Government Executive - Authors - Brian Friel

A Federal Holiday Poem

Brian Friel — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Observing what has been a holiday tradition at Government Executive since 1998, we present our annual ode to federal employees.

Twas the night before Christmas, and all 'cross the Web

Not a surfer was surfing, except for some feds.

The FAA cleared Santa for his annual flight,

As the Weather Service predicted a clear, starry night.

NIH's top doc gave Santa the vaccine,

As USPS valiantly kept up its delivery routine.

When out on the web there arose such a crowd

Of kids on their mice click, click, clicking around

'Til they landed their browsers on a special Web site

Where NORAD tracked Santa all through the night.

In English, in Spanish, in even Francais,

The radar tracked Nicholas around on his sleigh.

The radar bleep, bleeped as Santa drew close

Drawn by the heat off of Rudolph's red nose.

The satellites tingled, the warning bells jingled

When NORAD got sight of merry Kris Kringle.

Kids 'cross the land knew their friends had been wrong.

NORAD's site proved it: Santa lives on!

And as feds 'round the world kept the peace through the night,

Santa looked down, and called out with his might,

"Thank you, civil servants! You fight the good fight!

Happy days to you all, and to all a fine night!"

Happy Holidays from all of us at Government Executive!

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A Federal Holiday Poem

Brian Friel — Mon, 23 Dec 2019 10:21:22 -0500

Observing what has been a holiday tradition at Government Executive since 1998, we present our annual ode to federal employees.

Twas the night before Christmas, and all 'cross the Web

Not a surfer was surfing, except for some feds.

The FAA cleared Santa for his annual flight,

As the Weather Service predicted a clear, starry night.

FEMA stood by in case of snow, ice or sleet,

As troops 'round the world maintained the peace.

When out on the Web there arose such a crowd

Of kids on their mice click, click, clicking around

'Til they landed their browsers on a special Web site

Where NORAD tracked Santa all through the night.

In English, in Spanish, in even Francais,

The radar tracked Nicholas around on his sleigh.

The radar bleep, bleeped as Santa drew close

Drawn by the heat off of Rudolph's red nose.

The satellites tingled, the warning bells jingled

When NORAD got sight of merry Kris Kringle.

Kids 'cross the land knew their friends had been wrong.

NORAD's site proved it: Santa lives on!

And as feds 'round the world kept the peace through the night,

Santa looked down, and called out with his might,

"Thank you, civil servants! You fight the good fight!

Happy days to you all, and to all a fine night!"

Happy Holidays from all of us at Government Executive!

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A Federal Holiday Poem

Brian Friel — Thu, 21 Dec 2017 15:30:00 -0500

Observing what has been a holiday tradition at Government Executive since 1998, we present our annual ode to federal employees.

Twas the night before Christmas, and all 'cross the Web

Not a surfer was surfing, except for some feds.

The FAA cleared Santa for his annual flight,

As the Weather Service predicted a clear, starry night.

FEMA stood by in case of snow, ice or sleet,

As troops 'round the world maintained the peace.

When out on the Web there arose such a crowd

Of kids on their mice click, click, clicking around

'Til they landed their browsers on a special Web site

Where NORAD tracked Santa all through the night.

In English, in Spanish, in even Francais,

The radar tracked Nicholas around on his sleigh.

The radar bleep, bleeped as Santa drew close

Drawn by the heat off of Rudolph's red nose.

The satellites tingled, the warning bells jingled

When NORAD got sight of merry Kris Kringle.

Kids 'cross the land knew their friends had been wrong.

NORAD's site proved it: Santa lives on!

And as feds 'round the world kept the peace through the night,

Santa looked down, and called out with his might,

"Thank you, civil servants! You fight the good fight!

Happy days to you all, and to all a fine night!"

Happy Holidays from all of us at Government Executive!

Photo: Flickr user Rob

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A Federal Holiday Poem

Brian Friel — Thu, 22 Dec 2016 15:35:47 -0500

Observing what has been a holiday tradition at Government Executive since 1998, we present our annual ode to federal employees.

Twas the night before Christmas, and all 'cross the Web

Not a surfer was surfing, except for some feds.

The FAA cleared Santa for his annual flight,

As the Weather Service predicted a clear, starry night.

FEMA stood by in case of snow, ice or sleet,

As troops 'round the world maintained the peace.

When out on the Web there arose such a crowd

Of kids on their mice click, click, clicking around

'Til they landed their browsers on a special Web site

Where NORAD tracked Santa all through the night.

In English, in Spanish, in even Francais,

The radar tracked Nicholas around on his sleigh.

The radar bleep, bleeped as Santa drew close

Drawn by the heat off of Rudolph's red nose.

The satellites tingled, the warning bells jingled

When NORAD got sight of merry Kris Kringle.

Kids 'cross the land knew their friends had been wrong.

NORAD's site proved it: Santa lives on!

And as feds 'round the world kept the peace through the night,

Santa looked down, and called out with his might,

"Thank you, civil servants! You fight the good fight!

Happy days to you all, and to all a fine night!"

Happy Holidays from all of us at Government Executive!

Photo: Flickr user Sirenz Lorraine

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An Excess of Multiple-Award Contracts Is Creating New Problems for Government

Brian Friel — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 11:53:05 -0400

For the better part of the past decade, procurement shops throughout the federal government couldn’t seem to stop themselves from creating new contract vehicles. There’s something alluring about seeding and cultivating a multiple-award contract, with dozens of companies clamoring to participate and the promise of hundreds of millions of dollars blooming under a vehicle of your creation. Since 2005, thousands of multiple-award indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) programs have sprung up, many with multi-billion-dollar ordering ceilings.

The contract vehicle garden is now overgrown. Supply clearly exceeds demand.

Just look at IT services. The 10 largest contract vehicles have $17 billion in annualized ordering capacity. But those vehicles hosted under $12 billion in actual orders last year, leaving 37 percent excess capacity. Examples of underutilized contracts abound. The Interior Department’s cloud computing IDIQ has a $1 billion annualized ceiling. It attracted just $27 million in spending in fiscal 2015, according to federal procurement data.

The excessive excess capacity won’t last. Contract vehicles will die off over the next few years, with competition among procurement shops and among prime contractors deciding which IDIQs survive.

