Government Executive - Authors - John Kamensky

Agencies really are missing an opportunity by downplaying performance information

John Kamensky — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 13:21:00 -0400

Shelley Metzenbaum’s recent article for Government Executive, “A Missed Opportunity,” highlights a conundrum facing government improvement geeks for nearly three decades. She laments that federal agencies’ quarterly performance updates for their priority goals “deserve more attention.” She says this lack of attention is a “missed opportunity” to engage the allies and advocates for these priority goals, help agencies learn how to improve and inform the public.

But does the public care about overall performance in the abstract or does it really care more about specifics—such as increased broadband access or reduced homelessness? Is it better to provide bite-sized chunks of information targeted to interested parties or an overall scorecard for the general public? What’s the best strategy for shining a flashlight on government performance in ways that engage the public’s support for reaching these goals?

A 2010 law requires federal agencies to publicly identify two-year goals for a small handful of priority initiatives and asks the Office of Management and Budget to post quarterly progress reports on these initiatives. Agencies have designated 82 such goals. In addition, OMB itself has identified three government-wide presidential management priorities where it is responsible for implementation and progress reports. Over the years, OMB has created a public-facing one-stop website called Performance.gov that makes this and more government performance information readily available.

Performance.gov is a Great One-Stop, But . . .

Performance.gov has improved greatly over the past decade, responding to criticism by the Government Accountability Office over the years that the website did not meet the government’s own usability tests. Recently, OMB has significantly improved the site’s design and usability with the help of the U.S. Digital Service.

In addition to the website—which is fairly static—OMB now makes much greater use of social media, regularly using Twitter, LinkedIn and its own blog to highlight progress on agency and cross-agency goals.

In addition to links to agency goals and plans, Performance.gov also hosts several cross-agency communities, such as the community of customer experience champions across the government as well as the Performance Improvement Council.

Some goals are fantastic examples of progress reporting. The cross-agency goal to improve customer experience delivery focuses on specific government services in specific agencies. It reports progress and improvements on each. For example, one such service improvement at the Veterans Affairs Department now allows veterans to use a mobile app to view claims and schedule medical appointments.

But creating a supply of performance information does not necessarily translate to a demand for it. That’s a different challenge. Is it because the performance information is viewed as self-serving for the administration? Not a reliable source of information? Puff pieces?

Performance.gov’s Ideal Target Audience

Metzenbaum says “It is time for those who believe in the federal government and want it to succeed to . . . give attention to the quarterly performance updates, longer-term strategic and shorter-term annual plans, and annual performance reports.”

But who are these “believers?” What do they really want? And are they even the right audience? Understanding how effectively government is delivering results is not just a “good government” thing. Before President Biden’s inauguration, The Washington Post’s David Von Drehle wrote that, beyond COVID-19, “Another disease in need of a cure is the anemia of official credibility. This has been a long time coming.” He went on to say: “Institutions regain credibility by delivering results. Trust can’t be demanded from a free people; it must be earned.”

But creating a supply of credible performance data does not necessarily translate into a demand for it. Thought is needed as to who is the specific target audience, and that would help define the best approach.

There seems to be three potential approaches to presenting information that may encourage a demand for more: better storytelling, crafting a dashboard, and/or creating a scorecard. Each have had some moderate success in capturing broader attention, but also pose risks in fostering potential “cheating” by agencies to look better.

Each of these three potential approaches assume different audiences—inside or outside government—and different purposes. They could be used in tandem or blended by different providers for different purposes such as learning, transparency and accountability.

A Platform Approach. A web-based platform is a way of publishing and consuming datasets via the use of standards, application programming interfaces and common building blocks. Examples include Data.gov and Usaspending.gov. Platforms allow easy access by third parties, which then can format the data in innovative ways. Platforms, however, tend to require some expertise in finding and interpreting data.

Some platforms go a step further and provide some descriptive information along with the data. This is the approach currently reflected in OMB’s Performance.gov website. However, there’s little fanfare when progress is updated each quarter and there isn’t much of an investment in using storytelling to convey the information. The data tends to feel diffuse, with no bottom line. For example, the quarterly update for the agency priority goal to “improve child well-being” is 16 pages long, with no clear assessment as to whether progress is being made or not.

In a follow-up exchange with Metzenbaum, she told me she favors this descriptive approach because it could ideally engage policy advocates and “goal allies” in order to “strengthen goal-setting and goal-framing and improve progress on them.”

In my view, the website could take a step further by adopting a more compelling story-telling slant, for example short videos by various goal owners, to engage a wider audience. The goals are updated on a quarterly cycle and there are enough priority goals to refresh stories every workday. These storytelling efforts should be led by the agencies, not OMB. One example might be the quarterly progress and results webcasts that Paul Lawrence used when he was undersecretary for benefits at the Veterans Affairs Department. Using this approach, he would engage over 10,000 people for each of his quarterly webcasts.

A Dashboard Approach. The use of dashboards tends to be a high-level summary of performance and progress, without judgements made – but also oftentimes without the context needed to understand what is happening. To be seen as more credible, it probably should be undertaken by a nonpartisan third party, such as a nonprofit or foundation.

For example, the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service translates annual federal employee survey data collected by the Office of Personnel Management and has created a highly visible Best Places to Work report that ranks federal agencies. It showcases these agency rankings, along with best practices, at a major event that is picked up by national media. More recently, the Partnership created an Agency Performance Dashboard but the dashboard doesn’t yet track performance beyond what is reported in federal employee surveys. It could be the beginning of a more visible initiative to educate the public on government performance.

Several potential downsides of a dashboard are that it identifies areas needing attention but does not indicate whether progress is being made or include strategies for how to improve.

A Scorecard Approach. Government is familiar with scorecards. They were used with some success by the George W. Bush administration in the early 2000s, which used them as a way to focus on accountability, with judgements made by OMB as to agency progress. More recently, Congress and the Government Accountability Office have been using a semiannual scorecard to nudge progress on technology reform since 2015. While the Bush management scorecard was dismissed by some as a politically-biased effort, agency progress on the congressional/GAO technology scorecard has been showcased in hearings and the media.

Metzenbaum argues that this approach is not optimal, especially if undertaken by OMB, because it steals “attention from efforts to make progress on outcome objectives.” She says the emphasis should be on improvement, not on achieving a target. She says agencies need to be able to see OMB as a partner, not a judge. Also, she fears that agencies would respond by setting “timid targets” that they know they could successfully meet.

Nevertheless, scorecards do engage members of Congress and the public far more effectively than dashboards. However, given the potential for negative incentives, if a scorecard effort were to be undertaken by a congressional panel, it probably should be done soon so Democratically-controlled oversight committees can create a baseline so the Biden administration would not see this as a politically-driven scorecard if undertaken by a future Republican-controlled Congress.

Engaging the Public

Metzenbaum’s column is a call to action. She says we need to “enrich public understanding of what government is doing.” While Performance.gov is a valuable platform for agency performance information, OMB should not have to be the sole voice in telling the performance stories of government, and the primary focus should not necessarily be to share performance information within the government or with “policy advocates.” To tell the story more broadly may require multiple approaches with a wider range of story tellers and analysts.

Whichever approaches are used, and whoever undertakes these efforts, the over-arching purpose should not ignore the importance of engaging the public in ways that create educated citizen-consumers. Ideally, in the long run this should help improve trust in government and its institutions, as suggested by The Washington Post’s Von Drehle.

Whatever is done needs to go beyond just posting data on a platform website. It should be a public event with media, not just a stealth quarterly posting of progress reports. The Partnership’s Best Places to Work event, report and announcement may be a good model. The model of congressional technology reform hearings could also be a way to better shine a flashlight on government performance.

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Agencies Really Are Missing an Opportunity by Downplaying Performance Information

John Kamensky — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 06:00:00 -0400

Performance.gov is a Great One-Stop, But . . .

Performance.gov’s Ideal Target Audience

Several potential downsides of a dashboard are that it identifies areas needing attention but does not indicate whether progress is being made or include strategies for how to improve.

