 Well, good morning, everyone. And we're here to have a briefing on progress on Project AIM 2020. Before we begin, I do want to acknowledge it was a public release that two of our executives received the Presidential Meritorious Executive Award, Scott Flanders and Chris Kennedy. So I want to extend our congratulations to them for work, fine work that they've done over the years for the agency. And with that, I'm going to welcome the staff and those here in the audience and who may be listening in on today's briefing. The purpose of today's meeting is to discuss the progress on Project AIM implementation. As many of you know, the implementation of Project AIM is intended to help the agency to better position itself with respect to the challenges in the coming years. And we look forward to hearing from staff on the implementation that's going on. And with that, I'd ask my colleagues if they have any other remarks before we open. OK, if not, I'll turn it over to Victor McCready, Executive Director for Operations. Morning, Mr. Chairman, commissioners. Maureen and I and some of the members of the Project AIM team are pleased to be able to speak with you this morning about this period of change that we're going through and the opportunity that it presents to us. While our safety and security mission remains paramount, we're actively engaged in our efforts to implement the commission's direction in the June 2015 staff requirements memo on Project AIM 2020. Specifically, we're implementing the plan laid out in August and making progress towards the goal of becoming a more agile agency and one that's sized for current and future levels of work. All the Project AIM tasks have involved engagement and input from staff, and have demonstrated close collaboration and coordination across organizational lines. There have been everyday examples of living the NRC values as we fulfill the agency's mission. And of course, this is one of our priority focus areas, and it's encouraging to see our values reflected in the way we are engaging one another on a number of very significant issues. Our next major deliverable to the commission will be our re-baselining recommendations on work that can be shed, deprioritized, or done with fewer resources. We've identified the initial proposed changes based on the common prioritization process. We now plan to send you two commission papers. The first paper will be delivered in late January, and it'll be a comprehensive list of the activities that can be shed or deferred. If adopted, some of these decisions might be implementable during the remainder of this fiscal year, fiscal year 2016. The second paper to be delivered in early March will include known significant workload changes through fiscal 20 and longer term efficiencies or scope changes. Next slide, please. We'll start today's meeting by discussing the progress on project aim implementation. Fred Brown to my left will describe the common prioritization process, as well as an update on the re-baselining of the work of the agency. Next, Darren Ash to my right will provide an update on our overhead consolidation efforts, and Dave Schene will discuss the recommendations provided to you in a recent second paper on potential centers of expertise. Michelle Evans will then describe how the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation is implementing some of the project aim strategies and incorporating the additional direction we received from you and the staff requirements from our Miranda for project aim. Miriam Cohen will provide an update on human capital and workforce planning, and finally, Maureen Wiley will highlight some upcoming milestones between now and the end of May of 2016. I'll now turn it over to Fred Brown. Thank you. Thank you, Vic. Good morning. So as I start, I'll remind the commission, as you well know, common prioritization is about improving the agility of the agency, improving our ability if we get unexpected work to determine what resources should be moved to that work and what the impacts of doing that would be. And re-baselining is a slightly different, re-baselining is associated with sizing the agency for our workload. But the two go together because they're both based on what work we have currently that needs to be done. So on my first slide, I'll talk a little bit about the common prioritization process. We started this process by asking ourselves, what work do we do, why do we do it, and how can we do it more efficiently? And the first thing we did is went out to internal stakeholders and external stakeholders, as we discussed in September with you, and asked for suggestions on things that could be done better. All those suggestions were funneled to the offices that actually do the agency's work, and the subject matter experts and responsible line managers in each of those offices built on those suggestions and their knowledge to prioritize the work within their local unit, and then at a business line level, assemble all of that work on a business line or a corporate product line basis. Once that was done, and the responsible office directors believed that it had been done with a high quality and effectiveness, the lists were brought together by a group of deputy office directors from across the agency with broad participation who merged those individual lists into a true common prioritization list of all the agency's work, and in my next two slides, I'll describe the criteria that we use for doing that. So once we had that baseline of our existing workload, we went back to the existing agency procedure for adding, shedding, and deferring work when we get emergent needs, and we revised it so it now utilizes the same criteria that the common prioritization list is based on. So we now have a tool that as emergent work comes in, we can make quick and effective decisions about what to work on based on its priority and what work won't be done as a result of the new work. I'm very confident in the products that we've developed. We completed in early December, and having said that, I think that they'll continue to evolve. We have tabletops scheduled in the January-February timeframe to make sure that we can optimize around the common prioritization aspects of the work because as I mentioned, we were also looking at the end product or rebaselining as we created the common prioritization list. So if we move to the next slide, I'll talk a little bit about the criteria that we used to bin and rank the work of the agency across business lines and product lines. We concluded that the most important thing that we can do is to respond to current safety or security issues facing the agency, including emergency response. So we put all of those activities into the highest priority bin. And then below that, we went back to our core mission of rulemaking, of licensing, and inspection for existing facilities or facilities that'll be operating in the near term. And when I say facilities, I mean material licensees in our entire spectrum of licensees. We said those are our second highest bin by priority, followed closely behind by similar work for facilities or licensees that aren't going to be operating in the immediate future. And then below that, in our fourth bin, we put all the activities that are necessary to support either directly or indirectly the work in the first three bins. Just two things to say about the binning process. There are kind of indirect or support functions that when you look at them, they're integral and required for work in the first three bins. So for instance, an electronic IT system that's used for rulemaking specifically and directly, we bin that with the associated rulemaking, similar concept with facilities. And then the final thing I would say is just because work is identified in the fourth bin doesn't mean that it's important. Personally, my favorite example is payroll. If we don't have payroll, the rulemaking, licensing, and inspection activities will grind to a halt. So things in the fourth bin are important, but relative to our core mission, they're below those core activities. So if I could move to the next slide, please. So I've kind of tied the work of the agency to the four bins, but it doesn't really help us look for efficiencies. So the next thing we asked is, well, why do we do this work and how do we do it and are there more efficient ways to do it? And in doing that, we ranked each block of work into essentially three rankings. What component of the work is required to meet legal minimums in the applicable area? And we call that the alpha rank of that work that needs to be done. Then we asked, okay, well, there are many things that we do that aren't legally required, but they're tied to the principles of good regulation, clarity, reliability, openness and independence of our function. And those are prudent to do and appropriate to do, and we don't want to lose those things. So we call those the bravo rank within each of the activities within each bin. And then if there was residual work that either because of the way things have changed or because of a look for more efficient work, streamlining the work that didn't fit into A or B, we call that the Charlie rank within each bin. And we took all the Charlie activities that we found and moved them to the bottom of the common prioritization list in mass. So that's common prioritization. We have a procedure and a tool to use to look at incoming work. And if we could go to the next slide, we now transition into the rebaselining product, which I mentioned we now plan to give few two products on the end of January and in March timeframe. So the January product will reflect things like these illustrative examples where we found, essentially a low return on our investment for a level of activity, a level of activity in a diminishing return, an activity in an area where time has changed and we've learned more and there's an opportunity for potential savings. So I think the first bullet on development of internal procedures is pretty self-explanatory. In individual rulemaking, I think that there are many rulemakings that we have more information now about than we did when we started the process. And as we looked at the criteria, we concluded that they would fall into a lower priority at this time. So we'll make recommendations in that area. Development of correspondence is an example that there are things we can do in the near term. You'll see those in the January paper. And there are some longer term savings that we can't define what we would implement yet and we can't quantify the savings and efficiency in a quantifiable way. So we'll provide those to you in March with a request to continue to work on those. And then finally to talk about more of a program piece within the reactor oversight process, as you well know, we do continuous assessments of licensee performance. We have quarterly reviews. We have an end of cycle review. And when we built the ROP, we carved out some additional management attention at a mid-cycle review. The administrative burden of performing that has grown over the years. There have been repeated suggestions that we evaluate that. We actually had four separate staff suggestions in the September of timeframe to evaluate the return on investment for the administrative burden in the mid-cycle review for the ROP. And so that fell to the bottom of the priority list. With that, I'll turn the mic over to Jeremy. Okay, thank you Fred. Good morning, Chairman, commissioners. My remarks this morning focus on staff's efforts to affect changes in corporate support services in response to direction from the Congress, the commission, and feedback from our own staff. More specifically, Project AIM and a separate independent assessment by Ernst and Young, or EY, gave us clear direction for the need to change. The types of changes are far-reaching and in many instances may result in reduced costs or may improve service delivery or internal processes. Finally, others will enhance how our staff work and perform our mission. The next two slides will address specific recommendations stemming from Project AIM and the related EY report as well as staff's actions. Next slide, please. In response to congressional direction, the NRC contracted for review of the agency's overhead functions in comparison to peer agencies and what options might be available to reduce costs. The resultant report was issued in April, 2015 and we subsequently completed our assessment of the report and found merit in all of EY's recommendations. One of the most prominent recommendations from EY and from Project AIM was about IT security. There is no doubt that IT security is vitally important to ensure for the continuity of our mission, the protection of our assets and our information. I