Page 54 - FCW, July 2020

CaseStudy
The secret to NRC’s
telework agility
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had a relatively smooth transition to telework thanks to a willingness to collaborate and adapt on the fly
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July 2020 FCW.COM
BY STEPHANIE KANOWITZ
The key to moving the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s workforce from 98% onsite to 98% remote this spring was preparation, according to a top IT official at NRC.
“Not only are we changing the environment people are working in from at the building to at home, but we’re also changing the means by which they’re getting to our networks and we’re changing the technologies they’re using in order to get secure access to information all at one time,” said Thomas Ashley, director of the commission’s IT Services Development and Operations Division, during a recent virtual event on telework sponsored by FCW.
“Until about two years ago, we ran largely a desktop situation with no mobility capability,” he added, but recent efforts to adopt new technology eased the transition during the coronavirus response. In early March, NRC employees received instructions on how to use Microsoft Office 365 at home, connect to the agency’s virtual private network and access NRC’s application storefront using Citrix.
The commission also hosted an agencywide Telework Test Day when the number of NRC employees working remotely went from a couple hundred — the average number on a given day during normal times — to 1,400, or almost half the agency’s workforce, Ashley said.
Furthermore, NRC worked with service providers and the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that its trusted internet connection could handle the leap in usage.
“We have a very robust network, but it’s a private MPLS cloud,” Ashley said. That worked well for physical workstations onsite at NRC offices, but “our trusted internet connection was not sufficient for a full remote telework situation.”
In one week, NRC quadrupled its 400 megabits/sec trusted connection to the commission’s headquarters. In addition, the IT team created dashboards to monitor and balance incoming internet traffic via the VPN and automated alerts and interventions for certain problems. Currently, the VPN supports almost 3,000 concurrent connections.
“Technology adoption happened at a rate I’ve never seen before,” Ashley said. “People were adapting to an agency-issued workstation failure by adjusting their means of connecting via their home computer and Office 365 and using our enterprise identity hub to authenticate the one-time passwords.”
Some of the changes may be here to stay, he added. For instance, NRC created a web portal through which nuclear power plant licensees can send information securely. A backend workflow distributes that information
to the appropriate offices, removing a previously manual distribution process.
“We learned quickly that much of what we do in operations can be done remotely,” Ashley said. “‘Portable work’ is what we’ve labeled it here at the NRC, but my contractors and government workforce have continued to work as effectively — and some have argued more efficiently — in a remote capacity than we have been to date.”
He also credits “collaboration at a level that the NRC has not seen before.” For example, the commission’s employees now average 50,000 Skype sessions per week.
Additionally, an NRC training center in Tennessee that typically provides in-person instruction for nuclear power plant inspectors and other personnel pivoted to virtual instruction and has offered 960 self-study and instructor-led courses to some 38,000 students. NRC is also onboarding new employees virtually, including summer interns.
Ashley said the biggest lesson NRC has learned is the importance of training employees. “Technology moves a lot faster than technology adoption, so we learned that we have to continue to invest to get that education to our user community,” he said. “We have to learn how to shepherd people to technology to better enable them to work from wherever it is they may be.” n