Take, for example, an Army order for program management support services currently residing on the Army’s Information Technology Enterprise Solutions 2 Services (ITES-2S) contract. The buying agency did some window shopping, issuing a request for information in at least three places: on the open market, to Alliant contract holders and to vendors on the National Institutes of Health’s Chief Information Officer – Solutions and Partners 3 (CIO-SP3) contract.

A GSA official pitched Alliant, saying that the vehicle has a “world class contractor pool” and “provides a streamlined acquisition process,” according to a document posted on FedBizOpps.gov.

The incumbent contractor is on Alliant, ITES-2S and CIO-SP3, so any of those would do if the company wants to retain the work.

A different contractor suggested that the buyer instead turn to the Army’s $461 million Program Management Support Services 3 (PMSS 3) vehicle. The incumbent contractor is not on PMSS 3, so a shift to that vehicle would ensure a new company wins the work.

At the same time companies are promoting their favorite IDIQs, industry is increasingly pushing back against the creation of new contract vehicles. Remember that a multiple-award IDIQ forces companies through a two-step process to win work. First, the companies have to bid on and win slots on the IDIQs. Second, the selected companies compete with each other for task or delivery orders awarded under those multiple-award contracts.

Every time a company wins a multiple-award IDIQ that fails to generate any task or delivery orders, the company loses money. There’s no way to have a return on investment when no actual paying work flows through a contract vehicle.

Companies also incur operational costs for each contract vehicle that they maintain. The companies must market the vehicles to their clients, maintain websites, hire program managers and fulfill ongoing paperwork requirements. Assuming the same number of orders flow through a reduced number of contract vehicles, companies could realize efficiencies through contract consolidation.

That consolidation is under way. In the past year, the Defense Health Agency, the U.S. Special Operations Command, the Homeland Security Department and the Air Force all opted to halt the development of new contract vehicles and instead announced plans to tap into existing capacity on contracts such as the General Services Administration’s Alliant vehicle for IT services and One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services (OASIS) program for professional services.

To take advantage of agencies’ increasing desire to avoid the creation of new vehicles, some procurement shops are offering better bargains. The National Institutes of Health recently cut the fees on CIO-SP3 and other governmentwide IDIQs it manages. GSA provided volume discounts to the Air Force, Army and Homeland Security after each of those buyers guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars in orders would flow through the OASIS contracts.

I expect in a few years there will still be hundreds of contract vehicles for federal buyers to consider using, down from the thousands currently available. It’s a big government with a huge variety of missions and buying needs, but even the world’s biggest buyer can live with fewer choices. The contract vehicles that offer the best deals, easiest and fastest ordering, best customer service and strongest suites of offerings will survive the coming consolidation.

Brian Friel is founder of One Nation Analytics, an independent research, analytics and consulting firm for the federal market. He can be reached at bfriel@onenationllc.com

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The One Change That’s Upending the Federal Contracting World

Brian Friel — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 11:46:24 -0400

The General Services Administration is launching a new era in federal information technology acquisition this spring when it releases requests for proposals for Alliant 2 Unrestricted and Alliant 2 Small Business, the next generation of the agency’s governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWACs).

The Alliant 2 contracts will likely be the largest federal IT services contracts of the next decade as measured by volume of orders. Unrestricted has a $50 billion ceiling over 10 years, while Small Business has a $15 billion ceiling.

The Alliant 2 contracts are also the first federal IT deals that use an objective method of selecting winners. Most IT companies have never seen anything like it.

GSA pioneered the approach in 2013 on its One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services (OASIS) contracts for professional services. All protests against OASIS failed, a validation of the objective method that GSA is now using for Alliant 2. GSA also used the method for recent human capital and building maintenance contracts.

A key innovation in the objective method is a self-scoring system. Companies can claim points for relevant experience and certifications. Does your company have ISO 9001 certification? You get 1,500 points. Did you complete a $1 million cybersecurity project recently? That’s 100 points. Have you managed a federal IT facility overseas in the last five years under a $100 million cost-plus-fixed-fee multiple-award task order? That’s a brass ring: Give yourself 10,000 points.

It’s a bit tricky, but with some elbow grease, companies can figure out their scores in advance. Once they submit their bids, GSA will validate bidders’ scores and either accept or reject claimed points.

Another innovation of GSA’s objective method is that pricing is a non-factor. GSA is telling companies up front what the range of fair and reasonable prices is. Unless an Alliant 2 bidder makes a silly mistake, no company is likely to lose on price.

GSA has rightly determined that under multiple-award contracts, pricing is an important consideration only when you get to the order level. After Alliant 2 is up and running, the prime contractors will duke it out on price as agencies submit orders. But this spring, GSA is just trying to pick the companies with the best IT services chops.

The 60 large companies with the scores closest to the maximum total of 75,600 will be selected for Alliant 2 Unrestricted. The top 80 small business scorers will win spots on Alliant 2 Small Business.

Those 140 companies will be eligible to compete for orders that agencies place through the Alliant 2 program. All other companies will have to subcontract to those primes. Companies can expect billions of dollars in orders to flow in from all over government, from the Army to Health and Human Services to Agriculture to the Defense Health Agency.

Winning a slot on Alliant 2 could absolutely make a company’s decade. Many of the fastest-growing federal IT services companies of the past five years, such as Digital Management Inc., ActioNet, and Vistronix, saw much of their growth come via Alliant Small Business. Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC each generated more than $400 million in business on Alliant in fiscal 2015 alone.

The odds of winning in the Alliant 2 sweepstakes boil down to two numbers: the score of the 60^th ranked unrestricted bidder and the 80^th ranked small business bidder. Everyone at or above those scores wins. Everyone below loses.

I’m estimating the scores of all the likely bidders as new data and information comes out. My review so far suggests that only a couple hundred points may separate the companies that get a chance to compete for $65 billion in work during the next decade and those that are left out. My partner Rick Slifer of RASA Consulting has pointed out that knowing your score is important, but knowing your ranking is critical.

I expect the objective method that GSA is pioneering to catch on across government for a wide range of contracts. It’s a way to avoid the lengthy delays for multiple-award contracts that have tended to get mired in protests over subjective decisions. The OASIS RFPs were issued in July 2013, bids were due that September, awards were announced by May 2014, all protests were rejected, and the contracts were up and running by September 2014. If Alliant 2 enjoys a similar clear path from master contract selection to task orders, other agencies are likely to start adopting the objective method for their contracts as well.

