Challenge
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) is the government agency responsible for the safe and effective decommissioning of the UK’s civil nuclear legacy. The NDA plays a strategic role in implementing government policy, managing 17 sites and ensuring it has the right skills and resources to fulfil its mission. The industry in the UK has an aging workforce and the NDA needs to take a robust approach to retaining the knowledge it needs and ensure it leads the industry in innovative ways to address this issue.
DNV solution
DNV has created a tool for the NDA to identify critical knowledge, and has validated the tool in pilots with some key NDA departments.
DNV piloted an approach to knowledge retention at the NDA’s largest and most complex site and has subsequently supported the NDA in implementing an enhanced version of that approach within its organization to help inform and influence the industry more broadly.
The approach has two elements. Firstly, a web-based application was designed to help assess the potential risk of knowledge loss across NDA staff. Secondly, the NDA knowledge management team was coached in methods to capture and transfer knowledge in a number of pilots.
Outcome and benefits
- The NDA is now able to identify its critical knowledge and review its approach to managing that knowledge for the benefit of its mission.
- The NDA has a robust risk assessment programme, can identify where any potential vulnerabilities may lie in terms of knowledge availability over the short to medium term and can deal with those risks proactively.
- The NDA has developed a toolkit for supporting knowledge capture and transfer that includes audio-visual methods as well as knowledge maps and digital knowledge ‘bytes’.