Engaging the Public

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A quick take on the president’s management priorities

John Kamensky — Tue, 10 May 2022 14:21:00 -0400

When President Biden’s fiscal 2023 budget request was released in late March, media headlines focused on agency spending levels and new initiatives proposed. But there is another set of stories surrounding the budget release that tends to get less attention.

The administration also released details on its management agenda–how it’s going to deliver on its budget promises. Back in November, it released its cross-agency “President’s Management Agenda Vision,” which is more formally called “Cross-Agency Priority Goals.” That vision has now been fleshed out in more detail in tandem with agencies having released their four-year strategic plans, their first-ever learning agendas and their “agency priority goals” for the next two years.

This will be a lot to sift through. Here are some takeaways from the cross-agency priority goals and agency priority goals, both statutorily required by the 2010 Government Performance and Results Modernization Act:

Cross-Agency Priority Goals Are Tightly Focused. The Office of Management and Budget is required to develop a set of cross-agency priority goals that would cover a four-year span, designate a goal leader, and report progress publicly on a quarterly basis. In recent years, these cross-agency goals have been dubbed the president’s management agenda.

In past years, the agenda would be a set of more than a dozen different initiatives with leaders across the government for each. But the Biden management agenda is different. It focuses on three key priorities: strengthening and empowering the federal workforce, delivering excellent services and customer experience, and improving the federal management processes for grants and contracts. In releasing it, President Biden called it a multi-year, whole of government effort.

A leader for organizing this effort in the Office of Management and Budget, Pamela Coleman, says the goal was to “keep it simple” and connect the management initiatives with broader administration priorities by leading with values and a vision.

Government management guru, University of Texas professor Donald Kettl, declared the new agenda “a big deal” in the context of the 20-year history of presidential management agendas, noting that the Biden agenda limits itself to three cross-cutting areas instead of embracing a wide array of different commitments. He also noted that the agenda highlights the importance of engaging and empowering the federal workforce to deliver results.

The agenda was developed with lessons from the past in mind. For example, one lesson is to enlist top-level commitment. The formal document is co-signed by all of the members of the President’s Management Council, which is composed of the deputies in each department and major agency. Individual members of the council have agreed to co-lead each of the three priorities. The General Services Administration has a small implementation team to back them up, and to convene cross-agency communities of practice composed of line employees involved in these initiatives.

One of the three goals is to improve customer experience–which was bolstered in December by a presidential executive order with specific agency commitments and action steps. This could be the hallmark management initiative of this administration, much like “open government” was under President Obama. For example, OMB noted: “the executive order includes 36 customer experience improvement commitments across 17 federal agencies, all of which aim to improve people’s lives and the delivery of government services.” And in late April, OMB announced five cross-agency projects to bring together services and programs related to “life events” that cross agency boundaries, such as help recovering from a disaster (nine agencies), or preparing for retirement (seven agencies).

In early April, OMB released an update to the president’s management agenda that translated the visionary language posted in November to making it an action plan. For the first two of the three priorities, OMB detailed key strategies, the goals for each of these strategies, success metrics, and named individuals (both political and career executives) from across the government who will be leading the individual goals. OMB also committed to publicly reporting quarterly the progress of each of these goal teams.

For example, for the priority related to strengthening the federal workforce, it details four priority strategies led by about a dozen senior executives, along with 30 “success metrics” that will be overseen jointly by Office of Personnel Management Director Kiran Ahuja, Defense Department Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks, and Labor Department Deputy Secretary Julie Su.

One of their key success metrics is to work with agencies to increase employees’ sense of engagement with their jobs. In the private sector, employee engagement is a key metric for productivity, retention and satisfaction. Annual surveys of federal employees have shown improvement in recent years but OMB noted that “engagement varies significantly by agency and agency size.” The four-year goal is to “narrow agency-identified gaps [in engagement] by employee group or organizational unit by 20%.” OMB has previously reported that there are more than 28,000 work units across the government that have been surveyed, so crafting improvement strategies to address the needs of widely different circumstances across the government will be a significant challenge.

Agency Priority Goals Are More Mission-Oriented. That same law requiring cross-agency goals also requires major agencies to develop their own priority goals that cover a two-year span, designate a goal leader, and report progress publicly on a quarterly basis. These are to be near-term, implementation-focused priorities, not new policy initiatives. OMB reports that this is the eighth cohort of agency priority goals. In past years, they totaled between 80 and 100 priority goals across all agencies, oftentimes with carryovers from previous cohorts.

So far, 20 agencies report a total of 72 priority goals. Five are joint goals between two agencies, and three agencies have not yet publicly released their priority goals (Defense, Education and Justice). Joint goals include, for example, Agriculture and Commerce committing to provide “at least 550,000 households with access to high quality and affordable internet service.”

Interestingly, there is continuity, even across presidential administrations. About one-third of agency priority goals have been carried forward from the prior cohort but sometimes with new, improved titles. For example, here’s one re-labeled priority goal for the Department of Housing and Urban Development:

HUD’s 2020-2021 goal: Protect Families from Lead-Based Paint and Other Health Hazards: “By September 30, 2021, protect families from lead-based paint and other health hazards by making an additional 17,800 at-risk housing units healthy and lead-safe.”
HUD’s 2022-2023 goal: Strengthen Environmental Justice: “By September 30, 2023, protect families from lead-based paint and other health hazards by making an additional 20,000 units of at-risk housing units healthy and lead-safe.”

Several other observations about the new goals:

There are far fewer goals addressing internal agency operations and more that address issues facing the American public.
A quarter of the goals address Biden administration priorities related to equity and climate change.
Some agency leaders seem to “get it” and are using their agency priority goals as an overarching umbrella to rally their workforce around key priorities. These include the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Transportation and NASA. For example, NASA’s goals highlight the Artemis moon mission, the Webb telescope, climate change research and leadership in space technology.

One agency priority goal that caught my attention as potentially being a big deal Americans might notice is a commitment by the General Services Administration to expand citizens’ use of one-stop sign-in to access government services across different agencies (Login.gov) from 16 million to 41 million Americans over the next 18 months.

Next Step: Getting the Word Out. A big challenge when dealing with the nitty gritty of governing and getting things done is communicating what’s happening to the public and stakeholders. OMB undertook efforts to engage stakeholders in the good government community while developing the cross-agency priority goals. Several agencies noted that they reached out to their respective communities, as well.

OMB created a one-stop website—Performance.gov—where it consolidates all agency strategic plans, performance plans and agency priority goals, along with the cross-agency priority goals. The site is updated frequently and includes quarterly progress reports on agency and cross-agency priority goals. It also identifies the individuals across the government who lead each of the priority goals.

But now OMB may have some competition! The nonprofit Partnership for Public Service has created a federal Agency Performance Dashboard that provides additional information on personnel-related issues and management challenges each agency faces. It promises to update progress and performance via the use of automated API data feeds from different federal data bases. If it works, it will be more interactive and more real time than the more carefully curated OMB website. We’ll see in coming months how this works.

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A Quick Take on the President’s Management Priorities

John Kamensky — Mon, 09 May 2022 13:03:19 -0400

HUD’s 2020-2021 goal: Protect Families from Lead-Based Paint and Other Health Hazards: “By September 30, 2021, protect families from lead-based paint and other health hazards by making an additional 17,800 at-risk housing units healthy and lead-safe.”
HUD’s 2022-2023 goal: Strengthen Environmental Justice: “By September 30, 2023, protect families from lead-based paint and other health hazards by making an additional 20,000 units of at-risk housing units healthy and lead-safe.”

Several other observations about the new goals:

There are far fewer goals addressing internal agency operations and more that address issues facing the American public.
A quarter of the goals address Biden administration priorities related to equity and climate change.
Some agency leaders seem to “get it” and are using their agency priority goals as an overarching umbrella to rally their workforce around key priorities. These include the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Transportation and NASA. For example, NASA’s goals highlight the Artemis moon mission, the Webb telescope, climate change research and leadership in space technology.

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Can Biden Deliver Better ‘Customer Experience’ for Americans Than His Predecessors?