Brian Friel is founder of One Nation Analytics, an independent research, analytics and consulting firm for the federal market. He can be reached at bfriel@onenationllc.com

Photo: GotCredit

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A Federal Holiday Poem

Brian Friel — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 17:11:34 -0500

Observing what has been a holiday tradition at Government Executive since 1998, we present our annual ode to federal employees.

Twas the night before Christmas, and all 'cross the Web

Not a surfer was surfing, except for some feds.

The FAA cleared Santa for his annual flight,

As the Weather Service predicted a clear, starry night.

FEMA stood by in case of snow, ice or sleet,

As troops 'round the world maintained the peace.

When out on the Web there arose such a crowd

Of kids on their mice click, click, clicking around

'Til they landed their browsers on a special Web site

Where NORAD tracked Santa all through the night.

In English, in Spanish, in even Francais,

The radar tracked Nicholas around on his sleigh.

The radar bleep, bleeped as Santa drew close

Drawn by the heat off of Rudolph's red nose.

The satellites tingled, the warning bells jingled

When NORAD got sight of merry Kris Kringle.

Kids 'cross the land knew their friends had been wrong.

NORAD's site proved it: Santa lives on!

And as feds 'round the world kept the peace through the night,

Santa looked down, and called out with his might,

"Thank you, civil servants! You fight the good fight!

Happy days to you all, and to all a fine night!"

Happy Holidays from all of us at Government Executive!

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A Federal Holiday Poem

Brian Friel — Tue, 23 Dec 2014 12:37:33 -0500

Observing what has been a holiday tradition at GovExec since 1998, we present our annual ode to federal employees.

Twas the night before Christmas, and all 'cross the Web

Not a surfer was surfing, except for some feds.

The FAA cleared Santa for his annual flight,

As the Weather Service predicted a clear, starry night.

FEMA stood by in case of snow, ice or sleet,

As troops 'round the world maintained the peace.

When out on the Web there arose such a crowd

Of kids on their mice click, click, clicking around

'Til they landed their browsers on a special Web site

Where NORAD tracked Santa all through the night.

In English, in Spanish, in even Francais,

The radar tracked Nicholas around on his sleigh.

The radar bleep, bleeped as Santa drew close

Drawn by the heat off of Rudolph's red nose.

The satellites tingled, the warning bells jingled

When NORAD got sight of merry Kris Kringle.

Kids 'cross the land knew their friends had been wrong.

NORAD's site proved it: Santa lives on!

And as feds 'round the world kept the peace through the night,

Santa looked down, and called out with his might,

"Thank you, civil servants! You fight the good fight!

Happy days to you all, and to all a fine night!"

Happy Holidays from all of us at Government Executive!

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A Federal Holiday Poem

Brian Friel — Mon, 23 Dec 2013 14:09:21 -0500

Observing what has been a holiday tradition at GovExec.com since 1998, we present our annual ode to federal employees.

Twas the night before Christmas, and all 'cross the Web
Not a surfer was surfing, except for some feds.

The FAA cleared Santa for his annual flight,
As the Weather Service predicted a clear, starry night.

FEMA stood by in case of snow, ice or sleet,
As troops 'round the world maintained the peace.

When out on the Web there arose such a crowd
Of kids on their mice click, click, clicking around
'Til they landed their browsers on a special Web site
Where NORAD tracked Santa all through the night.

In English, in Spanish, in even Francais,
The radar tracked Nicholas around on his sleigh.

The radar bleep, bleeped as Santa drew close
Drawn by the heat off of Rudolph's red nose.

The satellites tingled, the warning bells jingled
When NORAD got sight of merry Kris Kringle.

Kids 'cross the land knew their friends had been wrong.
NORAD's site proved it: Santa lives on!

And as feds 'round the world kept the peace through the night,
Santa looked down, and called out with his might,
"Thank you, civil servants! You fight the good fight!
Happy days to you all, and to all a fine night!"

Happy Holidays from all of us at Government Executive!

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A federal holiday poem

Brian Friel — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 15:48:19 -0500

Observing what has been a holiday tradition at GovExec.com since 1998, we present our annual ode to federal employees.

Twas the night before Christmas, and all 'cross the Web
Not a surfer was surfing, except for some feds.

The FAA cleared Santa for his annual flight,
As the Weather Service predicted a clear, starry night.

FEMA stood by in case of snow, ice or sleet,
As troops 'round the world maintained the peace.

When out on the Web there arose such a crowd
Of kids on their mice click, click, clicking around
'Til they landed their browsers on a special Web site
Where NORAD tracked Santa all through the night.

In English, in Spanish, in even Francais,
The radar tracked Nicholas around on his sleigh.

The radar bleep, bleeped as Santa drew close
Drawn by the heat off of Rudolph's red nose.

The satellites tingled, the warning bells jingled
When NORAD got sight of merry Kris Kringle.

Kids 'cross the land knew their friends had been wrong.
NORAD's site proved it: Santa lives on!

Happy Holidays from all of us at Government Executive!

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A federal holiday poem

Brian Friel — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Observing what has been a holiday tradition at GovExec.com since 1998, we present our annual ode to federal employees.

Twas the night before Christmas, and all 'cross the Web
Not a surfer was surfing, except for some feds.

The FAA cleared Santa for his annual flight,
As the Weather Service predicted a clear, starry night.

FEMA stood by in case of snow, ice or sleet,
As troops 'round the world maintained the peace.

When out on the Web there arose such a crowd
Of kids on their mice click, click, clicking around
'Til they landed their browsers on a special Web site
Where NORAD tracked Santa all through the night.

In English, in Spanish, in even Francais,
The radar tracked Nicholas around on his sleigh.

The radar bleep, bleeped as Santa drew close
Drawn by the heat off of Rudolph's red nose.

The satellites tingled, the warning bells jingled
When NORAD got sight of merry Kris Kringle.

Kids 'cross the land knew their friends had been wrong.
NORAD's site proved it: Santa lives on!

Happy Holidays from all of us at Government Executive!

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A federal holiday poem

Brian Friel — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Observing what has been a holiday tradition at GovernmentExecutive.com since 1998, we present our annual ode to federal employees.

