Recent leadership changes have created an opportunity to realign Operations, strengthening our workforce and increasing Navy shipbuilding throughput.
The demands facing our shipyard are clear: significant workload, increasing ship complexity and a highly competitive market for skilled labor. Together, these conditions require us to think differently about how Operations is structured and how we support our shipbuilders performing the work.
Effective immediately, Operations will be organized around three primary areas:
- People and Process: The foundation of our business, hiring and training the right number of skilled people in the right places, achieving performance expectations, while ensuring strong process adherence for rework reduction and quality improvement
- Throughput: Driving daily progress on our vessels by eliminating bottlenecks, maximizing production, and ensuring our “center of the shipyard” activities in shop and unit construction are paced to support waterfront schedules
- Mission Assurance (Test): A unified structure for Independently testing and delivering vessels, demonstrating the final quality of ships and their systems to ensure they operate as designed
We are aligning Operations around People, Throughput and Mission Assurance to improve coordination, remove barriers and increase ship production, while maintaining our commitment to safety, quality, schedule and cost.
For this realignment, several Operations leaders will assume new or expanded roles:
Lance Carnahan, Director of Production, will lead the People and Process elements of Operations. He is responsible for performance, staffing, skills alignment and partnering with the Maritime Training Center of Excellence to ensure training aligns with needs. Additional focuses will include process adherence and rework reduction to minimize impediments.
Joel Shell, Director of Unit Construction & Ships Management, is responsible for achieving bill counts and increasing throughput in shop and unit construction to best support ship and construction managers. He will focus on leadership and strengthening partnership with Programs and will serve as the leader for construction managers as they assemble, complete and deliver our ships.
I am establishing a Mission Assurance department led by Director Brad Trumbaturi. The department will bring Machinery, Electrical Test and Test & Trials together under a unified structure responsible for independent quality assessment, testing and ship completion. This realignment reflects the close coordination required between Machinery and Test, while separating Electrical Test from Electrical Production to strengthen independent oversight of final construction quality.
David Davis will continue in his role as Test Director as he supports Brad’s transition and nears his well‑deserved retirement later this year.
Dave Smith, Director of Field Industrial Engineering, will lead performance assessment and execution of industrial engineering activities focused on tactical performance improvement. This change will support the recent company announcement which aligns Field and Program Industrial Engineers with the production areas they support.
Amy Rowell, Chief of Staff for Operations, and Dr. Anna Bourdais, Director of the Maritime Training Center of Excellence, will continue in their roles and Johnny Nungesser will continue his role as Director of Special Projects.
Andrea Goff has recently assumed the role as my Executive Assistant and will also serve as Employee Engagement Focal Point, acting as the conduit for engagement activities and the assessment of their effectiveness.
This represents a significant change to the Operations organization, driven by a single goal: increasing ships throughput for our Navy customer. That remains our primary measure of success.
While leadership responsibilities have realigned, the organization will not operate differently at the working level. With this new structure, people will be able to perform their work with clearer accountability, better coordination, fewer barriers, stronger training alignment and faster issue resolution.
Please give this team your full support as they navigate these new responsibilities.
Donny Dorsey
Vice President, Operations