John Kamensky — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 11:20:06 -0500

The Biden Administration has announced a new “Customer Experience and Service Delivery” initiative, promising some pretty specific and measurable actions, not just high-minded rhetoric. For example, it includes 36 customer experience commitments across 17 federal agencies focused on “the moments that matter most in people’s lives” such as retiring, travelling, and paying for college. It also focuses on reducing administrative burdens for people applying for safety net programs by streamlining enrollment and certification processes.

But is this just new wine in old wine skins, or is it a strategic renewal and expansion?

Biden is now the fifth president since Bill Clinton to announce a new customer focus for federal services. It started with an executive order in 1993 by Clinton, who made customer service the signature focus of his Reinventing Government initiative. (Full disclosure, I was a deputy director for that initiative.) But the Biden initiative builds on—and takes lessons from—his predecessors.

Lessons from the Past

Over the past 30 years, presidents have undertaken customer-oriented initiatives to improve federal services to the public with an eye towards improving trust in the government’s ability to deliver on its promises. Here are highlights from some of these initiatives, and lessons learned (and here’s more history from a prior post):

President Clinton. His administration’s reinventing government initiative, under the direction of Vice President Al Gore, undertook a number of customer-oriented initiatives via executive orders and memos. It declared “The standard of quality shall be equal to the best in business.” This resulted in setting 4,000 service standards across 570 agencies. It worked with the publishers of 6,000 phone directories across the country to create customer-oriented Blue Pages where you could find Passports under “P,” not under “S” for State Department, which issues passports—this was before Google or USA.gov existed.

In its later years, it shifted to the use of customer satisfaction surveys and focused attention on 32 agencies that had the most interaction with the public, such as the Postal Service and IRS. And since this was during the early years of the internet, it sponsored the creation of new websites organized around target populations—business.gov, students.gov, recreation.gov, etc. It also promoted the creation of FirstGov.gov, the first one-stop site for the federal government (re-named under Bush as USA.gov).

Lesson: Creating a targeted focus on a subset of services leads to more tangible results.

President George W. Bush. The Bush administration deemphasized customer service, largely because it was seen as a Clinton initiative. But they didn’t eliminate it. The Bush team changed the language to focus on “citizen” services, with an emphasis on electronic service delivery. In his e-government initiatives, the focus was on selected citizen services, including electronic EZ tax filing, seeking help after a disaster (now disasterassistance.gov), and accessing federal benefits (now benefits.gov). These and other digital initiatives are expanded on through Biden’s new directive. The efforts to measure and publicize customer satisfaction was deemphasized, which led to calls on Capitol Hill for legislative action but this never resulted in anything.

Lesson: Moving to digital e-gov can make a big difference for public ease of access at a lower cost than in-person services.

President Obama. The Obama administration created a new emphasis, with a new directive that agencies create customer service plans, but was slow to operationalize actions in his first term. In his second term, he created a “cross-agency priority goal” that focused on a subset of 30 services in 16 agencies that were seen as “high touch.” His administration incorporated the newest private sector best practice—customer experience—which focused not on specific transactions but on the “journey” that a customer would face in receiving services. They also created a cross-agency Core Federal Services Council and an awards program to champion improved customer experience within the federal community.

Probably the most prominent, and successful, efforts were at the Department of Veterans Affairs. VA secretary Bob McDonald created a Veterans Experience Office in 2016 in response to the Phoenix hospital waiting list scandal, which was a wake-up call that there was no “customer voice” in the system to understand what was going on in the different VA bureaus. This office led a redesign of how VA delivered services. For example, it championed the creation of a “patient experience program” based on human-centered design, using journey mapping. It started with hospital appointment scheduling to identify “moments that matter” in the process. The office reported that it increased veterans’ trust in VA by 25% over the subsequent 5-year period using this “bottom up” approach.

Lesson: Focusing on designing service delivery from the perspective of an individual customer’s experience is critical to success.

President Trump. The Trump administration placed no real emphasis on customers in public statements and disbanded the Obama-created cross-agency council of career leaders and awards program. However, Trump did quietly continue the customer experience efforts begun under President Obama via a cross-agency priority goal that focused on a handful of 26 “high impact service providers.” A new cross-agency network evolved and a presidential-level awards recognition program was reinstituted. But more importantly, the Trump administration invested in staffing, digital services, and support structures at the General Services Administration and the U.S. Digital Service.

Lesson: Building governmentwide administrative and technical capacity matters.

Applying the Lessons

So what’s different this time? The new Biden initiative has taken to heart lessons from previous administrations in designing its new initiative.

The directive sets clear, measurable expectations of what is to be delivered and how. The Biden directive creates clear expectations of what people can expect in each of the 36 initiatives detailed. For example: “The Secretary of State shall design and deliver a new online passport renewal experience that does not require any physical documents to be mailed.”
It focuses on organizing around “life experiences” using industry best practices such as “journey mapping” and “human-centered design.” This strategy will integrate activities that may involve a subset of services from several agencies—such as Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Labor—when military personnel transition from active duty to private life.
A parallel strategy focuses on reducing administrative burdens or other barriers, an effort already underway in other parts of the administration to improve services and program results.
The initiative enlists the members of the President’s Management Council (typically each agency’s deputy secretary or equivalent) to “select a limited number of customer life experiences to prioritize for Governmentwide action.” Past experience found that joint ownership helps create commitment.
It directs the creation of cross-agency implementation teams around each “life experience” and requires the director of the Office of Management and Budget to “establish a team within OMB to lead and support agency customer experience initiatives.”
It directs OMB to ensure accountability for action via regular reporting and guidance for how to assess capacity to manage the individual customer experience efforts underway.
It directs agencies to integrate their customer experience activities into their regular strategic, operating and staffing plans, and into the individual performance plans for senior executives.

All of these proposed actions and the continuity of existing commitments of talent and resources in agencies and OMB are very promising steps.

Unfinished Business

While the new Biden initiative is an important step forward, past experience shows that this work can’t just be a technocratic, top-down effort initiative, supported by diligent employees and contractors. VA learned this lesson, and it has taken years to incorporate the customer experience approach into its operating culture. But VA may be a special case. It has the advantage of a clear set of customers, unlike the Commerce Department, for example, which has a range of customers for services as diverse as patents, weather forecasting, Census statistics, international trade, and more. Most federal departments are more like Commerce than VA, but at the service delivery level, which is where the Biden initiative focuses, there may be more commonalities to VA’s experience.

President Biden likes to talk about “whole of government” efforts. But improving customer experience for federal services is not just a single administration’s initiative. It requires a long term strategy for engaging more than just the White House and OMB in rethinking how government works for the people. For long-term sustainability this will require:

Engaging agency leaders. If they don’t see it as a priority, neither will their employees. To demonstrate their commitment, they’ll need to get out into the field and talk with employees and customers. Former veterans undersecretary for benefits, Dr. Paul Lawrence, did this well.
Engaging employees. Leaders need to spark enthusiasm among career civil servants. After all, they can legitimately say they’ve seen this all before. The Biden initiative has enlisted individual members of the President’s Management Council (typically deputy secretaries) to champion initiatives in their own agencies. They could make service on a customer experience team part of their agency’s career leadership promotion track.
Engaging state governments. Most federal services are delivered, using federal monies, through states via the federal grant system. This includes education, social services, Medicaid, and disaster assistance. They need to be part of the federal services “journey-mapping” efforts in order to make services seamless.
Engaging the Congress. While legislation may not be necessary, having congressional champions for improving the various “life experience” processes detailed in the Biden directive will be valuable for ensuring longer-term sustainability.
Engaging nongovernmental sectors. Other successful governmentwide initiatives have external advocates. For example, the implementation of the Evidence Act is championed by the nonprofit Results for America and the DATA Act is championed by the Data Foundation. While the federal government cannot promote such efforts, external advocates can self-organize to help ensure longer-term sustainability.
Engaging the public. Part of the rationale for the Biden initiative, and for previous customer initiatives, is to increase public trust in government. But there needs to be greater actual engagement with the public. This might include more interactive, real time feedback mechanisms as well as locally-based citizen advisory teams, such as VA hospital veterans’ services advisory boards or national park advisory committees.