Twas the night before Christmas, and all 'cross the Web
Not a surfer was surfing, except for some feds.

The FAA cleared Santa for his annual flight,
As the Weather Service predicted a clear, starry night.

FEMA stood by in case of snow, ice or sleet,
As troops 'round the world maintained the peace.

When out on the Web there arose such a crowd
Of kids on their mice click, click, clicking around
'Til they landed their browsers on a special Web site
Where NORAD tracked Santa all through the night.

In English, in Spanish, in even Francais,
The radar tracked Nicholas around on his sleigh.

The radar bleep, bleeped as Santa drew close
Drawn by the heat off of Rudolph's red nose.

The satellites tingled, the warning bells jingled
When NORAD got sight of merry Kris Kringle.

Kids 'cross the land knew their friends had been wrong.
NORAD's site proved it: Santa lives on!

Happy Holidays from all of us at Government Executive!

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Collaboration-minded feds see barriers to working together

Brian Friel — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

A manager at another department wrote back to say he saw no reason not to share his department's skills list for attorneys with her. But another official at the department overruled him, saying the list was for internal use only. The manager could tell the HR specialist how the department developed its list, but couldn't share the list itself.

In other words, one federal agency told another to go reinvent the wheel.

"Traditionally, we've been dominated by our stovepiped departments and agencies," says James Locher, president and chief executive officer of the Project on National Security Reform, a Washington-based nonprofit that promotes interagency collaboration in defense, diplomacy and homeland security. "There are probably hundreds of thousands of people at the GS-14 and GS-15 levels who are out there trying to make interagency collaboration work. They're doing it despite the system and often at some risk to themselves."

In the September issue of Government Executive, Brian Friel explores how savvy civil servants across government are building bridges between departments and agencies. Faced with challenges that require cooperation, front-line and mid-level managers are finding ways to cut through red tape and bypass their bosses' myopic mind-sets to connect with people in other agencies who have the know-how to get things done.

Click here to read the full story

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All Together Now

Brian Friel — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Collaboration-minded feds discover that getting agencies to work together is easier said than done.

Earlier this year, a human resources specialist at a federal agency put out a call to her comrades at other agencies: Could someone share a competency model-a list of expected skills and abilities-for staff attorneys? Such lists are pro forma HR documents, used to evaluate candidates for jobs and to develop training programs that help employees gain required skills. Not exactly classified material.

In other words, one federal agency told another to go reinvent the wheel.

The encounter illustrates the frustrating bureaucratic obstacles standing in the way of rank-and-file employees and managers who see interagency collaboration as a key way to making government work better. When they reach out their hands to like-minded people at other agencies, they discover those hands often are slapped. That can be because agencies are loath to share information with each other, their bosses want to stay focused on their own offices' issues, or officials at different agencies don't trust one another. "Traditionally, we've been dominated by our stovepiped departments and agencies," says James Locher, president and chief executive officer of the Project on National Security Reform, a Washington-based nonprofit that promotes interagency collaboration in defense, diplomacy and homeland security. "

There are probably hundreds of thousands of people at the GS-14 and GS-15 levels who are out there trying to make interagency collaboration work. They're doing it despite the system and often at some risk to themselves."

Across government, savvy civil servants are building bridges between departments and agencies. Faced with challenges that require cooperation, front-line and mid-level managers are finding ways to cut through red tape and bypass their bosses' myopic mind-sets to connect with people in other agencies who have the know-how to get things done. The professionals tackling the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill this year prepared for the event using one model for interagency collaboration. Special operations forces tracking terrorists in Iraq used another, while child welfare officials have experimented with other approaches. In every case, the bridge builders created relationships that previously didn't exist and helped overcome cultural differences that kept agencies from working together.

"Building trust is key to coordination," says John Gustafson, a retired Environmental Protection Agency manager who spent a decade strengthening the interagency group that prepares for hazardous incidents like the Gulf oil spill.

Hurricanes and Oil Spills

Five years ago, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans, trust was hard to find among the federal agencies responding to the disaster. Officials at the new Homeland Security Department, created to improve coordination between federal, state and local agencies dealing with major domestic catastrophes, had made a critical error. They did not have an operational plan in place designating each agency's duties in a response effort. With no such plan, things fell apart.

Then-Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, who was vilified in the local and national press for failing to manage the disaster, told Government Executive a few months later that an effort to draft a plan for interagency collaboration-a massive National Response Plan-had itself become a victim of interagency fighting. "One of the items that bothered me most during my tenure at FEMA was the [Homeland Security] department's insistence on taking the development of the NRP away from FEMA," he said in December 2005, after leaving government. According to Brown, department officials first put the Transportation Security Administration in charge of the plan's development, then a department-level organization called the Incident Management Group. Brown said an old coordination plan used for disasters ranging from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to the Columbia space shuttle explosion was tossed aside in the process. "The NRP, in my opinion, was never vetted through the numerous state and local entities which had a vested interest in not only formulating a new operational plan, but in making certain that the coordination developed under the old [plan] was not lost," he said.

Disasters like Katrina require interagency collaboration because no single agency is capable of handling all the consequences. FEMA, the U.S. Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, National Guard, Federal Aviation Administration, and Housing and Urban Development Department were among the agencies called to action to help the millions of people affected by the hurricane-especially the 800,000 who were displaced from their homes.

The headline-grabbing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in April required a similar array of agencies to gear up response efforts. The federal government has a long-standing interagency system for dealing with hazardous chemical leaks, toxic incidents and major oil spills. An on-scene coordinator, in this case a Coast Guard official, manages federal efforts in the aftermath of such accidents, drawing on the expertise of scientific and technical professionals from 16 agencies organized into rapid response teams.

To make sure the government is ready for such incidents, those 16 agencies participate in a coordinating body called the National Response Team. NRT took on its modern form in 1995, when Gustafson became its first executive director. The team had been around since an oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., in the late 1960s made federal policymakers realize that responding to such disasters required more interagency teamwork. A veteran of state and federal government, Gustafson had plenty of experience getting agencies to work together in crises by the time he got the NRT assignment. At EPA in the late 1970s, he participated in the agency's response to the Love Canal toxic waste disaster in 1978 and to the Exxon Valdez oil spill 11 years later.