say this in light of very significant breaches at OPM as well as other agencies in the private sector companies. Clearly, we must ensure that our network and systems are properly protected and at the same time, we need to make sure that our processes and practices are effective, efficient and risk informed. We conducted research and benchmarked against peer agencies, the resultant report identified targeted six areas for improvement and proposed 15 recommendations. Based on my assessment of the report, I tiered the recommendations according to their impact on efficiencies, savings and improved cybersecurity measures. We've completed four actions already, resulting in a savings of $350,000 and reducing burden to our staff. The tier one recommendations will have implementation plans similar to Project AIM and will be tracked to completion by the EDO and the CFO. Similarly, the report recommended consolidating data centers. Our goal is to reduce down to two data centers, a primary and a backup. Progress has already been made in this area. In the last year, we've closed two data centers, Church Street and One White Flint. Another data center, Two White Flint will be closed later this fiscal year. The remaining ones in the regions and the technical training center will be closed in FY17 and 18. The EY report also made a number of recommendations concerning possible targets for centralization. The first recommendation related to the feasibility of further outsourcing certain financial processes. OCFO is developing plans to transfer accounts payable and accounts receivable to a federal shared service provider. OCFO is also planning to automate invoicing and license fee billing, which are currently manual processes. Once automated, NRC will be positioned to utilize the department treasury's integrated payment platform, which is another federal shared service. The second recommendation emphasized centralization and standardization, and to those points, OCFO will be centralizing regional budget formulation as well as travel authorization and travel fund certification. These will be completed in FY17. In addition, OCFO has already completed a feasibility analysis of allowance and fund certification centralization. Further work in these areas will begin once formulation and travel centralization is completed. Finally, new policies and procedures to strengthen and centralize controls over cost activity codes, or CACs, are in place, are now in place, and new non-fee billable CACs are now in use. Phase two of the CAC management program, which is the reform of code used for fee billing, is underway and will be completed by the end of the fiscal year. Next slide, please. Important item coming out of project aim work was a focus on process and workflow simplification. A common complaint is related conference room provisioning. Agency staff need to contact multiple people to request such things as a conference room, a projector, a laptop, et cetera. Staff wants a one-stop shop that can fulfill these requests. Making the request for services at one place for all things, and having effective behind the scenes, processes in place to fulfill those requests will help improve staff satisfaction. The initial approach will be in place this spring, and over time we will expand our service catalog. Another recommendation from project aim targeted employee productivity. Mobility is integral to how our employees can work away from the office. We also know that mobility means more than just email, calendar, and contacts. In response to commission direction, we are moving off of Blackberry and have developed a core set of principles for enhancing mobile solutions. Provide more staff with better capabilities at a substantially lower cost. Our approach includes a blend of Apple and Android devices, both phones and tablets, and an increased use of our current bring your own device, or BYOD software solution. The BYOD solution enables access to our intranet, share drives, and SharePoint. It also supports the use of commercial apps and overtime homegrown apps. The transition activities have already commenced. As I described many of the actions we are taking in response to project aim in the EY report, I can't ignore the fact that some of the supporting work relies on contractors and the need to improve consistency and quality of contractor tasking and reporting. One of the critical positions in NRC, and for that matter across government, are our contractor office, contracting officers, representatives, or course. Course makes sure the NRC requirements under the terms of the contract or agreement are met in quantity, quality, and cost. Numerous changes in new technology recently implemented in contracting and financial management has highlighted the need for cores to perform their jobs consistently across the agency. The Office of Administration with strong executive support from the CFO and NRC led a cross agency team to identify standardized sets of roles and responsibilities for core. Admin and their partner offices will have many of the tools in place by April 2016. Headquarter offices and regional offices are also developing implementation plans. Admin, NOR, and my own office, OCII, will be the first to implement the team's recommendations. As for the near term, the buzz from the staff that is that the work currently going on with critical support from our business process improvement team will improve processing time and efficiencies. Finally, EY recommended that NRC increase the use of cloud computing. Put simply, cloud computing emphasizes buying services from a third party instead of providing services on our own. The vendor would host us along with other customers. They would also maintain the equipment, patch and upgrade software, as well as protect the data. Acquiring services or capabilities as opposed to running them on our own on site is intrinsic to the re-competition of our current IT managed services contractor ITIS, which comes to an end in FY17. Efforts are underway to develop the new contract requirements. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Dave. Well, thanks, Darian, and good morning, Chairman and commissioners. I'm happy to be here this morning to discuss the Centers of Expertise efforts with you. As part of Project AIM, the commission directed the staff to evaluate existing centers of expertise within the agency and determine whether expansion of this model could lead to greater efficiency and effectiveness in accomplishing the agency's mission. We provided a notation vote paper to the commission on November 9th, and we recommended pursuing four areas for Centers of Expertise as part of Project AIM. As described in the paper, the working group that developed this paper included senior managers and staff from NRC headquarters and the regions, as well as representatives from the National Treasury Employees Union. As part of our efforts, we engaged potentially affected staff to ensure we did not miss any significant issues before we made our final recommendations. The working group also considered lessons learned from previous NRC efforts to establish Centers of Expertise, and those lessons helped inform us as we developed our recommendations. The staff reviewed lessons learned from the Transforming Assets into Business Solutions or TABS project, as well as the recent merger of the Office of Nuclear Materials Safety and Safeguards and the Office of Federal and State Materials and Environmental Management, as well as some currently existing Centers of Expertise, such as allegations, vendor inspection, and electrical engineering. The most significant lesson that we learned was that the greatest benefit that you derive from putting in place a Center of Expertise comes from being more agile in shifting resources than whenever responding to changing workloads, and if properly administered, a Center of Expertise can result in a more efficient and effective use of resources by streamlining the decision-making, the standardizing the work processes, enhancing knowledge management, and maintaining critical skill sets. Next slide, please. The working group deliberated on a variety of potential candidates for Centers of Expertise before we recommended the four areas that are included on this slide. At this time, the staff is recommending the Commission approve Centers of Expertise for allegations, external hazard evaluations, technical specifications, and rulemaking. For allegations, the staff proposed that the Allegation Coordinator functions that support the program offices and headquarters be centralized within the Office of Enforcement. For the external hazard evaluations for the new and existing operating reactors, NRO currently houses the majority of the agency technical expertise to evaluate seismic and flooding hazards and performs evaluations for both the existing reactors as well as new reactor issues. Moving the remaining NRO resources to NRO will make it easier to balance the work between the new and operating reactor projects as work on the post-Fukushima reviews and the combined license applications are being completed. And it has the added benefit of centralizing this function to support a potential merger of NRO and NRO should the Commission subsequently approve such a measure. For technical specifications, the bulk of the text-backed work remains in NRO with only a few FTE allocated within NRO for the text-backed reviews. Similar to the external hazard proposal, consolidating the text-backed reviewers within one organization, in this case NRO, will help balance the workload and also help support a subsequent merger of NRO and NRO. For rulemaking, the staff proposed that the Project Management and Regulatory Analysis staff for rulemakings that currently reside in three offices, NRO and NMSS, be centralized all within NMSS. Of course, the technical experts that develop all the technical basis for the rulemakings would remain within each of the program offices. As we were developing these recommendations, we were aware that there are several ongoing parallel efforts that could impact the number of proposed rulemakings and the rulemaking process itself in the future. However, we believe that those efforts do not necessarily impact the consolidation of the Project Management and Regulatory Analysis functions. And as a result of those efforts, if they have any results, any effort, any impact on rulemaking, consolidating all the rulemaking within one office will likely make it easier to shift resources to other areas if that's necessary. So if the commissioner approves the rulemaking center of expertise, as we move forward, the staff will take into consideration the commission's yet to be determined direction on a paper that you currently have before you on the commission involvement in early stages of rulemaking, as well as the results of the other ongoing project name efforts that Fred mentioned have common prioritization and rebaselining, which may also result in additional improvements and savings to the rulemaking process. In our view, pursuing a rulemaking center of expertise at this time is a good first step to prepare for a more efficient rulemaking process once the commission provides direction on your involvement in the early stages of rulemaking and the other project aim efforts on prioritization and rebaselining efforts are completed. So with that, I look forward to any questions you may have on centers of expertise and I'll turn it over to Michelle Evans. Thanks, Dave. Good morning, Chairman and commissioners. I'm here today to discuss project aim implementation in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. We'll provide an update on two specific project aim tasks related to operating reactor licensing process improvements and the transition plan for the merger of NRO and NRR. I will also provide insights into how NRR is considering additional opportunities to more broadly apply risk insights to enhance our decision making as directed in the staff requirements memorandum for the project aim report. Next slide. The commission approved the recommendation to conduct a process improvement review of the operating reactor licensing process. You noted in the SRM that the review of the process should be done on a schedule that does not affect the staff's ability to reduce the backlog of licensing actions. As you are aware, NRR has been implementing a plan and is making progress to improve performance in the processing of licensing actions which has resulted in reducing the operating reactor licensing backlog. First, we initiated efforts in fiscal year 2014 to stabilize and recover the licensing action backlog that was created by Fukushima related work competing for the same critical skills. This involved providing the