INTERVIEW
LT. GEN. TODD SEMONITE ON ENGINEERING REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE IN THE U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS BY BILL COSTLOW, USACE HE ADQUARTERS
Your top priority is to “Revolutionize” the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). Could you tell us about this initiative and how it’s maturing? Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite: We’ve had a dramatic increase in construction requirements and an unprecedented number of natural disasters in the last three years. The disaster supplementals from Congress, and increasing construction missions from the Department of Veterans Affairs to U.S. Customs and Border Protection [CBP] have propelled our budget from $26 billion to more than $58 billion. We need to evolve to Revolutionize our delivery. Revolutionize corresponds with DOD’s [Department of Defense] three priorities: readiness, modernization, and reform. I prefer the word Revolutionize over reform, though. Reform has a negative connotation that an organization is broken – that isn’t the case with USACE. We are the world’s premier public engineering capability, but we can’t rest on our laurels. USACE is going to be to engineering what Uber is to taxicabs. You can go almost anywhere in the world and use Uber Eats to order lunch on your phone from a local restaurant and have it delivered to you by a company that we would never have thought about a few years ago. That’s the level of change we’re looking for to Revolutionize our command. Think of Google and Apple and how they’ve revolutionized the way we do things. Along with our growth in mission, America’s aging infrastructure requires a new way of thinking about project funding and we need to figure that out. We need to look around, harness emerging technologies and work with stakeholders to find innovative new ways of doing things – then have the courage and drive to implement real change. 10
Some of these tasks can be done internally – I call those below-theline efforts. This is a review of our processes to make sure they are efficient. Policies that made sense a few years ago don’t always work as intended down the road ... that means constantly streamlining and “leaning down” our processes. I’m asking leaders to make risk-informed decisions: We need to take risk with bureaucratic processes that don’t meet the intent of delivering the program. We will not take risk with integrity, law, or concrete and steel. This is about empowering people to get the bigger task done, to deliver the project on or ahead of schedule, at, or below price and never, ever compromising quality. If we can reduce bureaucracy by 50 percent, it will help us deliver the program that is increasing by 200 percent. Other things we need external help with – I call those abovethe-line efforts. Most of what we do is affected by regulation, policy, or law. Sometimes those things slow us down or cost more so there needs to be a conversation that helps us meet the spirit of that policy or regulation while getting the job done. The conversation needs to be: “Hold us responsible, but untie our hands so we can be more responsive.” I’ll get into more of that later. The bottom line is we’re questioning all of our processes and other agency processes that impact the way we do business, subject to our guiding principles of project management: 1) on or ahead of schedule, 2) at or under budget, and 3) never compromise quality. Could you give us an example of a below- and above-the-line effort? We issue a lot of permits and some of the most challenging have been 408 permits. These are for third party changes to a federal civil works project. So, if a municipality wants to install utility poles
