From: Victoria White [white@fnal.gov]
Sent: Monday, May 14, 2007 8:46 AM
To: 'Marilyn Dixon'; 'Pier Oddone'; 'Young-Kee Kim'; 'Alicia Filak';
'Bill Griffing'; 'Bob Grant'; 'Bruce Chrisman'; 'Cindy Conger'; 'David
Carlson'; 'David Gassman'; 'Jeff Cotton'; 'Kay Van Vreede'; 'Randy
Ortgiesen'
Cc: 'Mary Tolian'
Subject: RE: Assurance Council Meeting - May 15, 2007

Attachments: AssuranceCouncilCharter-annotated-vicky.pdf;
AssuranceCouncilCharter-Vicky.doc; Tracking.doc

Dear Assurance Council, 

THE CHARTER - For homework we were asked to consider the draft charter for the council.  Since I did not receive it electronically I scanned it in and annotated it in PDF (attached).  

When I read it carefully after the meeting I found it quite confusing and somewhat inconsistent with what I think the council is about, specially
after hearing Pier's desires.   

It seems to be rather important to understand specifically whether the council provides only advice to Pier, or whether it has other responsibilities and powers to make things happen at the lab - such as asking the line management organizations of the lab to implement certain processes, or adopt certain standards.  

I also found it rather difficult to figure out the exact roles and responsibilities (and the interactions) between
  The Assurance Council
  The Internal Audit function
  The Office of Quality and Best Practices
  The Office of Project Management and Oversight  (with the "and" is what they call themselves)

I found a very nice mission and vision web page for Internal Audit, including a Charter laying out the "powers" of the internal audit office at http://www.fnal.gov/directorate/IA/Internal_Audit.html.  There was also an excellent discussion of risk and how ideas for what needs to be looked at are collected - from Fermilab Management among others. 

I did not yet find a mission statement or explanation of the roles, responsibilities and powers of the OQaBP - I'm sure it is laid out in the FRA proposal somewhere in general terms. 

I did not find a mission statement for the office of Project Management and Oversight. 

How are these bodies, who are all concerned with "assuring" in some way,
supposed to interact?   I think the charter should probably address this
headon.  

There also seems to be a bit of a dichotemy between concentrating on the Assurance Letter and the formal areas where we are bound by federal regulations or DOE orders and concentrating on where our practices and procedures fall short (even if on paper we look good) and leave us potentially with a lack of quality - putting our program and reputation at risk. 

I studied quite a few different Charters of various organizations and found them to have many common themes. None of them had "Deliverables".  Many of them were for bodies formed basically to "assure" that the agency, or organization, made progress in the right direction and as defined by the law or executive order or some higher level set of objectives. 

Since my idea of what the charter should say doesn't look too much like the draft one I decided to write another one - as my way of giving input to the process.  It is attached.  It contains many questions.  

THE ASSURANCE LETTER - I did not receive it yet - as background to the Charter of the council. Perhaps when I see it I will understand better what the AC needs to do. 

TRACKING SYSTEM - I attach some more things to be included in the list of "issues" possibly to be tracked.  I believe it will not be consistent with the Charter (when we have it) to mandate a list of things to be tracked more carefully.  It seems to me that we would more naturally find an area of activity at the lab where insufficient tracking of some sort is going on - and then we would advise Pier that he should get those responsible in that area to get together and develop a plan for doing things better (including tracking).  Of course it could be that the Assurance Council has additional powers and that it might actually create and charge a Working Group of the appropriate people to institute some new ways of doing business in a particular area.  This is something that must be decided.  

AGENDA ITEMS - I ask that my 2nd and 3rd agenda item suggestions from last week be considered for agenda items again either this week or sometime in the future. 

I will not be able to make the meeting this week - I am out of town at a review. 

Vicky