NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

By: Jim Hodges

Responding to comments and concerns gleaned over weeks of meetings between branches and NASA Langley Director Lesa Roe, the Center Operations Directorate is putting in place a new system to handle some of the requests made under the Research Operations, Maintenance and Engineering contract.

George Finelli, director of the COD, said Tuesday in a Town Hall meeting at the Reid Center that his group would become more involved in assessing work that is performed under the "Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity" portion of the ROME contract, which is valued at about $42 million per year.

"Demand for IDIQ work is growing," Finelli said.

That work falls in a category different than that of the base operations – facility operations, instrumentation services, maintenance, etc. -- aspect of the contract, which is valued at about $30 million per year.

Lesa Roe, NASA Langley's center director, listened to comments and concerns about maintenance and operations during weeks of meetings with the center's branches.

Photo Credit: NASA/Sean Smith

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"It's more of a process of getting the right COD civil servant involved up front to try to shrink the time to get work done, and to get things approved and get them underway," Finelli said.

He added that COD also will put a heightened review process in place.

COD manages the ROME contract, which is performed by Jacobs Technology.

Over the late spring and summer, Roe met with branches around the center in something of a "listening tour," and among the voices she heard were those with problems concerning service.

Finelli said Tuesday that about 600 "trouble calls" per month were received, and that the ROME contract is staffed to handle about 500. Also, about 2,200 maintenance items come up per month at Langley, and the contract is staffed to deal with about 1,500.

There is a backlog of about 10,000 items.

"They inherited about that big a backlog," Finelli said.

The ROME contract was let in 2002.

With civil service customers working directly with ROME, "40 percent of IDIQ work valued at $32 million has no COD involvement in request definitions and cost estimation," Finelli said. That included work termed "tactical engineering," which is largely those projects valued at less than $500,000.

"We want to enhance engineering management for the center within the COD," Finelli listed among the changes being implemented.

That is designed to have COD reestablish some of the "smart buyer" capability for ROME work.

To do all of this, COD plans to redeploy some of its workforce and to hire three people to enhance its capability to manage the flow of center-wide ROME tasks and provide "points of contact" for customers. The directorate also plans to train some of its cadre in cost estimating to provide a centralized cost estimation service for facilities engineering, repair and construction work.

Implementation of the changes is targeted for January of 2009.

In response to a question about oversight and a suggestion of returning to more civil servant involvement, Finelli reminded everyone of the reason for the ROME contract.

"The reality is that we have a lot less people on the center than we had in 2000, and the trend is that we're not going to grow," he said. "But the work is growing."

Roe also supported the idea that the workload at Langley is increasing, while the civil servant workforce is set at 1,890.

"In the science area, we have some great work in the decadal study," she said, citing an example. "We want to have less civil servants doing some things so we can have more civil servants doing other things."

Those other things, she added, involved research, which has always been Langley's primary mission.


 
NASA Langley Research Center
Managing Editor: Jim Hodges
Executive Editor and Responsible NASA Official: H. Keith Henry
Editor and Curator: Denise Lineberry