operating reactor licensing program with additional resources, hiring supplemental technical support and implementing targeted process improvements. For example, since early in 2015, NRR management increased oversight on improving performance by routinely holding monthly meetings with the director of NRR to identify bottlenecks and to allocate resources to monitor progress and stay abreast of issues. Management also clarified expectations to staff regarding NRR processes and guidance. These expectations include a more rigorous approach in seeking additional information related to license amendment applications. These efforts remain effective and are achieving desired outcomes. At the end of fiscal year 2015, overall performance on completing licensing actions in less than one year was 88%, a 5% improvement from the low point of 83% timeliness in May of 2014. We expect further improvements in the coming fiscal year as the staff and management worked toward our internal stretch goal for fiscal year 2016 of 3% improvement over the fiscal year 2015 result. Also early in 2015, NRR management identified several efficiency initiatives to improve and enhance our existing processes. Initiatives related to the licensing process, acceptance reviews, risk informed technical adequacy and decision making are currently in progress and their results should contribute to overall operating reactor licensing process improvements. In addition to further enhance the predictability, timeliness and efficiency of operating reactor licensing reviews, NRR will conduct a process improvement effort that will be informed by both the current improvement initiatives as well as lessons learned on how the backlog originated and how it was resolved. Implementation of additional improvements and monitoring results from this process improvement effort will take effect during the second half of fiscal year 2018. Next slide. The commission approved the recommendation for staff to develop a plan to conduct a merger of NRO and NRR at the appropriate time. A team has been formed by staff from NRO, NRR and Region 2 to assess the merits of various approaches for a merger of the offices. They are working to identify efficiency gains, challenges and a potential timeline for the merger. Their focus is on the four broad areas for improving regulatory efficiency that are identified in the Project AIM Report. These are right sizing the agency, streamlining agency processes, timeliness and executing regulatory functions and making decisions and unity, that is establishing clear agency-wide priorities. The team is considering important drivers for the merger such as the macro environment of the U.S. energy sector and the expected near-term reductions in workload as some activities are scaled back or completed. Specifically, changes in the economy and the domestic energy sector have changed the outlook for both operating and new reactors. Economic factors have influenced the declining interest in new reactors and has also led to several operating reactors beginning decommissioning early. This has resulted in reductions in both the new and operating reactor business line workloads. In addition, several resource-intensive activities conducted within the operating reactor business line are now nearing completion or are complete, such as initial license renewal from 40 to 60 years, reviews for the Watts Bar Unit 2 operating license and the work activities associated with the Fukushima event. The team also developed key criteria for the merger such as a target combined number of staff for NRO and NRR at the time of the merger, a flat or declining workload, the need for mature processes in place for licensing and oversight of new reactors and a manageable number of policy issues under development. The work is on schedule. A draft business case for the potential merger is under development. The final commission paper is on track for June of 2016. Next slide. While plans are being developed for the potential NRO merger, as I just discussed, within NRO, we are actively focused on internal reorganization activities needed as a result of reduction in workload expected in the near future. In our fiscal year 2016 staffing plan, recently submitted to OCHICO, we identified near-term organizational changes involving the divisions of Japan Lessons Learned and License Renewal. The Fukushima-related workload is declining as we continue to implement actions to resolve tier one, two, and three activities. All activities are on or ahead of schedule. Management has developed and is implementing a plan to transition staff from the Japan Lessons Learned Division over the next several years. It is envisioned that by the beginning of fiscal year 2019, one branch will remain to focus on the final closeout of the Fukushima-related work. License renewal workload reductions over the next few years are expected to result in a significant reduction in staffing needs by late calendar year 2017. Our projections do factor in the uncertainty of the number of plants that will submit applications for subsequent license renewal between 2018 and 2020. We recognize the need to ensure we have core competencies available to complete the remaining first license renewals and to prepare guidance and plans for subsequent license renewal to ensure we will be ready to review the first expected subsequent license renewal applications in the 2018 to 2019 timeframe. We are also factoring into our thinking the awareness of other agency initiatives such as Centers of Expertise and the Potential Merger of NRO and NRO. Therefore, we are currently considering a broad range of options that would likely result in organizational changes. It is important for whichever option we pursue that we ensure knowledge management in critical areas while also best utilizing staff to support a broad range of needs and functions. Next slide. So now I'd like to transition to a topic directed by the commission and the staff requirements memorandum for the Project AIM Report. You directed staff to more broadly apply risk insights to enhance our decision making. In NRO, we have several initiatives ongoing within the Operating Reactor Business Line which focus on enhancing our ability to make risk informed decisions. The goal of these initiatives is to increase the efficiency and the timeliness of our decision making as well as help focus our activities on those issues of greatest safety significance. The first area I want to address is the development of a risk informed approach for addressing low risk, low safety significant compliance issues. NRO has formed a working group made up of headquarters and regional staff to develop a process to risk inform our response to low risk, low safety significant compliance issues. In recent years, a number of licensees have identified non-conformances with their licensing basis design requirements such as tornado missile protection. In general, the issues have been determined by staff to be of low safety significance. Despite this, conducting and reviewing these operability determinations has been very resource intensive for both the licensee and the staff. This has raised questions about how we address low risk compliance issues that merit some discussion on how we can address these issues in a more efficient and effective manner. This could potentially reduce the level of resources that both the staff and the licensee apply to low safety significant issues. The working group has made progress in defining a framework for discussion and we are in the process of engaging the industry. The next step will be to conduct a public meeting early in the new year. The second area I want to touch upon is risk informed licensing actions. We in NRO as well as licensees have an increasing interest in pursuing risk informed licensing actions. Many of the current risk informed licensing applications include changes to the technical specifications since they were originally defined without the benefit of risk insights. Incorporating risk insights into our decision making can provide the justification for changes such as allowing flexibility and allowed outage times by calculating a real time risk informed completion time or relocating certain surveillance frequencies out of the technical specifications so that they can be changed in order to optimize the testing frequency. We are currently completing a pilot review of a license amendment for what is called TechSpec Initiative 4B which is the initiative that allows flexibility and allowed outage times. This initial pilot review has revealed the need to clarify ambiguities in the current guidance. Given that we have additional reviews in house to complete we are taking steps to provide clarity to the industry so that these subsequent reviews can be completed in a more efficient and effective manner. In addition within NRO we are enhancing our ability to efficiently review these actions through staff training on the risk informed initiative as well as additional management oversight throughout the review effort. And then the last example that I'd like to touch upon is crediting and mitigating strategies in licensing and oversight activities. In response to Fukushima events licensees have made various changes to their plants to address our requirements and have improved the safety of the plants over their pre Fukushima levels. Because of the added safety defense in depth Fukushima safety enhancements may provide benefits to risk informed decision-making initiatives to improve regulatory efficiency. Staff is working with the industry to determine how to appropriately credit mitigating strategies in licensing and oversight activities. Some potential areas for credit include risk informed license amendments, notice of enforcement discretion and reactor oversight programs significant determination process. We began meeting with the industry in October on this effort. The industry is actively engaged recently submitting applicable position papers which are currently being reviewed by the staff. So to summarize in NRO we are actively pursuing and incorporating the use of risk insights into our regulatory decision-making activities. Now I will turn the presentation over to Miriam Cohen. Thank you. Good morning, Chairman and Commissioners. The last time the commission was briefed on Project AIM we were just entering fiscal year 16 and beginning the major activities associated with strategic workforce planning. Since that time we've made significant progress toward meeting those goals. Next slide. I'd like to begin talking about where we currently are. As you know there was commission direction that set a target of 3,600 FTE by the end of the fiscal year. I'm happy to report that we've achieved this target and are well positioned for fiscal year 17. To achieve this success we have targeted external hiring for only those critical skills not available within the NRC workforce and through the development of our pipeline positions, our NSPDP as well as our summer program. We have also been facilitating internal staff movements based on workload shifts. For example, we use targeted solicitations which allow us to fill vacant positions, I'm sorry, which allows to fill vacant positions on a volunteer basis by seeking applicants from those pools of employees where we have extra capacity or overages within the agency. As we move through fiscal year 16 but with an eye on 17 and beyond we anticipate a more accelerated attrition rate based on the early out buyout. Our normal attrition rate is around 5% but with the early out buyout we are projecting an accelerated attrition rate this year of around six and a half percent. As you may know the early out buyout included 49 individuals broken down into the following categories. 