NRT brings together GS-15-level experts from its member agencies-including EPA, Coast Guard, and the Energy, Labor, Transportation and Agriculture departments-for regular meetings to plan and prepare for incidents. EPA and the Coast Guard lead the group. NRT officials realized they needed an executive director to give the team more stability, manage support contracts, organize special meetings and work out issues that cropped up for participating members. "The executive director is like a coach and a team builder who manages the process to get things done," Gustafson says. "Much of the job is being of service to the agencies, understanding their issues and trying to help resolve them."

Gustafson introduced a management-by-objectives system to discipline the team and keep it focused on taking actions that would better prepare the government for future disasters. Many interagency groups that meet regularly have secretaries who take down meeting minutes that become, by default, the documents guiding the groups' actions. Instead of taking this approach, he encouraged NRT members to develop discrete action proposals that everyone could agree on. Then he assigned those proposals to committees and set timelines for implementation. "I consciously tried to have NRT committee meetings get away from doing voluminous meeting minutes and focus energy on developing and implementing action proposals," Gustafson says.

The stability of an executive director and the focus of a results-oriented management system put NRT on a path of continuous improvement. The team could learn lessons from hazardous incidents and incorporate them into its plans.

Gustafson, who retired five years ago, says one key for successful interagency collaboration at NRT is the fact that its members are GS-15 career professionals. "They know how their agency works and have access to their agency's resources and their agency's people," he says. "Regular communication builds the understanding and teamwork necessary to prepare contingency plans and help ensure effective incident response."

NRT members have learned the group is a great way to run the traps on their own agencies' work to make sure other agencies' concerns don't trip them up. Members can submit their agencies' ideas and plans for interagency review at NRT. The response team's endorsement is something of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that all the other agencies have signed off on an idea. "The NRT process also helps identify interagency misunderstandings that could frustrate an incident response so that they can be worked out early," Gustafson says.

Horizontal Thinking

A basic tenet of NRT is that professionals within each agency who have the expertise need to know each other and work together without having to go up and down their agencies' respective chains of command. To feds who obsess over interagency collaboration, that's called horizontal thinking. Vertical just doesn't work in a disaster. When time is of the essence, you have to slice off the top five layers of the organizational chart, get the best technical and professional GS-15s in a room, and let them come up with solutions.

Many interagency collaborators go a step further. They say the professionals from different agencies need to work together day in, day out to deliver integrated services. Take the challenge of helping at-risk children. Social welfare professionals have realized that kids with a variety of problems-substance abuse, mental health issues, disabilities, unstable homes-often need the services many separate agencies offer to meet their educational, familial, health, behavioral and material needs. But the parents-or foster parents-frequently become frustrated by the multiple levels of bureaucracy.

So for the past 25 years, reformers have been experimenting with a form of interagency collaboration called systems of care. It's a loosely defined term, but the basic idea is one professional-a social services caseworker, for example-takes charge of a child's interactions with government and coordinates all the different agency professionals who provide services to that child and the child's family.

Ideally, that would mean bringing together at one table the child's parents, the caseworker, a teacher, a nurse, a counselor and other professionals to create and carry out a plan to improve the child's life. Mary Armstrong, an expert in child services, mental health and systems of care at the University of South Florida, says families often struggle to figure out which agencies will help subsidize services. Federally supported Medicaid might cover some services, while the local school system or a state program is responsible for others. The caseworker who serves as team leader also can act as a conduit, pulling together the money from different funding streams to make sure a child gets all the subsidies for which he or she qualifies. Creating a horizontal structure centered on the caseworker allows families to focus on their children rather than on mastering the varied procedures and rules required to deal with the government vertically-agency by agency. "When services are stovepiped and no one knows what others are doing, a lot of money gets wasted," Armstrong says. "If there are three case managers, then what's going on is a lot of duplication."

Collaborate or Integrate?

Even worse than duplication is when agencies get in each other's way. Law enforcement agencies that don't coordinate often have learned that the hard way. The FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and local law enforcement agencies often have realized they were conducting overlapping or duplicative investigations.

In the course of the Iraq war, the military services' elite special forces squads found themselves at cross-purposes. In hunting down terrorist targets, they were getting in each other's way. Rather than fight each other, the various services' commanders on the ground decided to take matters into their own hands. Given their mission, they decided not simply to collaborate, but to integrate. The highly trained professional troops from the different services started working together regularly to catch terrorists.

They formed what became known as high-value terrorist targeting teams, leading to the demise of many dangerous enemies who would have killed Iraqi civilians and American forces if the targeting teams hadn't gotten to them first.

"It's in that direction our government needs to move," Locher says.

Not every interagency collaboration is such a high-stakes endeavor. Some just involve sharing competency models so agencies can better train their attorneys. But teamwork at any level promises better results and lower costs to taxpayers, who think of civil servants not as employees of their respective agencies, but as the professionals who carry out the missions of the United States of America.

Brian Friel covered management and human resources at Government Executive for six years.

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Fixing Reform

Brian Friel — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Like President Obama, the past two administrations pushed governmentwide management reform efforts. Bill Clinton had his reinventing government initiative, which focused on getting agencies to use technology better, while George W. Bush had the President's Management Agenda, which featured e-government as one of its five pillars.

So it wasn't surprising when Obama's outgoing budget director, Peter R. Orszag, recently told the Center for American Progress, in a speech highlighting Obama's management agenda, that "closing the IT gap is perhaps the single most important step we can take in creating a more efficient and responsive government." It was a bit more surprising when he said: "Indeed, the IT gap is the key differentiator between our effort to modernize and reform government and those that have come before."

A focus on IT obviously is not new. Fixing IT has been a Sisyphean task at the White House for at least 18 years. What would distinguish this administration's effort would be demonstrable success at making government writ large an effective IT user. The Clinton and Bush administrations' technology efforts certainly had some successes, but the litany of failed IT projects that continues to plague agencies shows that overall IT management reform didn't work.

It might be that any governmentwide effort is doomed. Why? The most the Office of Management and Budget or any central agency can do is set policy. That's also true of many Cabinet departments, which often are just amalgamations of unique operating agencies. It's the managers in those agencies whose work decides whether an IT project fails or succeeds.