While this “unfinished business” may seem daunting on top of the already-ambitious agenda, it doesn’t need to happen immediately.

In sum, this presidential directive isn’t a retread of old initiatives. It builds on and learns from them but it is a remarkable bold step forward over what was done in the past. It is a holiday gift to the American people. Hopefully they’ll begin to see its impact in the New Year.

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Restoring Trust in Government One Customer at a Time

John Kamensky — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0400

Public trust in government—especially the federal government—has plummeted in recent years. This has ominous overtones for democracy, which is founded on trust. No wonder a recent survey of corporate CEOs shows the nation’s top business executives believe restoring public trust needs to be at the top of the national agenda.

This steady loss of trust over the years has led to a flurry of efforts in government and in the nonprofit sector to find ways to reverse it. And in some cases, it has worked. For example, after its confidence-busting veterans hospital wait time scandal in 2014, Department of Veterans Affairs secretary Bob McDonald created a Veterans Experience Office in 2015 to change the department’s culture to deliver integrated services to veterans and collect and use feedback about veterans’ experiences receiving VA services. It set a goal of 90% trust by veterans in the department. While it didn’t meet that stretch goal, it did increase trust between 2016 and 2021 from 55% to 79%—a 24% increase.

But can VA’s success be replicated in other agencies? New legislation introduced recently is betting that the answer is “yes.”

A New Legislative Push

Over the years, a number of bills have been introduced (but not adopted) to improve customer service in the federal government. These bills would have set customer service standards, increased employee accountability and made it easier to conduct customer surveys.

Newly-introduced legislation reaches beyond these efforts and is probably the most ambitious and expansive step ever. The bill—the Trust in Public Service Act—builds on best practices reflected in various administrative initiatives undertaken by federal agencies over the past three decades, such as the efforts undertaken by VA.

The legislation has bipartisan and bicameral support. Sponsors include Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and James Lankford, R-Okla., and Reps. Jerry Connolly, D-Va., and Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga..

Their goal, according to a press release, is to improve trust via better citizen interactions, through the routine use of citizen and employee feedback, and better communication with citizens. Their bill would do this by:

Establishing improved “customer experience” as a governmentwide and federal agency goal, including in federal programs delivered by states and localities.

Recognizing exceptional performers among federal employees, and agencies that are early adopters of new innovations that improve customer experience.

Integrating customer experience into existing administrative routines, such as agency strategic plans and evidence plans and by designating it as a permanent cross-agency priority goal.

Establishing a Chief Customer Experience Officer for the United States, who would report to the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Adding both customer experience and increasing public trust responsibilities to the job responsibilities of other statutory officials such as agency performance improvement officers, chief information officers, and chief data officers.

Encouraging agency heads to designate “lead customer experience officers” for components within their agencies that have significant interactions with the public, such as those functions designated as high-impact service providers.

Building on Prior Initiatives

Improving public trust and citizen services has a long history in the executive branch, starting with the Clinton administration’s executive orders on improving customer service. The Biden administration’s budget includes a renewed commitment, stating: “The Administration is implementing a comprehensive approach to improving the access, equity, and overall delivery of Federal services, which includes improving customer experience management.”

In addition, the President’s budget supports an ongoing initiative to improve customer experiences in 26 federal entities or programs designated as high-impact service providers, such as TSA airport security checks and student aid programs. For other federal services, the American Rescue Plan already included $150 million for the Federal Citizen Services Fund in the General Services Administration.

Improving Trust

Improving customer experience with federal services is foundational to increasing trust. But it is not enough. In fact, a citizen survey by Deloitte last year found that “respondents’ trust in the federal government as a whole is much less than their trust in 39 surveyed agencies.” It found that “high-touch” agencies, such as the Postal Service or National Park Service, were rated more highly, but still below those in the private sector.

A concerted effort to improve citizens’ trust needs to be multi-faceted and reach beyond just improving customer experience, according to a number of studies. This implies that a range of different strategies will be needed to go beyond what is in the pending legislation. These include:

Improving opportunities for meaningful citizen engagement with government.
Investing in civics to create a more educated citizenry.
Promoting a commitment to national and public service by American youth.
Increasing trust and commitment within government, among employees that serve the public.
Modernizing supporting institutional mechanisms such as ethics laws, “open government” initiatives and inspectors general.

For several of these strategies, separate legislation is pending. The proposed Trust in Public Service Act does not attempt to tackle these different strategies but it does direct the creation of an advisory committee on improving public engagement and civic culture that could serve as a catalyst for action.

However, the first step will be improving customer experience, one person at a time. Loudermilk may have said it best in his statement on introducing the bill: “I have worked on legislation to improve the customer experience every year I’ve been in Congress, and why I am leading this effort in the House of Representatives, with Congressman Connolly. The fact that the Trust in Public Service Act is a bipartisan, bicameral bill shows it is a very important issue for many Americans.”

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There’s a Better Way to Manage Federal Grants, a New Report Shows

John Kamensky — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 13:38:05 -0400

The federal grant system is vast. In fiscal year 2019, agencies spent $765 billion on grants to states, localities, research institutions, non-profits, and others—that’s more than the Pentagon’s annual budget. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, grant spending surged to $921 billion last year.

Grants expert Jeff Myers, along with several of his colleagues, recently wrote in Government Executive:

“A new survey [of federal grant managers] shows that administrative costs have spiked, while funding agencies struggle to measure outcomes … It isn’t surprising that measuring recipient outcomes is challenging. Grant managers are accustomed to measuring and reporting funding flows and uses, timeliness, and compliance. But data about quality, customer satisfaction and mission impact are harder to define.”

As Myers noted, most of the attention given to federal grants management has been devoted to the tasks of awarding and distributing funds and, after they have been awarded, to tracking spending. Until fairly recently, surprisingly little attention has been given to tracking program outcomes, or more importantly, in trying to improve those outcomes.

The Office of Management and Budget has been the leader in promoting results-oriented grants. Last year, it led a task force that published a Grants Playbook that calls for “a paradigm shift in grants management from one heavy on compliance to a more balanced approach that includes establishing measurable program and project goals and analyzing data to improve results.” This shift involves changing roles and responsibilities across the grants system.

Reinventing Roles

In a new report for the IBM Center, Federal Grants Management: Improving Outcomes, Shelley Metzenbaum argues that to shift the emphasis from administrative matters to improving outcomes requires rethinking the roles and responsibilities of the many players in the federal grant system. Many individuals—in government and elsewhere—are currently involved at various points in the life cycle of a grant program. They may influence both program objectives as well as the rate and magnitude of progress on those objectives. Their roles and responsibilities tend to be diffuse and, unfortunately, it is currently far easier to identify those working on fiscal, audit, and oversight matters than those working on improving program outcomes.

To drive improvement across the grants management system, Metzenbaum recommends developing three new roles: 1) designating grant program “outcome brokers”; 2) changing the role of traditional grant managers to become problem solvers; and 3) creating networks of grant program recipients who would comprise continuous learning and improvement communities.

Role 1: Designate Outcome Brokers

A 2014 Government Accountability Office report on the successful implementation of the 2009 Recovery Act observed that:

“Officials in the Recovery Implementation Office employed a collaborative, facilitative approach, while also leveraging the authority of the Vice President to facilitate the participation of stakeholders. The office functioned as a convener and problem-solver that engaged with a wide range of federal, state and local partners … Toward this end, the office adopted the role of an “outcome broker,” working closely with partners across organizational silos at all levels of government in order to foster implementation of the Recovery Act and achieve results.”

This role was embedded in the 2010 revisions to the Government Performance and Results Act but was dubbed “goal leader” for agency and cross-agency priority goals, not “outcome broker,” but the roles would be essentially the same.

Metzenbaum proposes identifying outcome brokers for every grant program’s outcome objectives. This person could be an existing official, inside or outside the grant program’s office or possibly outside the government.

The outcome broker would be responsible for bringing together goal allies and those with relevant expertise and resources to make progress towards the grant program’s outcome objectives. In some cases, the outcome broker might lead an outcome improvement team for the program or for broader strategic objectives. His or her role would be to work with grant program managers to:

Help define a grant program’s focus and other goals, targets and key performance indicators.