10 GG15 supervisors, 29 employees in corporate support and 10 project managers at the GG15 level. The early out buyout strategy has indeed facilitated attrition in areas where we have or where we predict overages. These strategies will put us at an end of year target of our fiscal year utilization of slightly under the 3600 target. Next slide please. We have focused on strategic workforce planning by analyzing office staffing plans to identify areas where there is extra capacity and potential vacancies based on current funding levels. Recently we have met with all office directors and regional administrators to identify the impact, the, I'm sorry, to identify the impact, the impact of anticipated future work and how that will have an impact on position and skill needs. From this information we've identified a few mission critical skills where we are or will be doing focus work to mitigate the risk of not having these skills. Two specific areas are PRA and cybersecurity. We've also identified some skill imbalances where we believe there's extra capacity in areas where we lack defense in depth. We believe these imbalances can be alleviated by redeploying staff within the agency. As I mentioned on the last slide, one way we've done this is through the targeted, through use of targeted solicitations. As you know, these are uncertain times. One of the greatest challenges will be to understand the impact of other aim initiatives such as rebaselining on our future workforce needs and we need to be insured we can be flexible and using all available tools to make sure we have the right people in the right place to meet our mission needs. As we move into the future, it's vitally important that we prepare supervisors and staff for this changing landscape. It means helping supervisors being comfortable, having those conversations to encourage staff to be flexible and to take advantage of opportunities that may exist in the organization. It also means helping staff transition to areas where they may not have the same comfort level but where we may need them to have because of the greater need. This piece will result in a more fungible and agile staff as we move into the future. With that, I'd like to turn the presentation over to Maureen Wiley. Thank you very much. I could have the next step slide. In addition to the topics we've discussed this morning, we're making great progress on a number of additional tasks and so I'd like to highlight those milestones. As Vic indicated at the start of the meeting, the rebaselining assessment is well ahead of schedule. You will be receiving a comprehensive list of activities that can be shed, de-prioritized or performed with fewer resources by the end of January. More than two months earlier than our original due date of April 6th. In addition in early March, you'll receive a list of longer term opportunities for efficiency gains or scope changes as well as the estimated projection of significant workload changes through 2020. The strategic workforce plan described by Miriam will be provided to you by February 8th. This plan will ensure that future organizational needs will be met without disruption. Based on the agency's priorities developed in the report, we will develop a plan for positional needs assessments of critical and or safety related positions to determine skill gaps or surpluses. The one-stop shop will be rolled out in April of 2016. This intranet based solution, the NRC service catalog, will provide a streamlined method to make requests for services and is expected to reduce agency costs. As well as provide more efficient and effective processes, eliminate multiple ticket systems and paper forms, not to mention staff frustration. The materials program in regions one and two were consolidated in 2003. NMSS is evaluating further consolidation of the regional materials program to determine whether further consolidation would be more efficient. The evaluated input will be used to provide a specific recommendation to the commission for review in May of 2016. If potential changes or consolidation is recommended, the project team will include a high level implementation plan with that submission. And lastly, the staff is assessing the corporate support functions in the regions to identify whether they may be standardized or centralized so as to reduce overhead costs and to promote delivery of consistent products and services across the regions and the agency. The result of that review and evaluation will be documented in an information paper and submitted to you by April 30, 2016. And now I'd like to turn it back over to Vic. Thanks, Maureen. We are making progress in, according to our overall plan, and are committed to delivering high quality results. Each task discussed today has an effective project management plan or approach, and we're actively working them to completion. As Fred mentioned, we've completed the common prioritization process with the revised ad shed process. As Darren discussed, we're currently implementing the recommendations we received from the Ernst and Young overhead assessment report. And as Dave presented, we've offered recommendations for gaining agility and some efficiencies using centers of expertise, which are currently under review by the commission. The progress we've made is already bringing near-term benefit. For example, we've made significant progress in reducing the reactor licensing backlog. Our common prioritization efforts have identified efficiencies that we can implement now, such as delaying or canceling some rulemaking activities, as well as implementing printing and digital correspondence improvements to save resources. The progress we've made is also positioning us well for successful outcomes. As a result of greatly limiting the vacancies, we post externally and offering certain eligible employees early outs and buyout opportunities we're currently projected to meet our fiscal 16 FTE target. The business plan to support the potential merger of the offices of new reactor operations and nuclear reactor regulation is under development and on schedule, which will inform the commission paper due to you in June. I'm happy to see that our leadership team and our staff are working together to be more mindful of our costs and the need to be both effective and efficient in our work. As we honor the new opportunities to become more efficient and more agile, we will integrate those implementation plans to ensure that we can productively complete the work while maintaining focused on our safety and security mission. And with that, we're ready for your questions. Okay, thank you all again for your presentations. We'll begin the question this morning with Commissioner Barron. Thank you for your presentations and for the work all of you are doing to increase the agency's efficiency and agility through Project AIM. I want to start with a big picture question about how we're approaching rebaselining and searching for efficiencies. There are different ways we can do this. One approach is to take a close look at our processes and procedures to see if we can streamline them to do the same work with fewer resources. I think that's probably the hardest way to find savings, but it's also probably the most beneficial. It's hard work to really look at your processes and figure out how can we be more efficient in what we're doing. Another approach is to just shed discrete tasks without changing the processes surrounding them. That produces some short-term savings, but it doesn't really make us a more efficient organization. It just makes us an organization that does fewer things. When we see the listed activities that the staff proposes to shed or modify, how much of each of these approaches are we going to see? I'm looking at you, Fred, but if someone else wants to chime in, that's fine too. All right, thank you, sir. I'll start. I think it's interesting as I think through how we develop the guidance and criteria and the work that's been done. And as I go back and look at the low priority work that's identified, I think my view is that the two approaches actually end up being merged. The looking for efficiencies was definitely done and we have process streamlining activities both in the near term that we'll describe in January as well as some of the things that'll take longer to work through to an executable and with a clear quantifiable savings that you'll see in March. But as we went down that path and we look at streamlining process to ensure that we can define it and control it and measure it and quantify what our savings are, we end up becoming more discreet in the activity that's shed. So as I look at the list today, in the near term, quite honestly, I was surprised when I did this, it looks much more discreet, but I don't think it's discreet in that we're stopping work that has high payback. I think it's discreet because we found inefficiencies, we found opportunities to streamline and we're zeroing in on the specific actions and activities. I think in interacting with the steering committee early in this process, one thing we definitely wanted to avoid was coming back to the commission with potential efficiencies that we couldn't hold ourselves accountable to having an implementation plan, to knowing when we were done, to having a specific savings, and I think we've avoided that largely in what you'll see in January, but it does make it look more discreet. Anyone wanna add anything to that? Well, I'm glad to hear that because I think it really goes to the heart of the project name effort and I think it obviously makes sense to identify any unnecessary work that we're doing, but I think our focus really needs to stay on identifying true efficiencies and it sounds like that's something that you are also focused on, so I appreciate that, thanks. I also wanna ask about the staff's recommendation to establish an agency-wide center of expertise for rulemaking to be housed in NMSS. Right now, NRO and NMSS each have a rulemaking branch and as I understand, at the center of expertise, the proposed center of expertise would pull all three branches together in NMSS. Can, this is probably a question for Dave, can you walk us through how a rulemaking would work in practice under this proposed approach of a center for expertise and the kinds of kind of sub-questions I have in mind is who's making decisions about the rulemaking, who's deciding what's in the regulatory, the technical basis, who's deciding what's in the proposed, the draft proposed rule, the draft final rule, who's accountable for the timeliness of the rulemaking, who's supervising the rulemaking employees in NMSS who are working on rules that are kind of led by other offices or the technical basis is coming from other offices, so can you kind of fill that out for us? What does it mean to have a center of expertise for rulemaking? How would it work? Where's the accountability and the kind of lines of authority? Yeah, well, thanks, Commissioner. That's a good question. In fact, that's many good questions. So let me take a shot at a high level at this and then I may ask Scott Moore from NMSS to provide a little bit of details from the NMSS's point of view. We realized when we went down the path of trying to recommend centers of expertise that there's a lot of good questions like that that have to be answered as you implement. And in fact, we even acknowledged in the paper that if we run into any showstoppers as we go through this that says you know this just really isn't gonna work out. We will stop and come back to the commission and say we identified something we didn't know before and so maybe this isn't the best idea after all. But we feel like at least on an initial look we've done a pretty good job at scrubbing the pros and cons and we think we can move forward with it. As far as where does the rulemaking, project management and rig analysis piece live, it can really live in a lot of different places in the agency. If you recall back in the 90s, it was in our office of research that did the rulemaking for us. And at that time the commission decided that it really wasn't part of research's core mission to do rulemaking so it was decided to put it back out into the program offices who have the technical expertise more of the, they have more skin in the game if you will on the regulations because they're closer to the regulations themselves. And so when we looked at where would you consolidate it back together? There were a number of factors we considered and part of it was we first looked at just combining NRO and NR back together and had the reactor regulation group get back together. But we took a broader look and said well if you're gonna make that move anyway then is it worthwhile to look at the whole organization to see if it's worthwhile? There were a lot of organizations we considered within the agency but we ended up with NMSS. The preponderance of the discussions we had with the different offices was they still wanted it to live within a program office somewhere, a technical office and so NMSS seemed to make sense. And so moving the, I think there's a branch in each office now that does rulemaking. When you consolidate you'll move those folks to one office under NMSS. But because we've made so many strides with the rulemaking coordination committee and the common prioritization of rulemakings everyone across the agency pretty well agrees on what the rules are that are important and how you move forward and so we have the prioritization there to do that. The technical expertise itself as far as if it's a reactor regulation or a new reactor regulation or materials regulation that you're concerned with that will still live within the program offices just as it does today. The way it works now is you have a