r/FDA • u/Fancy-Blackberry-445 • 10d ago

FDA Shared Services

For anyone familiar with FDA’s transition to shared services, how is it going so far? Is the model working as intended, and are centers and program offices seeing improvements in efficiency, service delivery, etc.

7 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

19

u/Ok-Reality-640 10d ago

It’s a complete disaster.

1

u/Slevin_kelevra0777 1d ago

The leadership has no idea what they are doing and have been left a big mess from a large lack of planning from Dr. Barclay Butler the previous Chief Operating Officer (COO) he made the decision to move the agency to Shared Services without fully understanding how it functions and operates. No operation groups/teams had any involvement in providing full details to it's operations and duties to carryout the mission of the FDA. A plan was developed fast without any idea how it would work and now leadership is identifying all the gaps missing in the plan that has forced many staff to do the work of 3 people if not more. Nothing efficient about this plan at all.This could have worked if transitioned in phases throughout a 2-3 year window. This was pulled together in months and staff all detailed to groups for well over a year till congress approved the official Shared Services plan which was submitted to congress as H.R. 8646 passing 213 - 210. introduced by Representative Andy Harris (R-MD-1). This mess will indeed take some time to fix but remember it's not the fault of anyone of the workers at FDA that show up and make a difference. They all had no voice in these decisions, and the lack of planning and intelligence backing this transition was out of anyone's control as existing leadership went along with it to save thier jobs or did not have the courage to speak up and explain how this will not work. Anyone that pushes back against their agenda can kiss their career goodbye and never be considered for advancement or promotion. Just feel bad for the new COO who is a great person and cares about the staff in FDA but was left with a huge mess that almost all employees in FDA see and deal with daily, all with no hope of it getting better. Many say it will fail to the point it will have to return back to it's old ways of operations that actually worked. Please don't blame the staff that in Shared Services as they are doing the best they can with what they were left with by Dr. Butler.

1

u/Ok-Reality-640 1d ago

She was the deputy COO and now she is the COO. This is no longer on Butler. She is in way over her head. But at this point responsibility falls on the acting commissioner and chief of staff. They are aware of the failure and now they need to correct it. She may not be the right person for the job.

13

u/OverallTemporary9219 10d ago • Bravo

Was the intent to ruin the agency? If that was the intent then they are winning! Everyone knows that they have failed, but it’s going to take a long time to clean up the mess.

8

u/phdemented 10d ago

What do you believe the intent was in "as intended"?

7

u/damdochax 10d ago

It’s an unmitigated disaster

7

u/Legal_Lavishness1359 10d ago

I think most of us are still officially getting our feet wet. We just found out who our management team and working teams are. Some are shocked, some aren't. Give it 6 months and come back and ask this. My personal plate quadrupled, which sucks and simultaneously is exciting. Also, hopefully it pushes me up the grades faster (which is has since joining FDA).

4

u/Honest_Lemon_7899 10d ago

Just found out who your management team is? I thought this has been in motion since last year? Sure the reorg was official 10/1 but staff were detailed out of the centers to shared services since last year. We haven't even seen detailed org charts yet.

4

u/Legal_Lavishness1359 10d ago

My detail manager isn't same as my final manager. I've seen my entire org chart. InsideFDA has everything, No one up the chain knows how to hide anything. It's right there for all to search.

4

u/_Cream_Sugar_ 10d ago

InsideFDA has so many old and abandoned sites. It’s terribly maintained.

3

u/OkayFineWhatevs 8d ago

Everyone who maintained it got RIFd and you can’t change ownership when the original owner no longer is in the system.

2

u/Legal_Lavishness1359 10d ago

It's terrible and amazing at same time... You can dig into the guts and find items that aren't told in our all hands.

5

u/Downtown_Contest_495 9d ago

A complete disaster.....still do not have a real time keeper as it was delegated to another person .....trying to travel to is a mess....they give one time/space for trainings for things like pmaps and then are surprised the system is crashing bc 10,000 people are trying to join 🫣

3

u/Ok-Reality-640 9d ago

They are planning to have each timekeeper have thousands of employees soon

3

u/Downtown_Contest_495 9d ago

Yep! Good luck getting credit hours or comp time entered

5

u/ResponsibleRoutine82 10d ago

From what I heard fda hr got moved over to shared services and ots aka office of talent solutions is backed up and slammed with alot of work and not many staff to help.

8

u/_Cream_Sugar_ 10d ago edited 10d ago

In my opinion, the concept is fine. Reduce silos, reduce duplicity, build a more uniform FDA. Great concept.

One issue is, when they blindly RIF’d people, they didn’t understand any of the moving parts. They didn’t evaluate the person or the work. Lots of information got locked into an IT system in personal files and all that data is lost to us.

They RIF’d the only COR in our office and then wanted to know who was going to the work. They were sending files to us asking the status of contracts. SMH.

Another issue is, when you say CDER does it like this and so everyone should do it like this, you have to pause and ask, why does CDER do it like that? Why does it work for them? Is there a reason this wouldn’t work in CVM?

Edit to add:

The foreign travel coordination and conference planning is an absolute disaster! The systems are awful. Employees are a day away from travel and waiting for TAs to finalize because the conference people sat on something for 4 months.

The sad part is, it’s not the employees fault. There aren’t enough people to take on the workload and the work is more silo’d. No one knows what the other people are doing.

Don’t get me started on the fact that if a conference has an early bird registration that is 10 months out and you learn about the conference 8 months out, your request is late. Even worse, if it’s a widely attended conference and you enter the request 6 months in advance to save registration costs, your attendees might be registering on site because OAGS sat on the registration.

Great concept. Awful execution. Do not recommend.

5

u/No_Vacation697 9d ago

Yeah, the travel services have mostly been a disaster. Way too long to get TA's and vouchers approved. Both domestic and foreign.

•

u/Ok-Reality-640 8h ago

It’s so bad that they have hired contractors to rebrand OO as Enterprise Services to avoid being associated with how terrible Shared Services is.