Catalyze discussions about the best ways to communicate program objectives to make them understandable, resonant, motivating, actionable and, where relevant, to reach agreement with outcome-focused partners on objectives and who will take the lead on different objectives.

Encourage collaboration with other government offices addressing the same objectives and determine how best to coordinate to find and share relevant evidence, find and fill knowledge gaps, and make progress on common outcome objectives.

Role 2: Turn Grant Managers Into Problem Solvers

The role of grant program managers would be reframed to emphasize improving outcomes. This would require adopting a problem-solving mindset (with the support of an outcome broker) and would include:

Clearly identifying and communicating outcome objectives and deciding where to focus both long term and short term.
Identifying what works, what works better, and when situational differences might impede effectiveness of a solution that works.
Promoting practices that advance progress towards outcomes while reducing less effective practices.

Can these responsibilities be added to grant managers’ existing responsibilities? Some might suggest that the increase in robotic process automation to perform routine administrative tasks holds promise for reinventing the role of program managers so they can shed the administrative routines in order to place greater emphasis on creative, problem-solving tasks.

Role 3: Create Continuous Learning Communities

One way to develop a problem-solving mindset and culture among grant managers is to proactively enlist help from those affected by the grant program to understand what works and what needs improvement. Rather than relying on a top-down “problem finding and punishment” approach, grant program leaders should develop a bottom-up learning and problem-solving approach.

Learning and improvement communities already exist in some grant programs. These communities, largely voluntary, bring practitioners and researchers together to build and use evidence to advance the grant program’s objectives. For example, some are:

Organized by grantee organizations, such as the Data Design initiative of the National Head Start Association
Non-governmental groups, such as Results for America
Grant recipients, such as Nevada’s Department of Education, working with its school districts to determine root causes of underperformance, and
Networked improvement communities, such as the Carnegie Math Pathways network of community colleges that focuses on improving success rates in developmental math courses.

These different models provide grants program officials alternative ways of creating communities for their own grantee and stakeholder networks that would work best for them.

Implementing Role Reinvention

There are existing examples of each of these three different roles proposed by Metzenbaum. The question is whether and how they might be scaled more broadly across the grants management system.

Interestingly, there is a pending opportunity that could be used to scale these examples. A recent law mandates the creation of an inventory of all federal programs, including grants. One element of this mandate is that all “federal financial assistance awards” (the formal name for grant programs) must annually report “results” to the extent practicable, based on data reported to the grant program office. OMB has undertaken a pilot effort to determine how best to develop the inventory. To date, the pilot has developed a methodology to identify categories of similar programs; OMB has thus far defined 12 categories and 34 agencies have reported about 700 programs and “sets of activities” (subsets of programs) that fall into these 12 categories. The 12 were selected because there has been some historical common understanding about them, such as programs and activities related to homelessness, broadband, workforce development, etc.

If categories such as these are ultimately used as an organizing construct, they might evolve into a set of portfolios of outcomes—related grants, programs, and activities that support a common outcome-oriented goal. And this is where an Outcome Broker—with the support of problem solvers and learning communities—might well become the focal point for ensuring such a portfolio of programs makes progress towards intended outcomes.

Where to Start

Half of all federal grant dollars are devoted to supporting health care programs, largely Medicaid. This might be a good starting point. There is a movement to address the social determinants of health, factors that are not directly health-related but contribute to poor health outcomes, such as economic instability, lack of access to quality education, and unsafe workplaces and communities. These and other factors are tracked by a network of health and social professionals inside and outside government via the federal Healthy People initiative.

Healthy People is a set of “science-based, 10-year national objectives for improving the health of all Americans.” Begun in the 1980s, it sets benchmarks and monitors progress over time of more than 60 health-related strategic objectives, grouped into five broad topical areas. Each objective is broken into sub-objectives that are linked to evidence and show trend information for each health objective and leading health indicator. When states develop their own health improvement plans, the site links to that state’s plans.

While the HealthyPeople.gov website does not currently link back to the various supporting federal grant programs, it could serve as a model of how grant program leaders could organize problem-solving efforts and communicate outcome-focused goals and relevant evidence. It could also serve as a natural starting point for designating outcome brokers and developing continuous learning and improvement communities.

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Lessons From 30 Years of Government Reform Efforts

John Kamensky and Dan Chenok — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 14:14:52 -0400

One of the most striking things new White House staffers encounter when they first walk into their offices in the White House or the large, gray Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door is the emptiness. The previous occupants leave no files or other records beyond those retained by career staff in the Office of Management and Budget and other agencies. All policy documents are sent to the National Archives, and the General Services Administration will have cleaned everything else away before the new staffers arrive.

This can reinforce a natural assumption that new leaders start with a clean slate to reform government policies and programs. But context and perspective on what came before has great value: What worked? What didn’t?

A new report that we co-authored, along with a set of distinguished contributors, shares insights, lessons and stories about our experiences in developing and implementing different kinds of government reforms over the years.

Every President Wants ‘Reform’

Each presidential administration over the past 30 years has promoted some form of government reform. Some were broad, such as the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government initiative in the 1990s and the more recent Trump administration effort to reorganize the federal government. Others were more targeted, such as George W. Bush’s President’s Management Agenda and the Obama administration’s Campaign to Cut Waste. Some led to more tangible outcomes than others.

Reforms come in three sizes:

Governmentwide, such as the Clinton-Gore Reinventing Government effort;
Those focused on mission support functions (e.g., personnel, finance, IT), such as the Bush reform efforts; and
Initiatives specific to improving mission delivery, such as improving customer service, cross-agency collaboration in delivering related services to common customers, and increasing the use of data-driven decision making on the front line.

Regardless of the size of reform, three phases with common success factors have emerged for every reform effort: 1) developing the reform initiative, 2) implementing the initiative, and 3) sustaining the initiative.

Developing a Reform Initiative

Typically, the development of a reform initiative is time-bound, often the work of a temporary task force to staff the initiative.

Make a compelling case for change. According to public management scholar Don Kettl, developing a management reform initiative starts with the political and administrative context facing government leaders in the White House, Congress, and agencies. They have to articulate why they want to pursue reforms, what proposed actions are needed, and who needs to be motivated to act.

Engage top leaders as champions. The most successful efforts had top level support, sustained for the duration of the initiative. For example, the Reinventing Government initiative in the 1990s was supported by Vice President Al Gore for the full eight years of the Clinton administration. In the Obama administration, then-Vice President Biden was effective in successfully implementing the Recovery Act, in part due to his personal involvement in calls and meetings with agency heads, governors, and mayors. Staff at all levels saw this and knew that implementation was a top priority for the administration.

Prioritize among competing opportunities. The George W. Bush administration was very disciplined in its reform initiatives. For example, it inherited more than 1,000 ongoing e-government projects from the Clinton administration. Then-chief information officer Mark Forman created the “Quicksilver” taskforce to prioritize those projects with the greatest potential impact. They ultimately selected 25 to invest in and scale. Similarly, Peter Levine, who was the Pentagon’s chief management officer in the Obama administration, faced hundreds of demands for projects to streamline Defense management processes and had to prioritize among them to ensure focus and attention.

Implementing the Reform Initiative

Historically, many reform efforts stumbled after their initiative plans were developed. Several critical success factors have emerged as keys to successful implementation:

Create a governance structure. The task force that develops a reform initiative typically is transitory in nature, and often dissolves after making recommendations. The resulting initiative needs both a champion and a governance structure to implement the initiative. In the Bush administration, the Quicksilver initiatives led by Mark Forman established a set of co-owners for each of the 25 projects it recommended, along with a “portfolio manager” in OMB to help address roadblocks.

Engage staff at different levels. Over the past two decades, reform initiatives have been largely top-down. In contrast, engaging a range of staff at different levels in an agency increases the chance of successful implementation. For example, Defense career executive Bob Stone, who helped lead the Reinventing Government initiative, made a concerted effort to engage frontline staff via the creation of “reinvention labs” and the use of “Hammer Awards” to recognize teams of federal employees who improved services to citizens or significantly improved administrative functions. This led to a greater level of commitment by field and other frontline staff, with about 100,000 people recognized over the course of the Clinton administration.