working group gets together and there's a project manager that runs the working group but the technical folks live with whatever office that deals with that regulation. That's who does the technical basis development that goes on and then the project management and the rig analysis piece happened regardless of what the office is that has to do that. So moving all that to NMSS we don't see changes the process all that much. What it does is give you an agility that says if rulemaking is going down in one area but up in another area it's easier to change resources, program management resources, the project management resources to help do that in the rig analysis piece. The technical folks still live within each of the technical organizations. So that was the thinking and the reason for moving it to NMSS if you're gonna do this now and move it was we were thinking about if you're going to merge NRO and NRR it's probably a good idea to pull some resources out of there to help make that merger more smooth as you go forward because otherwise you'd have a very large office if you keep all of it within in that office. So that was the thinking that the staff came up with and Scott if you wanna talk a little bit about how would it work in NMSS I'll let Scott give you a few words. Thank you commissioner. Scott Moore acting director office of nuclear material safety and safeguards. If the commission chooses to move forward with the center of excellence in NMSS I think we're well positioned to take it and carry out the direction. As Dave mentioned as the rulemaking office we would have responsibility for project management schedule, timeliness and milestones and the rig analysis. We would work hand in hand with the technical offices and be dependent on the technical expertise of the various other technical offices for the technical basis and also the rule content the technical aspects of the rule content. And in effect we're doing this now but at the division level within our office. NMSS's division with rulemaking responsibilities conducts rulemaking for a variety of other activities within NMSS for instance transportation spend fuel casks, fuel facilities, waste and security. We work with insurance security rules that are outside of the division that does the rulemaking itself. So the rule makers rely on the technical expertise of the individuals within those other divisions for all of the content and the input for the rule. We would just pick up operating reactors and new reactors and all of the other material that went with them. So the rule makers understand that they need to rely on the others expertise. Who's responsible for keeping the rule on schedule. The rule makers are, we would be who's responsible for providing the technical basis and the technical input to it. The technical side is and we would work hand in hand and so far it's worked fairly well. Who's accountable for the rule? We're accountable for the rule and the technical side is accountable for the input to it. Who supervises the rulemaking? We would supervise the rulemaking. Well thanks, I appreciate that. I think having and it sounds like you're well on your way on this. If we proceeded with a center for expertise in this area you are all kind of looking at the right issues on this and thinking it through so that there's really a common understanding going in of who's going to be responsible for what and who's accountable for what. I think the success of this type of approach really is going to be dependent on that if we go forward with it. Vic did you want to? I agree with you a hundred percent. It's certainly another opportunity. Should the commission decide to support these recommended centers of expertise it's another opportunity to display the interdependence of the collaboration across office, across business line even, that we've seen even in some other areas. I mean there are certainly examples of where there's clarity on roles and responsibilities. Different offices can carry out their role on a larger effort. I look at our efforts on license renewal where in our reactor license renewal where the regions have responsibility for implementing inspection program but there's an important coordination that has to occur at that interface. So those interfaces are important. New construction, high-tech management. It's all at the interfaces but there needs to be clarity on processes and roles and responsibilities and of course leaders have to make sure that it all works and I could go on and on and to describe the areas where this has happened in the past. We've learned lessons and we'll have the opportunity to implement them here. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner. I have a few questions. I tried to get the panel to address but just sort of starting off, I appreciate the work that's going on not only as reflected by the presentations given this table but the other participants from all offices and from all levels of the agency and I hope for me to continue to encourage that involvement I think is very important. In many ways, I think Project AIME gives us an opportunity for a reality check and says where are we in this environment? I can think over, I've been here too long I guess but I can think back over points in my career and just after Three Mile Island and at the point where TMI action plans items were being done, the early, very early 90s most reactor licensing was done. We also had some early decommissioning of some of the very early plants like Yankee Row and Hanum Neck coming up and then moving forward. So again, I encourage that, continue to encourage the engagement and I guess I'll ask the first question and maybe I'll direct it to Fred but others can chime in. Some of obviously an effort like this where it sort of focuses on what we're doing in an environment where we have some retraction which is not in itself the point of AIME. There are anxieties created and about what does this mean? What does this mean? How do I contribute to it? So one of my questions would be what are you doing as a project team to sort of manage that anxiety or address that and put the focus on where it needs to be with the project. Fred, I'll turn to you first. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So the managing the change process and communication I think's been recognized as critically important throughout the life of Project AIME. We've put a lot of effort into communication. We just had a town hall meeting with staff a week or so ago. Vic's been out to each of the offices and the ones he couldn't cover either I or an office director filled in with these talk with all supervisors who has steady stream of EDO updates going out. And in addition to all that work, we still have opportunities to improve in this area. So one of the things that I'm working on right now is to pull in the agency communication council and gain some additional resources with specialty skill in the communication area. It's actually an area, we have a very strong partnership going on. It's an area we have worked with our partners on communication, messaging and means and methods. We need to continue to do that. So critically important, we've put a lot of effort into it. We can and need to do better. It's high on the priority list to accelerate even further and I think the rebasaligning paper to the commission its availability will be a major milestone that we need to have a definite effective communication strategy around. Okay, thanks. One of the things, other things you touched on which has struck me because it's an area there are risks, benefits, but there are also risks on and it was with respect to the question of development maintenance of internal procedures. And I can recall over the years in terms of you get an IG audit, for example, a classic IG audit finding is you don't have sufficient controls, i.e. procedures over a particular process. Michelle talks about in terms of trying to address assuring sort of consistency on terms of the risk-informing process in terms of evaluation of findings that come out in terms of findings that may be made from inspection at particular plants. So tell me a little bit how you're sort of, as I say, managing those risks and benefits on procedures and where you really see that focus. So I would offer, I think as we, in where we're at, we started kind of with a plan for a plan where we've planned, we're in execution in many of the tasks now and we clearly recognize the need, as Vic said, clear roles and then it goes to Commissioner Barron's question, clear roles and responsibilities proceduralized prior to implementation. Again, we've had a really strong partnering, a partnership relationship and our labor partners have been very open and constructive in their feedback to us on the need to do this right and it's important to the offices. So in our integrated implementation plan that we provide updates to you monthly, as we have moved through the core, the contract officer representative task, for example, you'll see that we have actions and milestones for proceduralizing the revised process and it's our expectation that each task will have a similar level of detail hitting that critically important part of change and being able to sustain what we put in place. Part of what my raise, my question was that an example of lower priority was development and maintenance of internal procedures. I'm sorry. So I may not have been clear. So that's what I'm trying to understand because again in the context, I can think of IG audits, I can think of trying to improve consistency. The old, I remember 10 years ago the effort to update management directives, some of which reflected, for example, organizations as they existed in 1985 instead of 2005. That's where my concern, a concern is where's the risk and benefit in that, in putting that as a lower priority, what do you do to in effect manage the risks of that? Right, exact. I'm sorry. That's okay. You actually in your question provided the answer as we see it. So as we look at improving the internal management directive process, which is a specific long-term project, the goal will be to make that process faster, more efficient and easier to implement so we actually stand in a better place with respect to current procedures and expectations, making sure that the policy part of the document, which should be a little more difficult to change is separate from the details of how we do work, which is important, but it doesn't have to, it's a little different than the policy and I think one of the things we find is we've merged those two in a way where it's incredibly inefficient to update things that need to be updated regularly. And that's the point and thank you. We got there slowly or at least I got there slowly. One of the things we recognize as Fred alluded to is that it is our management directive update process is very lengthy and time consuming and we believe that there must be some efficiencies in there that we can obtain. This is not to reduce the number of directives or in any way diminish the adequacy of our internal controls that comes from having clear guidance to enable us to do our job in a way that's scruable and appropriate, but it's the updating and the creation of guidance documents that we believe there's some efficiencies to be gained. Okay, great, thanks. Maureen, could you describe for us the next steps in timing for incorporating the work we're doing, the rebaselining into basically the budget development process and related that ultimately in the fee rule? Certainly. So we have already been able to implement some of the opportunities to shed in the final stages of our FY17 budget submission. So we had included some at the early stage, some of the items that Darren described around centralization of travel and budget formulation for the regions done already. New elements have been included for the FY17 budget, which we roll out in early February. And then as the commission votes on those elements that we believe can be shed that have policy implications, it is our intent to do as we have done in previous years to clearly articulate to our appropriations committees where there might be additional savings in our budget going forward for 17. We also begin the FY18 budget process in approximately March. So because the federal budget process is pretty much constant, we can then dovetail those savings in. And of course, as we do the work on these longer term items, which 18 and out, we will feed them into the 18 and 19 budget processes as well. So we have to work with OMB about how we do that, but the feedback that we've had is that everybody wants us to succeed in Project AIM and they want us to be able to take advantage of those savings when they're available. Okay, thanks. Commissioner