One of the main methods by which Executive Branch Departments communicate with key stakeholders, such as Congress, is still the paper letter. For example, the Department of Energy (DOE) responds to numerous letters from a variety of Congressional sources on a daily basis and is frequently required to submit reports to different Congressional Committees. These communications are critical to maintaining relationships with Congress. While on the surface it may seem like a simple task, answering the mail turns out to be a complicated process.
Background
The DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) is responsible for the risk reduction and cleanup of the environmental legacy of the Nation's nuclear weapons program, one of the largest, most diverse, and technically complex environmental programs in the world. The EM program alone conducts cleanup operations at 38 field sites in over 15 states, with a workforce of more than 34,000 employees. More than one-third of Congress is intrinsically linked to the EM program. This includes the member in whose district the field site resides and those members surrounding the site where workers live or environmental impacts are felt. Finally, there are the Committees and Subcommittees of jurisdiction. All of these stakeholders receive frequent correspondence from EM.
The Approach/Solution
EM had a complex, but not unique, problem. Subject matter experts and senior managers were spending increasing amounts of time producing correspondence. The concurrence process to approve a piece of correspondence and have it signed and leave the Department is quite exhaustive. After a Program Office, like EM, has approved a piece of correspondence, it must be entered into the DOE tracking system and sent to support offices (General Council, Office of the Chief Financial Officer, Congressional Affairs, etc). Often, in order to meet a deadline and under pressure to get a letter “out of EM” and into DOE concurrence or if a piece of correspondence took a long time to be developed, letters with errors were approved. Creating a letter that was incorrectly addressed, not formatted properly, or contained unsuitable text led to an increase in time to produce correspondence, as multiple revisions had to be made. That reflected poorly on the Program Office and the Department.
Project Performance Corporation (PPC) understood that a simple approach to this complex problem was necessary, and developed the Congressional Correspondence System (CCS), which enables the creation of correctly formatted letters and labels.