Create a community. As one element of an engagement strategy, creating communities of employees motivated to pursue a particular initiative can provide an effective implementation strategy. Numerous efforts to create communities of practice and centers of excellence have been institutionalized and made potentially more sustainable over time. GSA, for example, hosts several centers of excellence, such as the Center for Artificial Intelligence and the Center for Customer Experience.

Sustaining the Initiative

The large scale, highly visible overarching reform efforts such as Reinventing Government, specific initiatives under presidents’ management agendas, and various reorganization initiatives can evaporate at the end of an administration when their political champions disappear. However, initiatives with a statutory basis tend to have greater continuity. The following success factors have shown to improve sustainability of such initiatives over time:

Create on-going institutional structures and new routines. For example, the chief financial officers’ community worked together to ensure the long-term viability of the role of CFOs by building a strong network, staff capabilities, and a long-term plan of action for the CFO community, strengthening implementation of the CFO Act .

Use a dual-track approach. Effective management reform requires top-down vision, support, and policy framing along with bottom-up engagement by frontline employees involved in implementing the initiative. The current communities of practice and centers of excellence could enable more systematic bottom-up engagement of frontline staff in future top-down initiatives.

Embed new requirements into pre-existing administrative routines. Agencies have many existing administrative routines and typically resist adding new ones. For example, the budget process represents the most enduring, and most central, administrative routine in most agencies. Based on the experience of the implementation of laws such as the CFO Act and the Government Performance and Results Act, initiatives that align with existing administrative routines and timetables tend to have greater sustainability. For example, both the CFO Act and GPRA reports provide information to Congress at about the same time they receive the president’s budget each February.

Ensure ongoing collaboration with Congress. A crucial success factor is the importance of involving Congress, even without a requirement for legislation to act on the initiatives. The lack of action on the Obama administration’s reorganization of trade agencies and the Trump administration’s proposed merger of elements of the Office of Personnel Management into the General Services Administration suffered in part from this skipped step.

These success factors can serve as useful guideposts for the management team at OMB, the departmental deputy secretaries, leaders on the President’s Management Council and others to collectively build government back better.

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How to Address the Question Every Program Manager Should Answer: Does It Work?

John Kamensky — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 14:50:33 -0500

In 2017, Congress gave tax breaks for investors in designated Opportunity Zones around the country. The idea was that this would generate substantial private sector investments in more than 8,700 lower-income census tracts. Did it work as intended? This is one of many questions raised by the Housing and Urban Development Department in its most recent research agenda, which is required by law.

HUD has pioneered the use of economic- and housing-related research and evaluation agendas since 2013. But in 2019, a new law required all federal agencies to develop evidence-building research agendas to assess how well their programs work. Dubbed “learning agendas,” the first set is due to Congress in early 2022.

What’s been the experience of early pioneers in developing learning agendas? What are some good models to follow? What are the potential pitfalls? A new IBM Center report by a research team composed of Kathy Newcomer, Karol Olejniczak and Nick Hart tackles these questions.

First, some background: A 2017 congressional commission recommended agencies use more “evidence” in making policy decisions. One element of the recommendation was for agencies to develop research-based, evidence-building evaluation plans to methodically examine the effectiveness and impact of various programs. These plans are colloquially called “learning agendas,” a term used by pioneering agencies in the Obama administration.

The commission’s recommendations were incorporated into the bipartisan 2018 Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, which required agencies to develop learning agendas in conjunction with their strategic plans, which are refreshed every four years. As a result, the first set of completed learning agendas will be due to Congress in early 2022.

Agencies were also required to designate chief evaluation officers to lead the development of their agencies’ learning agendas. The Office of Management and Budget has supported them with guidance in 2020 that includes, for example, standards for judging program evaluation practices.

Early signals from the Biden administration suggest strong support for continuing this effort. For example, in a memorandum shortly after taking office, President Biden declared: “Heads of agencies shall ensure that the scientific-integrity policies of their agencies consider, supplement, and support their plans for forming evidence-based policies, including the evidence-building plans required [by law in the Evidence Act].”

What Is a Learning Agenda?

OMB guidance in 2019 describes learning agendas as multi-year evidence-building plans that would be “a systematic plan for identifying and addressing policy questions relevant to the programs, policies, and regulations of the agency.” While OMB did not prescribe a format, it did note that such plans would need to address the following elements:

A list of policy-relevant questions for which the agency intends to develop evidence to support policymaking.
A list of data the agency intends to collect, use, or acquire to facilitate the use of evidence in policymaking.
A list of methods and analytical approaches that may be used to develop evidence to support policymaking

The guidance also asks agencies to identify potential challenges to developing evidence – such as statutory restrictions – and to develop annual evaluation plans to implement the multi-year learning agenda, as well as to conduct an assessment of the agency’s ability to actually implement the learning agenda.

Avoiding a Compliance Exercise

The IBM Center report’s researchers note that proponents’ greatest fear of evidence-based policymaking is that the learning agenda would become a compliance exercise to “placate oversight officials” and not be meaningful. Similarly, they noted that there is the possibility that, if program officials were not engaged in the development process, “the substance reaches a level of abstraction that makes implementation difficult.”

Based on their observations of successful early adopters, such as HUD and the Small Business Administration, they found that developing and implementing learning agendas “requires participation from a range of stakeholder and internal programs staff.” They found that such participation grounds the agenda with insights about programs that could lead to short-term operational improvements. It also offers success stories that can demonstrate the value of evidence-building efforts.

SBA, for example, collected feedback internally from program managers and externally from trade groups, think tanks and researchers. The agency constructed its plan around the four strategic priorities in its strategic plan, with long-term and short-term efforts to address questions such as: “What impact does lending have on long-term job creation, revenue growth, and export sales?” SBA’s agenda also identifies research the agency intends to fund, the relevant databases that researchers could access for such projects, and relevant literature for reference by the evidence-building community

Emerging Practices

Newcomer, Olejniczak, and Hart identify three emerging practices for developing an effective learning agenda:

Agency leaders and program managers need to identify and agree upon their agency’s key mission objectives and goals. If there is not a shared understanding about core mission objectives, it is difficult to agree on relevant research questions and priorities.

Staff and stakeholders have to be willing to participate in the learning agenda development process and commit to using its resulting activities in order to promote evidence-based decision making and learning within the agency. Developing a plan, and then not providing the resources to implement it, and not using the results to make decisions, is a recipe for a compliance exercise.

Agency leaders need to define the “unit of analysis” for which the agenda will be developed. Will it be organized based on: agency programs? agency organizational divisions? or broad policy outcomes? Will it be developed in conjunction with other federal agencies with related programs or desired policy outcomes, such as climate change? Will it be developed in conjunction with state, local, or other sectors, such as nonprofits attempting to address issues that require collaboration to solve, such as addressing the social determinants of health?

Sorting these issues out in advance of actually developing a learning agenda will make the resulting product more meaningful and actionable for both evaluators and decision makers.

Next Steps

Building on emerging practices, the research team identified a set of desired characteristics for learning agenda-building exercises. These characteristics include elements such as ensuring they are user-oriented by including program managers as co-designers in the development process, making the development process both interactive as well as iterative, and ensuring grassroots input to ensure the resulting evidence plans are grounded in information that actually exists or can be collected.

Newcomer, Olejniczak, and Hart also describe a seven-step process, using design sprint methods to develop a learning agenda that reflects the three characteristics above that make a learning agenda-building exercise effective. These steps are grounded in the importance of intentional and broad engagement of stakeholders. The steps, for example, include developing a stakeholder map to ensure key players are identified, identifying key points in agency decision processes and their timing to ensure evidence is available when decisions will be made, and cataloging the needs of various decisionmakers.

They authors found that co-developing these elements of a learning agenda increase joint ownership of the result and can increase the likelihood of the agenda being used to support evidence-building that is relevant to decision makers. After all, the ultimate goal is to help program managers, agency heads, budget officers, the public, and Congress answer the question: Does it work? And if not, what’s next?