Savinaki. Good morning and thank you all for your presentations. I will offer some observations and reactions because although I engage with a lot of you on these topics, it's a rare opportunity. Today's meeting is a rare opportunity to be able to speak broadly, to offer encouragement and praise where I can to offer perhaps some cautions where I would like to add my observations about where we're headed and how we're approaching some of these issues. I want to begin by quoting very briefly in the rebaselining instructions that were sent to program offices. The very first paragraph of the document before it got to the procedural aspects was a message from the EDO and CFO to all of the offices and part of it reads, this is a time of change and it is not within our control to alter that reality. The agency will be smaller in the coming years than it is now. As we work to become smaller, there is unique opportunity to look inside of ourselves, our organizations and our processes to find the things that impede our ability to make quality decisions in a timely manner and that frustrate us and our fellow employees. It is incumbent on us to fix the inefficiencies that are within our control. Please do not miss this opportunity and I want to really align with that message and express that I hope that that was heard and internalized by the staff from the EDO and CFO. It's a much more eloquent statement of something that I tried to communicate at the agency's all hands meeting in September when I express the view that I don't think project AIM is about being less than we are now, although as this acknowledges, we are rightsizing which I don't like because it's not a direct term and in truth we are downsizing and there's an explicit acknowledgement in this message from the EDO and CFO that we will be smaller, so we will be fewer but I don't think that we need to be less than we are and I do see it as an opportunity and I appreciate that our senior leadership is communicating that forward. How do we communicate that well? I'm a believer, it won't surprise people based on my conduct, I'm a believer that in times of change I think the way that we approach that with integrity is an almost painful at times honesty with each other about things and I want to acknowledge Miriam's message that she just gave us moments ago where she said it's vitally important that we prepare supervisors and staff for the future landscape. I think the early out by out appeared to be well communicated and I want to commend OChico and its staff for that. I think it was well developed and well executed and I think these types of smaller scale, successful implementation and execution of elements of aim build a growing confidence and that's good because this is a multi-year effort with many moving parts and so not every aspect of it is likely to be a successful but another thing that encourages me is our commitment to apply an improvement, a process to our improvement process as we implement it so it can be called sharpening the saw or any number of terms of arts that have been used in management and organizations over the years. I will offer some specific feedback. Michelle, I appreciate your presentation and I think NLR is a very sizable office within the agency, has things already underway, candidly had some initiatives in business process improvement underway prior to AIMS initiation and in the commission's action on the project AIM recommendations as I said, we didn't seek to disturb that in any way. Your presentation indicates to me that there is a pretty full scale ahead momentum that continues in NLR. Congress is in the stages of completing their action on our budget for the current year and accompanying that it appears likely that they will enact a set of reporting measures, some of which specifically address the licensing backlog and so I know that as the commission oversees your work, people will be overseeing all of our efforts on this front so I think as we predicted we're gonna have sustained and perhaps heightened external interest in our implementation on project AIM and so we move forward. I do want to maybe build off Commissioner Barron's questions about the centers of expertise that paper is in front of us and it's not the purpose of today's meeting to litigate or adjudicate the outcome on that. I don't always share the unbridled enthusiasm that may exist for centers. I see some things going on in the paper that I would ask you all to think about. You've looked to history and you've talked about use of centers over the course of the agency's history. I might suggest to you that in occasions you are conflating a bit consolidation or transfer of a function with the creation of a center. They operate differently and I think that there have been consolidation of construction inspection and reason to consolidation of aspects of materials programs. It's different and Commissioner Barron was exploring this. It's different from needing to keep an element of a function in a program office and yet consolidating some other aspect to be honest with you. When I look at rulemaking and I appreciate that Commissioner Barron selected those out of the four that you're recommending because perhaps I would feel differently about allegations maybe intuitively that makes a bit more sense to me. Rulemaking is the clearest case and to a degree the external natural hazard center and the tech spec center are gonna fall victim to the same concern I'm about to articulate which is that so people have to continue part of the function so the technical part of rulemaking is done in NRR. Right now if I'm in NRR Dave Skeen did a good job of describing this. I have to coordinate within there one interpretation of the rulemaking center is now I will have to go and coordinate with NMSS and then NMSS is gonna do the coordination that I would have done but will do it on my behalf with perhaps not the level of knowledge that I would have had about it. Is it the kind of efficiency that only a bureaucrat could love because now I have a whole new stuff. I do in general believe that efficiency comes from flattening and that I reside such sincere confidence in the quality of people we have at NRC which I've become a bit evangelical on we're capable of so much and that's why I'm often hard on NRC because when it's like a family when people are capable you just really you wanna see them perform at that level. I know we have to keep the potential merger of NRR and NRO as something we talk about like a hypothetical it is true that I have not succeeded in persuading a majority of this commission to explicitly direct that that merger will occur but I'd be very very surprised if any informed NRC individual within the sound of my voice really believed that five years from now there will be what was the terminology that was used I think that Michelle had a statement about the changes in the domestic energy sector have changed the outlook and they have so I don't think anyone within the sound of my voice who follows the issues thinks that five years from now there will be a quantity of new reactors work in front of this agency that would justify the sustainment of an entire office which for those who don't know at NRC is a very large organization offices are not small so we can treat it as hypothetical the market has decided this matter for us and many Americans wonder why it takes their government so long to concede to the obvious but at some point we will move forward Michelle has talked about the mechanics of the staff's planning to bring those organizations together but I would ask in the centers of expertise paper when I read a statement that saying centralizing external hazard center in NRO centralizing the functions in NRO normalizes the workload okay I also have 20 years of continuous federal service and there's a certain bureaucrat speak normalize the workload in NRO in my view you don't artificially inflate the workload of an organization whose workload is declining when it is inevitable that those or that organization will be merged with another organization that simply prolongs the transition time so I'm being real honest with you because I began at the beginning by saying change isn't made any better by sugarcoating it and talking about it in ways that make it sound like I'm gonna shield people from reality everyone's an adult and is ready to and it's probably watching the external landscape even more closely than we are so I think we need to have an element of accepting the reality and moving forward on some of these things I do wanna ask one final point and this might go to Michelle you talked about the fact that in business process improvement we're looking at things like a more rigorous approach to seeking information on license amendment requests I know we're looking at our licensing workload again change is hard and I think sometimes as commissioner Baron noted the hardest type of change is really perfecting things and making them more efficient easy types of change are changes to wiring diagrams which I worry that some aspects of the centers of expertise that's the wiring diagram change and efficiency much as whatever commission sat and decided that the office of research shouldn't have it centralized and it was decentralized here we said along after commissioner Saviniki's gone is another commissioner gonna sit in this very chair and go oh my gosh startlingly we find that this ought to be moved back to the program offices funny thing about 25 years of federal service we watch this pendulum go back and forth between centralization and decentralization but I think on licensing you know in doing it differently is not the same as doing it better I will note that I was troubled by I'll close with this a letter that was recently sent regarding a licensing matter it wasn't NLR but pre-application readiness assessment observations on the draft early site permit application for the clinch river nuclear site NRC staff communicated to TVA in order to conduct reviews on a more predictable schedule NRO is committed to a more rigorous acceptance review process that rigorous acceptance review Michelle you can say when you said a rigorous process on getting additional information it triggered this with me it says as such greater consideration is being given to aspects of an application that could result in a review extending beyond a projected 30 month schedule that NRC expects for ESP reviews when extending beyond a projected 30 month schedule that NRC budgets for ESP reviews so when extending beyond that aspects and when those aspects are identified in an application careful consideration will be given to whether an application should be docketed does that mean that if like a license amendment request or a new licensing review is considered to meet it's gonna exceed a model milestone schedule or goal we've set for itself we're not gonna docket it is that part of what's being considered for project aim? Does that make is that familiar to you at all so is that the direction we're going that if we can't do a power upgrade in 18 months we're not gonna docket something Jennifer Dr. Jennifer Eul has come to the microphone to illuminate this matter thank you. You're putting me on the spot this Jennifer you're on the director of the office of new reactors and looking at the wording in that letter it does appear to represent that we are only gonna be accepting applications that we can complete in 30 months and that is not what we meant by those words I would say we've had some communication with the licensee via phone call about what we actually didn't mean by that we are of course looking at being more efficient and an inefficient review sometimes starts from an application that really shouldn't have been submitted and I'm all about having docketing standards and acceptance review so and I didn't mean to put you on the spot the troubling thing would be is if we just thought it was complex we weren't gonna start absolutely not and so it was really trying to say that we didn't believe based on our readiness review that the technical justification for what they were looking to do in the case of the size of the emergency planning zone or the technical justification for looking at the seismicity of the site and doing some natural phenomena work there we didn't believe that that was adequate and so we were implying to them that don't come in with this because we will not accept this because it's not adequate to represent the phenomena of interest and it did highlight that we recognize that perhaps we're being more strict now in our acceptance reviews in large part because it represents or it turns out to be a more efficient review process if you have a fully justified some middle you don't have the request for additional information that gets unruly and is not efficient so that was what we were meaning by those words and I see now they don't necessarily represent that meaning. Okay, I thank you for that clarification and I apologize. