Decision Making in the U.S. Department of Energy's Environmental Management Office of Science and Technology (1999) / Chapter Skim
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3 RD & D Decision-Making Practices in Other Organizations
3 RD & D Decision-Making Practices in Other Organizations
Pages 28-37
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From page 28... ...
Process benefits include the following: depolarizing high-conflict situations potentially involving strong differences of opinion, ensuring comprehensive consideration of relevant factors, ensuring consideration of a wide range of alternatives, leveling the playing field across multiple projects and decisions, maintaining a consistent approach as people change positions, developing consensus and building commitment to action, facilitating explanation ofthe decision to internal and external parties, and providing documentation for retrospective analyses and insight on post-project audits. These benefits come not only from the nominal decision process itself, but also from the skill and quality with which it is carried out.
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From page 29... ...
LESSONS FROM INDUSTRIAL RD&D ORGANIZATIONS Because of RD&D's importance to long-te~m success and sustainable competitive advantage, many industrial organizations have devoted a significant effort to developing and improving their RD&D decisionmaking process. This allows one to learn from a group of organizations that allocate substantial resources to RD&D and that can be judged to have achieved significant and valuable results from this expenditure.
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From page 30... ...
Since OST is essentially a federal program of DOE program managers, who award funds to contractors to perform technology development projects, a suitable translation of this thought for OST might be, "Select the most competent contractors." The committee prefers to leave these translations to OST management, who are well positioned to appreciate how best to implement these general guiding ideas. Committee members thought that dealing with end customer needs was also critical for OST, as represented by the following: · Understand, focus on, and monitor changes in customer needs and requirements.
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From page 31... ...
"Think strategically" encompasses six of these decision quality best practices to stress the importance of a {ong-range strategic viewpoint in developing an elective RD&D program. "Measure and evaluate to guide resource allocation" encompasses six more.
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From page 32... ...
Overall decision quality is achieved by periodic examination of these issues, resulting in a succession of decisions made over hme on the scope and duration of any technology development project. 4The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman recounts examples of large organizations and governments that persisted in decisions or policies that were manifestly and grossly to their own disadvantage, given any reasonable view of plausible intended goals (Tuchman, 1992; see also Scott, 19981.
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From page 33... ...
Although some of the environmental challenges and consequences of the bureaucratic environment faced by DOE-EM are unique, DOE can still learn from the environmental decision-making and technology development practices of these leading industrial organizations. Practices for Environmental Technology Development Decision Making and Management The practices relevant to DOE-EM that the committee learned from more than one of these organizations include the following: · Link environmental decisions to the business planning process as much as possible.
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From page 34... ...
Since He central RD&D facility does not find sit is widely recognized that some of the legal agreements involve high marginal cost and low risk reduction benefits for specified actions. The use of RD&D to identify alternative technical approaches has merit in these situations, as discussed farther in Chapter S
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From page 35... ...
As reported to committee members, these three organizations perform an ROl-type calculation on each technology development proposal to compare all the new proposals in any given year prior to the annual funding commitments. Customer Buy-In At GRI and DuPont, the central technology development program was fimded by the parent organization with funds separate from those of the business units or member utilities.
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From page 36... ...
Finally, the detailed site visits to GRI, EPRI, and DuPont revealed further evidence of the use and value of quantifiable, probabilistic cost-benefit evaluations to help prioritize projects and allocate resources for maximum benefit. GR} in particular demonstrated that this could be done in a multicriteria setting; DuPont's experience showed that such methods can help achieve the maximum environmental cleanup per dollar expended; and the experience of many excellent industrial organizations indicates that such quantitative methods can have a powerful impact on improving the return on the RD&D expenditure.
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From page 37... ...
These concepts have to be translated into appropriate statements for OST, a translation that the committee prefers to leave to OST management. The results from industry environmental decision malting and the planning and budgeting processes of GR]
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