. Most recently, I was the Director of Planning for seven years in the Rocky Mountain Region. To that end, I participated in regional personnel reviews of placements of line and staff officers, and because I was in planning, and troubled projects of various kinds made their way to our office, I got to see disagreements between line officers, and problems between forest staff and district staff, in fact all possible permutations of Ways Things Can Go Wrong. My experience was very different from the 80’s when I worked on forests in Regions 5 and 6.

Here are several thoughts:
1) I’m not sure you can say anything about “the Forest Service”. Different regions have different cultures, as do forests.
2) In my region, “compliance” was sometimes perhaps more like “apparent compliance.” Which is not really compliance at all. On one bus ride back from a Regional Leadership Team, I asked a Deputy Forest Supervisor why they didn’t warn us about things until it was too late. He wisely noted that the Districts don’t necessarily tell the Supervisor’s Office either.
3) Some Forest Supervisors didn’t think that the Regional Forester had legitimate authority to override their land management decisions. According to what I call the “Cult of the Line Officer” the local official is always right. So if you defend your Ranger, and you are the Supervisor, that is good. If you are Regional Forester and you defend your Forest Supervisor, you are good. But if you disagree with the next level down and try to change it, you are losing points with them at an extremely rapid rate. Now, my experience may have to do with the personalities involved, but I just think the real world is much more complex and colorful than the organizational theories- and may be a function of… the personalities involved!
4) I think perhaps we could learn about the culture more by telling our stories and discussing what they mean, and whether others’ observations are similar or different.
5) When I read the below paragraph…

This position power model could further illuminate the conflict between staff and decisionmaker goals found in recent NEPA studies (Stern and Predmore 2011) as well as employees’ growing critique of leadership in the Partnership for Public Service and other surveys. It could explain recent burdensome business procedures handed down by managers who treat each new societal mandate (a set of rules to enforce new society priorities such as civil rights or homeland security) as not only a new rule but a new priority. Overemphasis on line officers’ careers, adherence to rules for their own sake, and the resulting impact on staff effectiveness might contribute to other Forest Service–acknowledged problems such as ineffective and process-heavy NEPA analysis (Bosworth 2001).

I have listened to line officers complain about the new Dilbertian requirements of the Department or the whole USG. It really isn’t the FS who makes most of these decisions, in my experience. Just attend a District Rangers’ Meeting to get the FS line officer perspective.

6) Finally, I think if you want to know what causes the morale problem, you would have to ask people directly in interviews. Then you would have to figure out what could be changed, within the decision space of the FS . I am all for doing this as a public discussion.

It doesn’t seem fair to me to blame “FS leadership” for ideas of the Department or higher levels. If we wanted to experiment with FS leadership, we would move them to the Department of the Interior (controlling for the “Department and higher ideas” variable) and then comparing them to the BLM (which has the same multiple use mission). Just sayin’