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Commissioner Austin. Thank you, thank you for your presentations. I wanna start out, Victor, with kind of maybe reinforcing a point made by Commissioner Schvenke where I also applaud the message that you and Maureen put out and the message from the EDO and CFO to the offices. I know I had a chance to be with Victor up in region one just last week with an all hands group and I've been to two other regions this fall and I've been reading all the agency-wide EDO updates and other communications including from Maryam and her team on various aspects of the personnel side of project name and so forth. Question I have and I'll ask you for Victor maybe Maryam will also wanna comment on it. What kind of feedback are you getting from the staff as to how well project name type issues are being communicated? So thanks for your question. I think there's a growing level of awareness. I do believe based on the meetings, the all hands meetings that I've participated in both here and headquarters office and in the regions that the office directors and regional administrators have done a very good job making sure that folks are aware of the importance of what project name is, what it isn't, what the offices and the regions can do and individually what they ought to take advantage of in this time. So there's a growing level of awareness. There has been some anxiety and some confusion so we're being very sensitive to that, taking advantage of our colleagues in the NTU to better understand what those issues are and we're taking them head on. The only other point I'd make is the sense of urgency that you've described in that first paragraph is was intentional. We need to have I believe that sense of urgency to move forward in this project. Reminded when I was 17, I guess when we were both 17, 18 years old after I first took the oath of office everywhere you had to go you had to run. There was a sense of urgency built or designed into your DNA and I believe that's what I sense now that everyone recognizes that we need to be more urgent about change and I believe that that change will be built into our fabric, our culture even after rebasalining is completed, that we need to look, be mindful of areas where we can be more efficient and more effective and proactive in identifying those and building plans to include them in our process. So I do sense a growing awareness and appreciation for that opportunity. So I've also been out traveling and I think what's been important in the feedback that I've received is that they appreciate that we speak directly to their concerns. So acknowledging uncertainty, inviting them to participate, giving them agency and treating their concerns fully as best we can. I've had great feedback. Obviously people talk to me much more about the corporate types of activities but even in some of those areas where we touch on the work that's being done in our programmatic business offices, I think there is a recognition that we can do this together and that while we can't take away everybody's anxiety by participating and making it work, in the end it's better for everyone. Thank you. I also know that I've had, I will hear from Maria later on and I appreciate and others she'll tell us her perspective in a few moments but the feedback I've gotten from my periodics of senior leadership at this table is appreciation for the active engagement with the NTEU organization throughout Project AEMS so I've been very encouraged to hear that. Not to say there's not some issues or problems but the engagement's been there so I've been encouraged by that. Fred, I'm gonna ask you a question. And this goes to ad shed and rebaselining. I'm gonna be very blunt. Sometimes the commission receives papers and I can give you a number of examples where we see the collective input from the staff filtered through management is trying to achieve a consensus approach and not trying to upset any office director or any part of the organization. So I gotta tell you, I'm a little bit worried on the how do we ensure an institution wide consistent approach and rebaselining and ad shed. Well, I think the steering committee would assure you that not offending office directors is not a problem with Fred Brown. I think I've offended everyone in the agency, probably six or seven times in the last five months. Five months. Yeah. Five months. That's probably true. So under Vic's leadership in Marine, we actually had a meeting with all the office directors as recently as Tuesday afternoon of this week and we all believe that to be successful we need to do this together. This is all about one NRC and it's consistent with the message that was provided to the offices back in literally August timeframe, September timeframe. And it's with a great deal of satisfaction that I can say that the commitment and the engagement throughout the staff and the leadership team has accelerated to the point where in Victor's words and the dialogue with the office directors this week, this is a product that is based on input from the staff and the subject matter experts and line management. It's owned at the office director level. We continue to refine it and literally at this point the refinement is around making sure that we can deliver on the promises in the low priority portion, a common prioritization. And we may find opportunities to add some things into low priority as we really scrub the list but we're dealing more now with can we really do what we've said we wanna do than the other way around. It's not forcing stuff in. So it's very satisfying to me where we're at and I don't have to say more than that. That's fine, you know where I'm coming from. Okay, I'm gonna speed up here. Miriam, I've got a question for you. And it's already been addressed by Commissioner Svendiki and starting the EDO CFO statement about we're in a very different place. Things have radically changed. And we've seen some examples. I wanna get into directed reassignments. There's my thrust to my question here. We've had lots of success the last couple of years moving people from NRO to NRO to deal with Fukushima type issues. At the end of the day, we can't have people doing work. People have to work where the work is. And we can't afford to not do that. We have responsibility to the taxpayers, to our licensees that pay the fee basis. And so certainly at some stage, I would expect that there will not be a voluntary type approach taken on to how we approach or people working with the work is. Are there any barriers or challenges that you see in having people reassigned where they need to be to match the workload? I think the biggest issue is cultural. I mean, quite frankly, we've been very good at moving people to where the work is. You know, sometimes it takes a little bit longer. But in fact, yesterday I actually had a conversation with Bill Dean in light of some of the organizational changes that Michelle alluded to in terms of where NRO is going, where their work is going into 17, and the need to start now to figure out how we can redeploy, reassign staff to the areas where there's going to be work in the future. And so I think what we really need to do is start having those conversations that I alluded to earlier with supervisors and staff so that if you've been doing X amount of work your whole career, well, the agency might need you to kind of expand the aperture a little bit and try to do something else. We're not very good at having those conversations as supervisors in the organization. And one of the things that's very good about this organization, you and I have talked about this, is that we provide very good opportunities for staff to expand their knowledge and skill sets through, whether it's formal training on the job training. And so those opportunities do exist. And I believe that as we take the steps now, knowing where we're going in 17 and beyond, that we can address those challenges. I think the biggest thing, as I alluded to earlier, is in providing the tools necessary for the supervisors and staff to understand that they have to be a little bit more flexible on both ends to be able to meet those needs for the agency. OK, well, I'm just going to end this particular, I'm going to go a little bit over my time here to apologize. But I feel so strong about this. And elsewhere in the private sector and other federal agencies in which I've served, there's been a clear policy. If the work isn't there, people don't stay where they were. They go to where the work is. And it's not an optional kind of decision. Right, and I would say it's a directed decision. Right, and I. We cannot afford to do otherwise, this is my personal. Right, and I think you use the right word as afford, because in the past when there was agency, the surplus is right in terms of cash available, you could afford to fund overages. And we're not in that situation anymore. So people will need to be redeployed to where the funded work is. OK, I'm going to make a couple of quick comments and one last question for David. Michelle, I want to applaud you, Bill Dean, and the entire NRR team on the progress that has been made on the licensing backlog. I think that is extremely significant. I will not ask you a question this about his comment. I hope that we can move out of the JLD earlier than your slide said on 2019. I think that's too late, just my personal view. I'm not asking you to comment, but I think that it's time to more quickly eliminate that organization and to roll things back in the regular line organization. Dave, I was not going to ask a question of this, but the thoughtful question that Commissioner Barron asked on the rulemaking, I've got to ask this, because I think you teed up some really categorized and abandoned in a way that's helpful. So I'm going to use an actual example. And if you want to have Scott come to the table, that's fine, but this is my last question. I'm a contextual person. I can't think about abstractly how this might work. And so I'm going to go back and we have experience with two rules I'm going to bring to the table here. One of them is mitigation for beyond design basis event rulemaking. The other one is the Digital INC IEEE 603. We'll have a meeting on that this afternoon. But I look at those two reactor-centric significant efforts. And I'm similar to Commissioner Barron on his accountability, who's in charge, who's driving this. I can't say, well, this is a project manager in this organization that is having a train run on time, but all the technical stuff is over here in a different organization. I'm struggling to figure out in the context of those two recent examples how this might work, because I can't draw a clear line of demarcation between project management process and substance. Help me out here. Yeah, so again, let me take a shot at this. And then Scott, if you want to weigh in, that's fine, or anyone else at the table. I go back to the process of rulemaking and how it works, right? You have working groups that do rulemaking. And you have a project manager that gets usually a multi-discipline team of technical experts. And it could impact two different offices. So I may already have rules where we have an NRO and an NRR technical expert on the rulemaking team. So the project management, they lay out the schedule, they lay out, this is when we have to get things done, this is the public interactions we have to have. But the technical basis, the technical basis has to come from the technical. No, I'm sorry, I understand that. That's not the question. The question is, in the reality, how the mitigation of beyond, let's just use that one. You're heavily involved in that, your prior experience. There's tremendous numbers of public meetings with NGOs, with industry, with NEI, et cetera, that evolved that whole rulemaking over a long period of time. So I don't see how it's possible to separate out the process piece from the technical substance of the rule piece. So how have that worked in that one example? OK, that's the question. I would go back to, even if you combine this into one office, you will have project managers that have more experience in reactors or materials or new reactors, right? That's the backgrounds they have. That's the regulations they understand. And so as you look to fill that group, if people leave, if a reactor type person leaves, I would look to replace them with a reactor type person, a project manager that could help do reactor type rule makings. But what you hope to do over time is cross train some of the project