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When setting performance goals and developing measures to track success at meeting those goals, agencies should better coordinate with one another, panelists said at a congressional hearing Wednesday.

Agencies encounter common hurdles in compiling annual reports required by the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, panelists told lawmakers at the hearing. But managers often fail to converse with colleagues at other agencies. The Government Reform Subcommittee on Efficiency and Financial Management invited experts from selected government groups to critique implementation of the decade-old GPRA.

That law requires agencies to set broad performance targets and demonstrate progress toward meeting goals. GPRA also asks agencies to look at whether particular programs are meeting expectations, but agencies have not paid as much attention to this requirement of the law, according to subcommittee staff members.

The Office of Management and Budget, however, has picked up some of the slack by completing formal reviews of a sampling of federal programs each year. Lawmakers are considering legislation that would require future administrations to complete similar evaluations at least every five years.

Agencies have improved at measuring performance in the 10 years since Congress enacted GPRA, panelists told lawmakers. But they would be better off if they coordinated with one another to develop common measures for similar programs, panelists testified.

The lack of coordination is "severe," and leaves "programs with similar missions and customer bases alone in their attempts to improve performance," said Carl DeMaio, president of the Performance Institute, an Arlington, Va. - based think tank. "Instead of sharing their innovations, they idle with their frustrations."

Agency managers also must do a better job of letting the public know whether federal programs are living up to expectations, said Patricia McGinnis, president and chief operating officer of the Council for Excellence in Government, a Washington-based think tank.

"Virtually all agencies now routinely publish ponderous annual reports running to hundreds of colorful glossy pages with many pictures, and they post them on Web sites," McGinnis testified. "I doubt whether any can demonstrate that their reports are being widely used by the public or by the media, or whether the agency encourages, responds to and considers public feedback to their reports."

In addition, managers should think about improving the specific performance measures they use, said Richard Keevey, director of the Performance Consortium at the National Academy of Public Administration, a congressionally chartered nonprofit organization. Agencies have "tended to focus on activities or outputs as the means to measure program effectiveness," rather than "outcomes," he testified.

While tracking a program's outputs can be useful, measuring results can prove more meaningful, Keevey told lawmakers. For instance, statistics showing the number of doctors reimbursed under Medicaid, do not necessarily provide an accurate picture of how well the program works, he testified. The measure is somewhat useful in describing how many doctors are enrolled in the program, he explained, but is not sufficient to capture its performance.

OMB and Congress could play larger roles in ensuring that agencies gain a realistic idea of how various programs are performing, panelists said. For instance, OMB could develop a governmentwide system for collecting and sharing performance information, Jonathan Breul, a senior fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government, recommended. Such a system would facilitate better coordination and ensure that performance information is "comparable across programs and can be shared with the government's central budget and financial systems," he testified.

Lawmakers should discuss GPRA strategic plans with agency managers, DeMaio said. By doing so, they can "ensure those plans include efficient and useful performance measures that can later be used by Congress to gauge results and to better inform appropriations and budgetary decisions," he testified.

DeMaio also suggested that lawmakers consider creating a Congressional Office of Program Performance to review OMB's formal ratings of federal programs. The office would "conduct its own program performance reviews" at the request of lawmakers or committees, he said, and would be staffed by General Accounting Office and Congressional Budget Office analysts.