The Veterans Health Administration, once the poster child of poor management, became a model of health care delivery during the 1990s, largely through its use of technology, Orszag noted in his speech. VHA sustained its good reputation through the 2000s as well. Why? Because the agency had strong leaders who made smart decisions, starting with Ken Kizer, VHA chief in 1994. The agency's open source electronic patient records system has become the standard for hospitals worldwide.

Other agencies had similar renaissances, including the Internal Revenue Service -- which had effective leaders in Charles Rossotti and Mark Everson from 1997 to 2007. The tax collection agency is not yet an IT management role model, but it has significantly boosted electronic filing and processing of returns during the past decade. One big problem for the IRS is it has churned through chief information officers and modernization project managers so often that a steady hand has been lacking.

Governmentwide reform efforts might have helped on the margins, but the keys to successful turnarounds are found within the individual agencies. OMB can issue memoranda and circulars and policies on management issues, and other central players can do the same in an effort to provide leadership direction, but in the end the senior executives, mid-level managers and front-line supervisors are the ones who make or break reform efforts. Supporting promising managers by clearing procedural hurdles and bureaucratic obstacles might be the most useful ways top administration officials can promote good government. Managers often find central agencies more of a hindrance than a help in their efforts to make their operations run more smoothly and effectively.

Governmentwide policy matters. But agency-level management matters more, and individual managers matter most of all.

Brian Friel covered management and human resources at Government Executive for six years.

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Fixing Reform

Brian Friel — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Want good government? Get good agencies.

Other agencies had similar renaissances, including the Internal Revenue Service-which had effective leaders in Charles Rossotti and Mark Everson from 1997 to 2007. The tax collection agency is not yet an IT management role model, but it has significantly boosted electronic filing and processing of returns during the past decade. One big problem for the IRS is it has churned through chief information officers and modernization project managers so often that a steady hand has been lacking.

Governmentwide policy matters. But agency-level management matters more, and individual managers matter most of all.

Brian Friel covered management and human resources at Government Executive for six years.

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Learning It Your Way

Brian Friel — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

You could go to a formal training workshop in a classroom that teaches the basics of social networking. Or you could play around with Facebook and Twitter yourself and contact other federal workers who have set up their own pages and accounts and ask them what they learned along the way.

Many federal agencies have development offices that have created significant formal training programs for workers. Formal training makes sense for many front-line jobs like Border Patrol agents and Veterans Affairs Department claims processors. But for government workers who have to learn new skills on the job, formal training won't cut it. The knowledge, skills and abilities they need to develop can be found only through informal networks and nontraditional learning efforts. Federal training professionals have to rethink the way they help employees learn new skills. Think "self-help," not "enroll here."

Indeed, social networking sites have helped foster permanent professional development networks for government workers. For example, some 300 federal professionals interested in enterprise risk management have joined the site FederalERM.com to keep up with the latest developments in that field. GovLoop's 30,000-plus members have created more than 700 groups to help each other do a better job on issues ranging from cybersecurity to human resources to performance measurement. GovLeaders.org, a site run by career senior Foreign Service officer Don Jacobson, connects federal managers and executives with the latest leadership development thinking.

Learning opportunities for federal professionals abound on the Web. Want a great case study in using root cause analysis to figure out why something happened? Then read about Goddard Space Flight Center deputy director Rick Obenschain's investigation into a recent NASA mishap at askmagazine.nasa.gov. Or find a community of practice -- an informal learning group -- at the Public Sector Consortium at public-sector.org, where you can explore ways to apply systems thinking to the problems at your agency.

Formal training programs are great vehicles for teaching employees the skills and procedures that are set in stone. Law enforcement personnel need to complete a full regimen of formal training at federal academies so they know the processes, rules and skills necessary to keep the nation safe. Federal wild land firefighters must be taught safety protocols and firefighting techniques.

But many federal workers have to be in a constant state of self-learning to acquire skills to meet the flexible and adaptable needs of their jobs. A management analyst looking to improve the agency's arcane process of grant-making must use informal techniques to find people in other agencies -- or outside government -- who already have found ways to streamline processes. A facilities director who has to make the office more environmentally friendly would do just as well, if not better, connecting with other federal facilities managers who have greened their workplaces as he or she would taking a class.

One advantage of informal learning would be hard to duplicate in a classroom. Instead of only one teacher, self-learners who reach out across the Internet can have a dozen or more.

Brian Friel covered management and human resources at Government Executive for six years.

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Learning It Your Way

Brian Friel — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Formal classroom training isn't the best route for many federal workers.

Let's say your boss has given you the job of setting up your office's Facebook page and Twitter account, but you don't know a Facebook fan from a Facebook friend, or a Tweet from Tweety Bird.

Learning opportunities for federal professionals abound on the Web. Want a great case study in using root cause analysis to figure out why something happened? Then read about Goddard Space Flight Center deputy director Rick Obenschain's investigation into a recent NASA mishap at askmagazine.nasa.gov. Or find a community of practice-an informal learning group-at the Public Sector Consortium at public-sector.org, where you can explore ways to apply systems thinking to the problems at your agency.

But many federal workers have to be in a constant state of self-learning to acquire skills to meet the flexible and adaptable needs of their jobs. A management analyst looking to improve the agency's arcane process of grant-making must use informal techniques to find people in other agencies-or outside government-who already have found ways to streamline processes. A facilities director who has to make the office more environmentally friendly would do just as well, if not better, connecting with other federal facilities managers who have greened their workplaces as he or she would taking a class.

One advantage of informal learning would be hard to duplicate in a classroom. Instead of only one teacher, self-learners who reach out across the Internet can have a dozen or more.

Brian Friel covered management and human resources at Government Executive for six years.

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Where’s the Rigor?

Brian Friel — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400

The Interior inspector general reported recently that several years ago the department began developing an integrity policy that would cover MMS and other bureaus, including the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service. But officials quietly abandoned the effort, even after a departmentwide council created in 2007 came up with a draft policy. "A decision was made to delay the adoption of the policy," the IG reported. "This was due to several reasons, such as the bureaus' inability to reach consensus and the impending administration change." Apparently unwilling to accept the presidential changeover as an excuse to avoid sound management action, only the U.S. Geological Survey adopted a full integrity policy. Such policies can help ensure that misconduct or bad science is rooted out and resolved.