managers to say, if the work is more in one area than another, can I have a project manager fill in and do a rulemaking that maybe that wasn't their original area of expertise, but they've learned over time or been cross trained to do it. So that's what we're looking at as far as putting the groups together like that. It's not that I would just have all NMSS materials type project managers running all the rule makings for reactors or whatever. You would have people with that background, that knowledge, because basically what you're going to do is move the people into one office that have that expertise now. That's not going to change any, right? There will always be some number of folks with their primary expertise in materials and some with existing reactors and some with new reactors. But if you could cross train some so that if in one particular area the rule makings increase and in another area they go down, then I've already got the project management group together. And it's easier under one management chain to shift those resources back and forth. So that's the thinking. That's kind of what we're thinking about. I appreciate it. Scott, do you want to say something? Scott Moore. Dave is absolutely correct. And in the example you bring up, for things like public meetings, they would still involve some technical staff to answer the technical questions. The project managers that are involved with the reactors themselves would be responsible for setting up the meetings, carrying out all the logistics, and going to the public meeting. But there would be some technical staff that would be involved in the presentations at the meeting as well. OK. Thank you. Thank you all. Could I, Commissioner Marin, just to make sure we've sort of equalized time, is there another question you'd like to ask? The answer is always yes. Well, let me just follow up on the rulemaking center for expertise concept. So I think Dave did a very good job just explaining the potential agility benefit of going this route. If you pool the three branches together in a directorate or whatever it's going to be, and you have different levels of work in those three areas you pointed out, you have a pool of people that could cover any area. So I get that. Can you talk a little bit about the potential downside? Because it seems to me you get a benefit, I think. The staff thinks there's a benefit, not just an agility, but in just in terms of having all the rulemaking folks together, learning from each other, talking to each other, maybe it helps with retaining them in the agency. You could talk a little bit about that if you want to. But that element, the downside that would seem to exist, but I want you to talk about this and tell me if I'm right, is that while you're pulling those people together, you're pulling the folks, the rulemaking folks in NRR and NRO, further away from the technical experts that right now they're working with in those organizations and in those offices. So how do you weigh the pros and cons of that? There's a benefit from having the rulemaking folks together. There's probably a disadvantage from pulling them further away from the technical folks. Is that a real concern? How do you look at that? Yeah, so again, I'll take a shot at this. You're right. There are downsides to doing this, right? There was a reason that they put it closer to all the program offices in the first place because each office felt that they could control their rulemakings easier, right? Because I have this certain closeness of the technical staff and the rulemaking project management folks. But in truth, I think back in my time in NRO, I was a rulemaking branch chief at one time many years ago. We had the project side of it. We controlled the process. But we didn't make any of the technical decisions on what would be done and when the rules would be done, on how you're going to do the rules. We had lots of processes in place that the commission would direct what the rules they wanted done with the proposed rules and whatever. And then we would follow through on that. But it was always our division of engineering or our division of safety systems analysis. Those are different divisions already on different floors in the building anyway, right? So while you work with those folks, to me, sitting in one white flint or two white flint and having your working group meetings, I don't see all that much difference in it. Yes, you're all right. There is a danger to that and that is a negative. That's a downside. And that's something we have to do. If the commission decides which you'd move for with the rulemaking center of expertise, there's a whole implementation thing we have to go through. We are working on guidance that says, before you make any moves, the first thing is communicate, communicate, get stakeholders together, understand what's going to happen. You have to develop an implementation plan, a communication plan. You have to talk to the people who are going to be affected by this. Does this really make sense to go down this path? And all we've done so far has had some preliminary discussions with potentially affected staff to find out were there any showstoppers in their view of going forward with this. And we didn't hear any. We heard some concerns. As you always hear, you're going to move staff from one group to another group. There are concerns about that. And we have to work through those. But we didn't hear anything that said, absolutely not, this isn't going to work. So if we run into that, and as we promised in the paper we sent you, if I run into that as we go through this process, we'll come back and say, you know what? We found something that is a showstopper now. It wasn't as easy as we thought it was going to be to get this done. In terms of the benefits of this proposal, as you see them, and anyone could answer this, but you're doing a good job, so you keep going. What's the principal benefit of this? Is it agility? Is there some other? Why do this? What's the reason for doing this? Is it superior? I'm not saying it is superior. I'm saying it is another. I wanted it. It's a method you can do, right? This is a method that we can do. We make it work, but it's not superior to what we have. That's very odd to me. But this goes to the heart of my question, right? It's set up a certain way now. It's a change, and it costs 100 million. Maybe there's a really good reason to change it. That's what I want to know. What's the reason? What's the best way? In my view, and others can weigh in if they think, the advantage of doing this, you're looking at rulemaking is going down in general anyway. If they go down more in one area than another, you can end up with a branch that had three or four people in it in one organization, which doesn't really make sense as a branch to live. If you have a couple of branches like that, it's better to combine the branches. If those branches are in one place, rather than spread out in a couple of different offices, it's easier to do that consolidation if that's the case. The other thought of putting them together and moving them over to an end-of-assessinist case is that if the commission decides you are going to merge NRO and NRO, you move more resources out of there that you could say is not the primary mission of NRO, which is licensing and oversight of the plants. So that's the added benefit you get out of doing this. And in my view, that's what I saw as we went through this. Open it to us. I agree with Dave. He covered what I think the primary benefits are. It also standardizes service delivery. But I think Commissioner Spinnicki can answer your question. It remains to be seen if it's superior from the current. I'm not sure that we can say that right now. And it does cost money right to set up centers. Yes, ma'am. I think we should put her down for a definite maybe. Anything else? Well, thank you. We had obviously a robust discussion. And at this point, I want to invite Maria Schwartz, Chapter Executive Vice President of the National Treasury Employees Union for Union Revarks. I presume somebody's not calling in to the discussion. Anyway, welcome, Maria. Good morning. Good morning, Chairman Burns, commissioners, Edie McCree, energy managers, and my fellow bargaining unit employees. I'm pleased to be able to be here this morning to speak on behalf of NTEU, Chapter 208. And equally pleased that many of my comments have already been touched on today by the commission and the agency's AIM team. NTEU established a project AIM working group composed of Chapter 208 officers and members. They have devoted a good deal of time during the development of the project AIM initiatives, some of which you discussed this morning, in an effort to make a meaningful contribution at the partnership table, particularly as these initiatives are implemented. NTEU applauds the agency AIM team for their dedication and their mindfulness of the importance of being transparent and regular communications with our employees. NTEU feels that management has made a concerted effort to include NTEU during the agency working group discussions as the project AIM 2020 initiatives have progressed. In spite of this, and as Chairman Burns pointed out, project AIM, what conceived of as a measured approach for the NRC that must fulfill its safety mission while operating in a changing environment, has weighed heavily on our employees. Why? Because of the uncertainties associated with it. It is a truism that one should never underestimate the power of purpose. Based on rigorous analysis of research conducted over 30 years with 17 million employees, Gallup identified 12 core elements that best predict employee and workplace engagement and performance, which, of course, is critical to efficiency and effectiveness. Of those 12 core elements, I know what is expected of me at work ranks as number one. Project AIM 2020 envisions a robust, agile, and strongly engaged workforce. This will not happen without dedicated and highly skilled employees and leaders that lead. As the AIM team works with the offices to develop recommendation on how the agency should prioritize its work and the commission makes decisions on how that work can be done most effectively and efficiently or not at all, Project AIM 2020 statement that, quote, employees are our greatest resource, unquote, must be the driver of those decisions. Employees must be able to see themselves as valued members of the agency in the decisions that are implemented. This means ensuring that decisions are based on appropriate criteria and that the impact on our employees is accurately considered and reflected in those decisions. As the NRC's FTE decreases, it is important that our remaining workforce does not misinterpret the agency's response to a changing environment, believing that the reduction in staff is hard evidence that people don't count. The message should be, in fact, quite the opposite, that our employees matter more than ever. This is why NTU has focused on three areas as we have provided comments on the various Project AIM initiatives we have partnered, roles and responsibilities, processes and procedures, and training. An agency focused on these areas will provide an environment where employees know what is expected of them. They will also understand the processes and procedures that are available to support success. And finally, they will be able to acquire the training necessary to develop the skills they need now and will lead into the future. The agency's decision must ensure that our employees get the right message. Our employees must know what is expected of them, how the work should be accomplished, and how it will be evaluated. And finally, are confident that they will have the necessary tools, including training, to be successful. This will ensure that our employees can see themselves and is an engaged and productive part of the NRC workforce in 2020. Thank you. Thanks very much, Maria. I would like everyone to thank you once again for the presentations today. A lot of hard work goes into this, as well as, more importantly, as you carry out the recommendations in the Project AIM initiative itself. And I think you've provided a good overview of progress. You've come up and tried to answer some of the questions, particularly in areas that may be of more controversy or more debate on it. And I, again, appreciate the straightforward responses that you've been giving. And in closing, I want to thank all staff that have contributed to the Project AIM 2020 effort. You're a dedication to seriousness with which you undertake the work and ensure that the agency effectively executes its mission is greatly appreciated by the commission. And with that, we are adjourned. I wish everyone happy holidays and a happy new year.