Three agencies honored with top management awards

The Office of Personnel Management on Tuesday announced the winners of the 2005 President's Quality Award, the top management honor for executive branch agencies.

Four awards were granted for management excellence in three categories. OPM selected winners from 47 submissions, and honored them at an official awards ceremony at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington on Tuesday night.

The State Department earned the award for Innovative and Exemplary Practices for the design and launch of its Employee Profile Plus database, which enables managers to locate current and former employees with skills in almost 300 specific areas. The Web-based system was deployed during the department's tsunami relief efforts in late 2004 and again following the Hurricane Katrina disaster, helping to find employees with the required language, area and disaster relief expertise in a matter of minutes, rather than days or weeks.

State plans to make the system available to help other agencies meet personnel needs.

The award for Overall Management went to the Labor Department in recognition of its effectiveness in implementing the five components of the President's Management Agenda: personnel reform, competitive sourcing, financial management, electronic government and performance budgeting.

Labor was the first and has been the only agency to earn the highest rating -- "green" -- in each category on the administration's management score card. It earned praise for enhancing performance through monthly departmental Management Review Board meetings to discuss cross-cutting management issues, and the establishment of internal PMA score cards for its 15 agencies and components.

The award for Agencywide Performance in a Governmentwide Management Initiative was shared by the State Department and the Social Security Administration, each of which earned the honor in recognition of human capital efforts.

State's accomplishments include attracting a record numbers of applicants over the last three years, diversifying its hiring pool, identifying critical skill gaps and meeting them, enhancing the leadership pipeline and using e-government to reduce hiring times.

SSA was recognized for using analytical tools as the basis for human capital decisions in recruitment, retention and employee development. Such tools helped the agency complete a massive effort to hire 2,200 new employees to address recent changes in Medicare drug benefits.

The President's Quality Awards were established in 1988. They were redesigned in 2002 to align with the objectives in the President's Management Agenda, and were updated again in 2004 to include three separate award categories and minimum requirements for each category based on ratings on the quarterly PMA scorecard.