tig brief - Air Force Inspection Agency

IN FOCUS
Nuclear
Weapons
Technical
Inspection
Oversight
Col. Scott Edwards
Defense Threat Reduction Agency
Kirtland AFB
Over the last two years, the Air Force
Inspection Agency (AFIA) and the
Defense Threat Reduction Agency
(DTRA) have conducted oversight inspection
programs to ensure inspection programs across
the Air Force and Department of Defense
continue to
be valuable
to the nuclear
mission.
Recently, both
agencies took
a step back
from their
demanding
inspection schedules to conduct a joint AFSO
21 Rapid Improvement Event (RIE). The
RIE focused on improving communication
and coordination between oversight teams to
identify opportunities to optimize independent
processes and to improve leadership’s
confidence in the nuclear enterprise oversight
programs. Over the course of a week, key
members of AFIA and DTRA oversight
inspection teams carefully analyzed every
aspect of both agencies’ oversight inspection
processes.
The RIE concentrated on improving and
optimizing the oversight inspection process
by addressing potential improvements in
inspector training, clarifying higher guidance,
identifying obstacles to communication, and
16 Summer 2011
establishing a
clear avenue
for sharing
information
while
conducting
independent
assessments.
The RIE team
identified
“communication triggers” in both agencies’
oversight processes to establish a common
framework of information that would enhance
their independent assessment processes. In
short, AFIA and DTRA will talk more often
at certain points in the process to establish
the facts of an inspection event and submit a
coordinated request to external sources. This
will improve the oversight inspection process
tremendously by establishing a common
baseline of information for each inspection,
thus reducing the chance of differences
between teams when assessing the same
situation. The new target for each oversight
inspection will be to:
• Request information from the same source
• Coordinate requests between AFIA and
DTRA
• Refine guidance and resolve ambiguous
items
After establishing common baselines of
information, AFIA and DTRA will springboard
into separate deliberation methods to maintain
the independent nature of both agencies’
processes.
The hard work was not finished—the team
also codified the arrangements needed to
execute this process through an action plan.
The action plan addresses the issues identified
and enables the oversight inspection processes
of AFIA and
DTRA to
evolve into
the desired
state of
establishing
common
baselines of
inspection