The Utilities Service Alliance is changing its corporate governance with the aim of improving performance across the fleet and to better align with INPO.
The initiative creates 11 new positions, all of which are focused at moving each plant in the fleet toward excellence. They will specifically focus on cross-functional fleet performance areas such as the INPO index, Equipment Reliability, operations focus and outage performance, to name a few.
“USA is very good right now at networking, benchmarking and improving performance in specific areas,” John Christensen, vice president of Operations at USA, said. “But we need to take it to the next level to drive performance in those very important cross-functional areas that are important to the industry.”
The new positions include:
Director of Performance Sustainability: expected to be filled by July 31, this director-level position will work closely with the INPO Performance Monitor Leader (PML) and act as a check on PML data and information. If there are declines in performance, this person will coordinate fleet response on those issues.
10 Corporate Functional Area Managers (one at each plant): These positions are dedicated, full-time to USA activities with additional Management Council duties. The primary role of this position is as a technical functional area expert with focus on governance and responsible for USA activities at the plant. They will initiate formal escalation for performance issues.
The Corporate Functional Area Managers, or CFAMs, will report to the Director of Performance Sustainability, who reports to Christensen. These positions will also help share the burden of Core Peer Team leadership, which is filled now by employees at Xcel and PSEG.
“These changes are designed to improve alignment with INPO and provide stronger oversight of improvement activities for the USA fleet and its members,” said USA Board Chairman Tim Rausch, senior vice president and chief nuclear officer for Susquehanna.
The 10 CFAM technical areas are: Operations, Maintenance, Training, Radiation Protection/Chemistry, Engineering/Equipment Reliability, Safety/Human Performance, Performance Improvement, Work Management, Emergency Response (Security/Emergency Preparedness) and Outage. Each site will submit three names to fill the positions; the USA board will pick a CFAM for each area.
To be sure, this isn’t a simply HR change. Fleet leadership expects results.
For instance, the desired end state is that all USA fleet members are INPO 1 or 2 by 2019. Other goals include quickly correcting performance declines and sustain excellence where it is, primarily in plant operations, equipment reliability, outage performance, training and security.
“This is more than filling positions and hoping for the best,” Christensen said. “The people who fill these jobs must be engaged and passionate about performance improvement and be dedicated to making the USA fleet an industry leader.”