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It’s ‘Back to the Future’ to Improve Agency Management Practices

John Kamensky — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 08:00:00 -0500

Columnist Fareed Zakaria, in a new book on lessons from the pandemic, observes that the endless debates over the size of government faded during the pandemic and “what seems to have mattered the most in this crisis was the quality of government.”

But what does “quality government” look like? How can public leaders and employees know—or show—that their organizations are high quality? After all, what is quality? Can it be measured? Why does it matter?

A recent task force, co-sponsored by the Senior Executives Association, the IBM Center for The Business of Government and several academics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, explored these questions and offered some solutions.

Long-time federal employees will remember the Federal Quality Institute in the 1980s, which promoted the use of Total Quality Management techniques, and the Reinventing Government initiative in the 1990s. Both promoted bottom-up efforts to engage federal employees on the front line and empower them to better serve the public. Some accounts say that these efforts engaged hundreds of thousands of federal employees. But these initiatives faded away in the early 2000s.

More recently, some federal agencies have embraced Lean Six Sigma techniques to improve their organizations’ efficiency on the front line. However, for most of the past 20 years, federal reform efforts have largely been top-down initiatives such as presidents’ management agendas, performance management and enterprise risk management frameworks, and program effectiveness assessment ratings. These have been conceived and driven by the Office of Management and Budget and while seen as successful, for the most part they did not engage many federal employees.

One lesson seems to be that more effective government reforms require both top-down and bottom-up initiatives. Given the shift in workplace dynamics driven by the pandemic, it may be time to create a new bottom-up initiative, as was used in the 1980s and 1990s, with a renewed focus on quality management.

A report released jointly in May 2020 by the aforementioned task force proposed creating an assessment framework for federal agencies. Authors Dr. James Thompson and Alejandra Medina wrote that such an approach has several benefits. First is that it would place a renewed focus on the role of management and on the centrality of that function to good performance. One interviewee for the report commented, “often the reason that programs fail is because of bad management rather than because of bad policy. It is hard to get people to pay attention to management.” Conducting an assessment would help bring focus not only to the management function and to those who participate in that function, but to the question of how to achieve management excellence. And second, the mere process of conducting an assessment would create a learning dynamic. Agencies judged as well-managed would become examples from which others can learn.

Building a New Initiative

In preparing their report, Thompson and Medina assessed past US efforts, such as the Government Accountability Office’s General Management Reviews in the 1980s, the Federal Performance Project in the 1990s, OMB’s Program Assessment Rating Tool in the 2000s. They also reviewed efforts by other countries and the private sector, such as the World Management Survey, the Baldrige Quality Award, the United Kingdom’s Capability Review Programme, and Canada’s Management Accountability Framework. They also co-hosted a workshop, along with the IBM Center and the Senior Executives Association, of current and former federal executives to glean insights from their leadership experiences in government. Based on their assessment of what worked and what didn’t in these various efforts, they offered a set of building blocks for developing a new initiative at the federal level.

One of the building blocks was to create an ad hoc task force that would develop a roadmap for building out an initiative that could be undertaken by the next presidential administration in 2021.

When the Thompson-Medina report was released in April 2020, the co-sponsors of that study recruited a small task force of volunteers, composed of current and former federal executives, both career and political. The members of the task force met over a period of months and grappled with many dimensions of developing a practical proposal. Ultimately, they agreed that it should be a learning tool, that it should be a self-assessment (or an invited third party), and it should be voluntary—not a top-down scorecard or ranking of agencies or work units.

The assessment framework, they felt, would be beneficial to new and existing leaders, as well as to aspiring leaders in their respective organizations. They felt that periodic assessments, much like annual physicals, would help leaders diagnose their organizational health and pinpoint areas that would benefit from strengthening.

The task force prepared a short white paper, Creating and Supporting a Management Quality Improvement Learning Center for Federal Managers, that is a “call for action by the incoming Biden-Harris Administration—in partnership with federal executives, managers and employees and other good government organizations—to elevate the importance of improving the operational health of federal agencies.”

Task force members did not attempt to define “quality management” but agreed on three overarching characteristics of quality:

Organizational performance that delivers mission results
Organizational resilience to manage risk and respond to change
Organizational agility to innovate and deliver better government

The task force members felt the specifics would be best developed by a subsequent implementation team that would include front line managers who would design, use and evolve the diagnostic tool. In addition, there were other design elements left undefined for the same reason. For example:

How should the attributes of what would constitute quality performance, resilience, and agility be defined and how would they be measured?

Should there be a single, common assessment framework or multiple versions depending on the particular attributes of an organization? Would a common benchmark tool be useful, or would the variety of federal functions such as VA hospital, FAA air traffic operations, and Social Security Offices be too divergent for a common tool to be useful?

What should be the unit of analysis for the assessments? Should an assessment be done at the work unit level, or at the departmental level? Should mission-oriented functions (e.g., patent processing) be assessed separate from or in conjunction with mission support functions (e.g., finance and personnel) they must depend upon?

A Roadmap for Next Steps

While the task force left open many critical elements of how the overall initiative might be implemented, it did lay out a roadmap for next steps:

Create a Management Quality Improvement Learning Center. This Center would serve as a catalyst, convener and champion for the development and adoption of assessment and diagnostics resources for federal managers. The center could be located inside or outside government, or both.

The Learning Center would be a repository of one or more assessment methods that would help managers “drive improvements in organizational performance, resilience, and agility by diagnosing and pinpointing areas to focus on strengthening,” according to the White Paper. It would create and maintain a playbook of successful practices as learning devices.

The Learning Center would pilot the assessment diagnostics protocols with volunteer agencies and iteratively update them based on experience.

The resources at the Learning Center would build on assessment data that already exists. For example, the data from the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey covers more than 28,000 work units. Customer experience data are collected for services in 26 agencies that have significant interactions with the public, such as the Transportation Security Administration. And an annual survey by the General Services Administration collects benchmarking data on managers’ satisfaction with mission support services.

The Learning Center would sponsor grassroots communities of practice to foster shared learning and exchange best practices on organizational management improvement strategies. It could leverage existing communities such as the volunteer-driven “Federal Leadership and Professional Development Seminar Series” developed by staff at the Department of Health and Human Services or the Federal Improvement Team, a grassroots community of federal employees who share a passion for continuous performance improvement in the federal sector.

Finally, the task force did not recommend a specific champion or “owner” for this initiative. However, it did identify several potential champions inside and outside government, including the Senior Executives Association, the Office of Personnel Management’s Federal Executive Institute, a university, or some combination of these or other organizations listed in the White Paper.

Given the immense challenges facing our government today, is this the right time to launch a quality management initiative, with an emphasis on bottom-up engagement? That may have been answered indirectly by President Biden in a recent video message to the federal workforce: “You’re the ones running the show. I have the utmost trust in your capabilities . . . to make good decisions, stay focused on what’s most important: humility, trust, collegiality, diversity and competence.” Restoring trust in government by the public, and within government by employees, starts with quality management.

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Looking Beyond the Federal Data Strategy

John Kamensky — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 10:00:00 -0500

There were quiet celebrations a year ago as the long-awaited Federal Data Strategy and a 2020 action plan came to fruition. It involved hundreds of dedicated people across the government and the action plan covered 20 specific elements. But the federal data strategy is just a foundation for a potentially broader vision. A new report on the critical need for intergovernmental data sharing by Harvard’s Jane Wiseman says we need to extend it to become a national data strategy that embraces states and local governments as well.

The Federal Data Strategy is an important framework that stitches together a number of different legislative and administrative initiatives into a coherent whole:

the GPRA Modernization Act of 2010
open data initiatives, such as data.gov
the Digital Accountability and Transparency (DATA) Act
the Grant Reporting Efficiency and Agreements Transparency (GREAT) Act
the Foundations in Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, which includes the designation of chief data officers and agency evaluation officers, and the creation of agency learning agendas.
the efforts of external advocates for data sharing and usage such as the Data Coalition and Results for America

The Federal Data Strategy includes a 10-year roadmap for federal agencies and it is on the verge of releasing its 2021 action plan. While many of these federal-level initiatives rely on state and local data components, the current COVID pandemic demonstrates the need for a much more proactive intergovernmental data sharing strategy, per Wiseman.

