The Next Wave

During a panel on the Navy's transformation at the Excellence in Government-West conference in San Diego in early December, Adm. Jose Betancourt, commander of the Navy's Southwest region, described some of the tough steps that have already been taken as the Navy moves to streamline. By focusing on duplication in shore-based facilities reporting to him, he has already cut one command's staffing from 6,200 in 1997 to 2,150 today, he said.

What the Navy seeks, said Rear Adm. Mark Ferguson, assistant commander of the service's Personnel Command, is a force with fewer people who are more specialized in their fields and more highly trained. The service will try "to put a letter after sailors' names" by sending them to professional training ranging from cooking school to Microsoft certification courses.

The Navy will seek to find employees who are "best fit" for its jobs, replacing the old up-or-out system of assignment and promotion. It will pay for qualifications and performance and will seek to give commanders a true understanding of, and control over, their staffing costs.

An early iteration of the new system is already helping to select people for duty stations in Italy. Sailors in the region are eligible for $900 a month in extra pay beyond their base salaries. Navy commanders now have the ability to select applicants for these jobs based on qualifications the applicants submit online, and on their willingness to accept pay rates that might be different from the norm. In a hypothetical example, two candidates with similar qualifications might bid against each other for a post. One might assert that he or she was willing to accept the job for just $500 a month in bonus pay.

When such a system is widely implemented, those who lack ambition and energy may find themselves unemployed. For example, a sailor with the rank of E-5, faced at the end of his current assignment with the need to bid for a new job, may struggle if his reputation, skills and geographical flexibility do not provide an easy match for commanders looking to fill an E-5 slot. He might then find himself bidding for an E-4 position-and if that failed, he could be out of a job.

These kinds of ambitious reforms, now under development at the Personnel Command in Millington, Tenn., are part of a wholesale sorting out of responsibilities among the four categories of Navy staffing: active duty, reserves, civilian federal employees, and the contractor work force. Thus the Navy is in the vanguard of the revolution in military management Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is seeking to achieve.

While we're on the subject of management, for this month's cover story, we commissioned Gregory Treverton, a senior policy analyst at RAND and former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, to assess the overall state of federal management by evaluating our recent Federal Performance Project in the context of other similar efforts to assess agencies' capacity to manage their missions. Treverton discovered that as a result of all of the recent performance measurement initiatives-starting with the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act and moving through the Bush administration's "scorecard" ratings of agencies-the appetite among federal executives to improve results is stronger than ever.

If you're aware of any individual managers and executives who are performing above and beyond the call of duty, we urge you to nominate them for our prestigious Service to America medals, co-sponsored by the Partnership for Public Service. Nominations are open until March 1. Find out more at http://www2.govexec.com/SAM/.