Interior is among seven Cabinet-level departments that didn't have comprehensive scientific integrity policies in place, the inspector general found, despite the fact that the Union of Concerned Scientists and other organizations have been calling for them for years. Several Interior scientific efforts had to be overhauled recently because of allegations of misconduct, so it's all the more striking that the department didn't adopt a policy.

Scientific agencies also are behind the eight-ball when it comes to measuring the results of the billions of taxpayer dollars invested in their research projects annually. The Office of Science and Technology Policy, along with the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, is working on a $1 million project to help science agencies develop measures to demonstrate the outcomes their work will produce. The first stage is an effort to show how many scientists and other workers are employed thanks to federal dollars at agencies, universities and research centers. That of course is only an input measurement. Project managers also promise to develop measures that show how federal science is helping the nation. But if the project follows the same trajectory as the integrity policy effort, then a decade from now those measures might still not exist.

The Gulf oil spill is a reminder of the life-and-death stakes involved in federal science. Research might be a trial-and-error enterprise, one that shouldn't be held to the same standards for results as routine operations. But it should be held to some standards. The lack of comprehensive integrity policies and the elementary state of performance measurement across many government science agencies shows managers of those operations have some work to do to instill rigorous management practices.

Brian Friel covered management and human resources at Government Executive for six years.

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Political Hot Potato

Brian Friel — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Civil servants can make decisions that are better for the long-term good of the country than elected officials can, right?

In a new book, public management expert Alasdair Roberts explores the rise and limits of that way of thinking, which he dubs in the title, The Logic of Discipline (Oxford University Press, 2010). The basic premise is democracies like ours have turned much of the nation's major decision-making authority over to professional bureaucrats. They fear politicians will make the wrong decisions because they're too focused on their own reelections. In addition to handing power to professionals, democracies also have created a variety of laws, rules and regulations designed to constrain politicians from making bad choices.

Roberts notes that foreign policy and national security are governed by such depoliticized systems as are major economic security institutions. "There are certain tasks, essential to the operation of globalized markets, that are organized in distinctive ways so that they will be buffered from popular influence or the vagaries of political judgment," he writes.

From the Base Realignment and Closure Commission system to pay-as-you-go budgeting rules, from the push to give federal agencies' management chiefs fixed, apolitical terms to the empowerment of independent bodies such as the Federal Reserve to make fundamental decisions for the nation, the logic of discipline is a pervasive mentality when the United States faces thorny issues. The underlying view is politicians can't be trusted.

But is handing authority over to civil servants and a predetermined set of rules always the best way to organize governmental operations? Roberts says the recent financial crisis and consequent worldwide economic recession is a clear argument that the professionals don't always know best. Central banks failed to prevent the crisis, independent regulatory agencies fell down on the job and budgetary restraints the world over were tossed out the window to save the global economy. Unelected professionals and a system of rules didn't get the job done. Their failures point to an obvious reaction in a democratic society. "Delegation of power to technocrat-guardians implies a weakening of the public's ability to participate in decisions that affect the welfare of the country," Roberts writes. "People might become alienated from, and eventually rebel against, a system in which power is closely held."

The problem with turning over too much power to civil servants is whether a system that does so can be sustained in a democratic society. If not, then it's setting up civil servants for failure. Roberts suggests that systems of discipline cannot be expected to make all the hard decisions that elected officials don't want to make. They can be too inflexible to deal with a world where things change and government needs to be able to adapt rather than live within a rigid system of predetermined action. Elected officials might have to step up to the plate more often and use their discretion, rather than push decisions off to civil servants. Roberts also suggests ditching the words "depoliticization," "autonomy" and "discipline."

"Within democratic systems, policy preferences cannot be locked in," he notes.

Brian Friel covered management and human resources at Government Executive for six years and is now a National Journal staff correspondent.

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Political Hot Potato

Brian Friel — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Career civil servants can't be expected to make all the hard decisions.

Civil servants can make decisions that are better for the long-term good of the country than elected officials can, right?

"Within democratic systems, policy preferences cannot be locked in," he notes.

Brian Friel covered management and human resources at Government Executive for six years and is now a National Journal staff correspondent.

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Mission Fissures

Brian Friel — Wed, 19 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Through much of the 1990s, critics of the Immigration and Naturalization Service argued that its spotty performance was due largely to its conflicting missions. On the one hand, the agency was charged with quickly processing legal immigrants whose skills were needed in a growing economy. On the other, INS had to block illegal immigrants from entering and staying in the country. The agency seemed unable to perform either mission well, because it was trying to do both. Enforcement and service didn't seem to mix.

In 2003, INS moved from the Justice Department to the Homeland Security Department, and it was split up. The Citizenship and Immigration Services bureau handles the legal immigrant processing mission, while the Customs and Border Protection bureau oversees border security and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau handles the capture and deportation of illegal immigrants.

Did the split work? The evidence so far is encouraging -- though not conclusive. The enforcement bureaus have stepped up their efforts during the past few years, and the number of illegal immigrants estimated to be in the country has fallen. The legal immigrants' services bureau has reduced the processing time for many key groups of applicants.

Similar mission conflicts have plagued other federal organizations. Is the Forest Service supposed to preserve national forests or encourage their cultivation? Was Fannie Mae's goal to increase homeownership or increase profits? The Internal Revenue Service took it on the chin in the 1990s for being too heavy-handed in enforcement and not sufficiently taxpayer-friendly.

The Minerals Management Service, a little-known agency within the Interior Department, has long been criticized for mishandling its conflicting missions: enforcing rules on the oil and gas industry and collecting royalties from their production. Congress and the Obama administration are considering a plan to split that agency in two, much as INS was pulled apart in 2003.

Not every agency has been cleaved because of mixed missions. The Forest Service has maintained its dual roles despite many decades of criticism that it leaned too much one way or another. The argument against splitting the agency has long been that two separate entities with authority over the same land could end up in bitter bureaucratic battles. Keeping a unified agency allows competing interests to work out compromises through a single chain of command, rather than create separate power structures that would wind up in turf wars. The IRS has stayed intact despite criticism of its handling of enforcement and service. Instead of a split, Congress gave the agency a strong national taxpayer advocate, Nina Olson, who has run the office since 2001. The IRS' ombudsman model could help other agencies struggling with the twin needs of enforcing the law and aiding citizens.

