Defense Environment Alert
September 24, 2002

GAO GIVES MIXED REVIEW OF ARMY'S LESSONS LEARNED PROGRAM

Lessons learned from the Army's chemical weapons disposal program have supported the program's efforts to safely destroy the chemical weapons stockpile, but at the same time, the Arrny has come up short in several aspects of its lessons learned program, a new General Accounting Office (GAO) report says.

The Programmatic Lessons Learned Program was created to improve safety, cut or avoid unnecessary costs and maintain the chemical weapons incineration schedule, the report says. The goal is to capture and disseminate lessons learned from the existing chemical weapons destruction facilities to new destruction facilities. The Army has constructed or is building five incineration facilities and is using alternative destruction technologies or has not yet made a decision on the technology at the four other chemical weapons stockpile sites.

GAO sent the report, Chemical Weapons: Lessons Learned Program Generally Effective but Could Be Improved and Expanded, to various Congress members Sept. 10. The report is available on InsideEPA. com. See page 2 for details.

The lessons learned program "has leadership that communicates the importance of [it] in supporting the ChemDemil Program's mission, processes for capturing and sharing lessons, and a technology to facilitate and support the program," GAO says in the report. "It also has developed a culture that promotes using lessons to foster safe operations."

However, the program "does not fully apply generally accepted knowledge management principles and lessons sharing best practices, thereby limiting its effectiveness," GAO says. According to the report, knowledge management principles are leadership "that articulates management's vision and goals," processes "to turn vision into reality," technology that supports the processes, and a culture "of knowledge sharing and reuse."

First, it says, the program lacks policy guidance to help senior managers in decision making or daily operations. It points out that "there is no guidance that defines the procedures to be followed when an alternative to a lesson is chosen or when a lesson is not implemented." The report gives the example in which three chemical weapons sites -- in Alabama, Oregon and Arkansas -- had not implemented a lesson that grew from problems with the pollution abatement systems at the Johnston Atoll and Tooele, UT, facilities. To fix the problem, the Tooele site used a superior and more costly material called hastelloy. "Headquarters decided not to implement the lesson at the three sites primarily because it would have involved higher initial costs. This decision ultimately caused serious safety concerns, higher costs, and delayed the schedule," GAO says.

Second, the program lacks formal procedures for validating whether a corrective action has rectified a deficiency, it says. Without a validation procedure, "there is little assurance that problems have been resolved, and the possibility of repeating past mistakes remains."

Third, while the lessons learned database houses thousands of engineering change proposals and other items, it is difficult to use and the lessons lack prioritization, GAO says. Database users surveyed told GAO "it is difficult to find lessons because the search tool requires very specific key words or phrases, involves multiple menus, and does not link lessons to specific events."

GAO also notes that the lessons learned remain mostly limited to the incineration project. The program has not been expanded to include all components of the chemical demilitarization program. For example, the Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment Program, which evaluates destruction alternatives to incineration, does not fully participate in the program. Many of the processes for the incinerators and non-incineration technologies are the same. "Under these circumstances, promoting a culture of knowledge sharing would enable all components to capture and use organizational knowledge," GAO says. Later, the report says, "the absence of policies and procedures promoting and facilitating the broadest dissemination of lessons learned places the safety, cost effectiveness, and schedule of the chemical weapons destruction at risk."

The report was prompted by concerns from members of Congress about the safety of incineration facilities following the release of chemical agent at Tooele in May 2000. GAO assessed whether the lessons learned program had "effectively captured and shared lessons to support the Chem-Demil Program's goal to safely destroy the chemical stockpile" and "identified the extent to which lessons learned have been shared and areas where sharing could be improved."

GAO makes several recommendations to improve the program's effectiveness and usefulness It calls for the Army to:

• "develop guidance to assist managers in their decision making when making exceptions to lessons learned;
• "develop procedures to validate, monitor, and prioritize the lessons learned to ensure corrective actions fully address deficiencies identified as the most significant, and
• "improve the organizational structure of the database so that users may easily find information and develop criteria to prioritize lessons in the database."

The report also suggests the Army develop a policy that promotes sharing lessons regularly with the alternative destruction technology programs.

The Army concurred with these suggestions, although its comments did not fully address the intent of the recommendations, GAO says.