For the Minerals Management Service, that kind of change might not be enough. Charges of corruption, incompetence and mismanagement have plagued MMS for decades. Now that the catastrophic BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has laid bare to the entire country the agency's shortcomings, it's hard to see how MMS can avoid a total makeover. It usually takes a great scandal like the oil spill -- or a tragedy like the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the case of the immigration service -- to get policymakers to deal with agencies' inherently flawed missions. Federal managers who don't try to deal strategically with conflicting goals in their agencies' charters ultimately can expect to see lawmakers handle them instead.

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Transparency Trap

Brian Friel — Wed, 05 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Earl Devaney has launched a revolution. A transparency revolution.

Devaney has spent his career keeping Uncle Sam honest, first as an investigator at various agencies, then as the inspector general at the Interior Department, and now as the chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, the oversight agency that is tracking spending under the $787 billion economic stimulus package signed into law in February 2009. Devaney said a few months later that he hoped his oversight board's Web site would be a prototype for government transparency in the future, helping Americans see how their tax dollars were being spent. Indeed, he said he hoped the site would help create "millions of citizen IGs."

On Recovery.gov, people can track hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts, grants and loans under the federal stimulus package. They can look at spending in their towns and counties and compare the distribution of dollars in all 50 states. Companies can review contracts that were awarded without competition to see whether they were given a proper chance to bid. This unprecedented transparency has triggered about 200 investigations into potential wrongdoing associated with the money.

The site also has generated hundreds of news articles about problems with the data and questionable projects, creating a messy and controversial picture of the Recovery Act's effects on the economy. Proponents of the stimulus package complain that Devaney should have made sure the data was clean before releasing it to the public, since critics have used mistakes in the data to challenge the Recovery effort's effectiveness. Many news outlets, for example, reported stimulus dollars had been spent in "phantom" congressional districts, because some organizations that received funds entered incorrect information for the district labels.

Anyone who expected increased transparency to improve the public's view of government should take note of a CBS News/New York Times poll published in February that found a stunningly low 6 percent of Americans believed the stimulus had created jobs. That is not a typo. It really was 6 percent.

That kind of feedback doesn't exactly inspire confidence that transparency is worth the effort for federal managers. Why bother with openness when the result is people will be less supportive of your efforts?

The fact is transparency is here to stay. Now that the government is posting spending information in such great detail on Recovery.gov, there's no turning back. So the question is, how do managers avoid the transparency trap so openness doesn't come back to bite them? Maybe the government can't just dump its data on the public and expect people to make sense of it.

Instead, federal managers will have to begin experimenting with methods of engaging the public to help answer questions and clear up misunderstandings associated with the new openness. Linda Travers and Sanjeev Bhagowalia, the federal technology officials who run the Data.gov Web site, have created one model-a blog on which visitors offer ideas and ask questions about the way the site is organized and how it could be improved.

So will the revolution that Earl Devaney started work? The answer isn't yet clear. But perhaps transparency needs to be coupled with engagement.

Brian Friel covered management and human resources at Government Executive for six years and is now a National Journal staff correspondent.

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Transparency Trap

Brian Friel — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Opening the book on government operations could cause major headaches for federal managers.

Earl Devaney has launched a revolution. A transparency revolution.

Anyone who expected increased transparency to improve the public's view of government should take note of a CBS News/New York Times poll published in February that found a stunningly low 6 percent of Americans believed the stimulus had created jobs. That is not a typo. It really was 6 percent.

So will the revolution that Earl Devaney started work? The answer isn't yet clear. But perhaps transparency needs to be coupled with engagement.

Brian Friel covered management and human resources at Government Executive for six years and is now a National Journal staff correspondent.

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Don’t Go, KSAs

Brian Friel — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Woe is the fresh-faced graduate, clenching a new master's degree in public policy, when he finds himself staring at a federal government job application that asks for a series of expository paragraphs describing how his knowledge, skills and abilities qualify him for the position he wants.

How horrible that he cannot simply email his resume to the government agency of his choice, just as he e-mailed it to a high-priced consulting firm. Instead he must sit and ponder how his various internships and mountainous coursework have prepared him for employment with the U.S. government. And then write it all down.

Ummm, really? Is it seriously that hard? Is it honestly too much to ask? Considering that federal agencies usually are inundated with applications for vacancies, is it really so burdensome to expect job seekers to explain, in writing, why managers should hire them over the hundreds of other candidates? Should the burden really be on hiring managers to decipher an applicant's qualifications rather than expect the applicant to spell them out?

These are the questions facing federal hiring process reformers as they consider the elimination of "knowledge, skills and abilities" statements from standard government application forms. The KSAs, as they are commonly known in bureaucratese, have been staples of Uncle Sam's hiring process for decades. Many applicants -- most vocally those who have matriculated from the country's most vaunted institutions of higher learning -- have long complained that the KSAs are a real pain. Some disgruntled job seekers say they're so much of a pain that KSAs are a contributing factor in their decision to work in the private sector rather than the federal government. Uncle Sam is losing the "best and brightest" because of these KSAs, hiring reformers long have claimed.

But if the "best and brightest" are so turned off by the need to submit lengthy documentation supporting their claims that they are indeed the best and brightest, then perhaps they really aren't well-suited for jobs in a paperwork-intensive environment such as the federal government.

While applicants might complain about KSAs, federal hiring managers and human resources officials often praise them. KSAs help hiring officials whittle vast pools of applicants down to a set of cream-of-the-crop candidates. KSAs also showcase applicants' writing and reasoning skills, and attention to detail. Well-crafted KSA statements help agencies determine which people are best qualified to do the government's work.

Even if KSAs are officially abandoned, job applicants shouldn't expect them to go away. Instead, watch for hiring officials to find a new name for the old KSA. Past efforts to streamline federal human resources rules typically have resulted in agencies using the same processes under a different moniker. The government's lengthy standard form for hiring, the SF-171, was eliminated in 1995, but agencies asked applicants to submit extensive "supplemental data" along with their resumes instead.

In the end, managers need to know whether candidates are up to the job. Reformers might think the onus should be on managers to figure that out, but the truth is, the burden is always on the applicant, whether that burden comes in the form of KSAs or not.

Brian Friel covered management and human resources at Government Executive for six years and is now a National Journal staff correspondent.

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