In her report, Wiseman showcases a number of successful initiatives that demonstrate the value of investing in data sharing efforts at the federal, state, and local levels, linking data from multiple sources across agency and jurisdictional boundaries. Three noteworthy initiatives include:

State Department’s use of data to repatriate Americans stranded overseas during the pandemic. In January 2020, the data team at State began to bring together data from disparate public and private sources to create real-time information updates for department leadership on how to bring Americans home safely, first from Wuhan, China, and then from outposts around the globe. Under the leadership of Janice deGarmo, the department’s acting chief data officer, the data team quickly brought together all the data it could to help understand, monitor, and respond to the crisis, both from across the department and from external sources. Applying lessons from the Ebola outbreak, it synthesized data from CDC, Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, publicly available information, and State’s own on the ground intelligence to help repatriate both employees and others needing help. This effort led to the safe repatriation of over 100,000 Americans from 136 countries on over 1,100 flights working with embassies and consulates in every corner of the globe.

Virginia’s leverage of data trust to rapidly respond to COVID-19. Almost a decade ago, the state of Virginia began a state-local data sharing effort, starting with an opioid data project in one community. Data were shared across state and local law enforcement, social services, judicial, and health agencies in order to better target prevention and treatment efforts. In 2017, the opioid death rate finally began to decline in that community and effort was expanded statewide. This project demonstrated the value of broader data collection efforts and led in 2018 to the formalization of the role of a statewide chief data officer, the Commonwealth Data Trust, and the launch of the state’s Open Data Portal. These foundational data sharing efforts paved the way for the state’s ability in early 2020 to quickly stand up a COVID-19 dashboard in a matter of days because it had already created a data sharing platform with agreements already in place with various state and local agencies in response to the earlier opioid crisis. This dashboard gives state leaders near real-time information about hospitals in need of supplies and locations with the largest COVID outbreaks.

Allegheny County’s use of data to prioritize child welfare and homeless services. Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, which includes the city of Pittsburgh, has over the last two decades built a data warehouse of social, health, justice, and education data that enables its case workers to prioritize the delivery of services where they are most needed. Individual-level data has led to the development of risk models for the delivery of child welfare and homeless assistance services. For example, the Allegheny Family Screening Tool analyzed hundreds of data points from various sources and is used by frontline caseworkers to predict the long-term likelihood of out-of-home foster child placements and whether to investigate a call about potential child endangerment. It has also developed a similar predictive model to help prioritize the provision of homeless housing services, since the County only has resources to serve about half of its homeless population. The tool uses existing client data from multiple sources to identify those individuals at the greatest risk of worsening mental health, incarceration, or emergency medical services.

Importance of Leveraging Digital Services

Wiseman found that the best government data sharing initiatives have a compelling vision of how data can be useful to transform operations, and are dove-tailed with the government’s digital service initiatives. She points to the Republic of Singapore as a leading example of how this is being done to create a seamless, customer-oriented government. It provides a one-stop access for citizens to more than 300 digital government services from 110 different agencies.

She observes that the role of the federal government is to start where it has—by defining a vision, principles, practices, and creating a governance framework (e.g., data sharing agreements, ethics, chief data officers), inventorying existing data, and setting standards. It has the ability to take on these tasks absent an urgent and compelling need.

However, state and local governments, because of limited resources, tend to undertake data sharing only when there is a compelling need to share data—emergency response, natural disasters, COVID response, floods, the opioid epidemic. However, they have learned that if you wait until you need the data, it is too late, because data collection, quality, and standardization efforts typically take years to cobble together. States and localities, however, are often more willing to support digital service investments that can show more immediate value to citizens. That is why linking data sharing to digital service transformation can help accelerate both.

Recommendations

Based on the findings from the relevant literature, expert interviews, and the case studies, Wiseman offers four recommendations to advance intergovernmental data sharing beyond the existing Federal Data Strategy:

Congress and the president should create a policy and governance framework. They should define a broad data and digital excellence vision, with incentives to act, and a strong data governance structure that include states and localities. This would include actions such as establishing an “ask once” goal for data collection, rewarding agencies that link their data sets, and creating intergovernmental data councils.
Congress and the president should establish funding and capacity building mechanisms to support implementation of increased data sharing across all levels of government. This would include actions such as supporting data literacy efforts in federal agencies and among federal leaders, funding for data sharing projects, and resources to improve data quality.
The non-profit and philanthropic sectors should proactively support intergovernmental data sharing efforts. This would include actions such as providing incentives to innovate and link different sources or types of data between the federal, state and local levels, and supporting information exchange networks.
Agency managers and data leaders at all levels of government should champion data sharing efforts. This would include actions such as articulating and creating a shared vision for data sharing, establishing shared data standards and protocols, and sponsoring communities of practice for data enthusiasts.

The COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated the urgency of investing in a national data collection effort. Performance data pioneer Beth Blauer and epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo recently noted in a New York Times op ed that eight months into the pandemic “there is still no federal standard to ensure testing results are being uniformly reported. Without uniform results, it is impossible to track cases accurately or respond effectively.” Without a national standard, states have developed their own approaches. Efforts like Johns Hopkins’ Coronavirus Resource Center try to standardize where possible, but overall, the national numbers are inconsistent. This hinders policymakers’ ability to smartly allocate resources, such as the vaccine, to where they will do the most good. Based on lessons from this effort, the incoming Biden Administration can leverage the lessons of the COVID-19 crisis to build on the foundation put in place by the architects of the Federal Data Strategy to create a Golden Age of data sharing.

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Disasters Are Inevitable; Government’s Inadequate Response Is Not

John Kamensky — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 15:57:45 -0500

In 2018, the small, picturesque town of Ellicott City, MD was devastated by a one-in-1,000-year flash flood. This happened just two years after it was similarly devastated by what was also characterized as a one-in-1,000-year flash flood. But this isn’t an anomaly. In the case of weather-related natural disasters, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that the past decade has been unprecedented in the number of billion-dollar disasters. NOAA reports that there were 28 such disasters in the decade of the 1980s, while there were 119 in the 2010s. And NOAA projects more highly violent and frequent storms to continue, given the growing influence of climate change.

So, how do communities—especially small towns—manage the looming specter of a natural disaster? Can they do something in advance?

A new study by a team of researchers—Katherine Willoughby, Komla Dzigbede, and Sarah Beth Gehl—analyzed the responses of hundreds of local government leaders to surveys conducted by the International City/County Managers Association (ICMA). They also interviewed nearly two dozen local leaders that experienced disasters about their experiences with managing their community’s recovery. Based on this information, they identified obstacles and promising practices for local leaders.

Obstacles

Local officials surveyed by ICMA shared their disaster management experiences. While their experiences differed widely because of the unique circumstances of each disaster, they described some common obstacles. Their observations were reinforced by findings in a March 2020 report on emergency and disaster management responses by the National Academy of Public Administration.

Lack of clarity in roles and expectations. Based on the ICMA survey results, many localities perceive the Federal Emergency Management Agency is less responsive than in the past. However, in fact, the number and size of natural disasters has dramatically increased over the past two decades—but FEMA has not. By law, FEMA was not designed to be a first responder. Rather, the Stafford Act stipulates that the strategy for any disaster response and recovery is to be executed locally, managed by the state, and supported by the federal government as planned in the National Response Framework. This lack of local understanding of FEMA’s role was reflected in the NAPA report as well.

In reality, the researchers note: “Local governments are on the ground level, closest to the people and communities affected. They can respond more quickly in the aftermath of a disaster, but also can put in place prevention mechanisms prior to disaster, such as building codes, emergency preparedness drills, and continuity of operations, sustainability and/or resiliency plans that reduce the costs of recovery after disaster.”

One size doesn’t fit all. There are four overarching objectives of every effective emergency management system: prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery. But typically, there isn’t a common response that works in most cases. The authors observe: “To discern definitely what works and what does not in the event of disaster is virtually impossible … every community is unique as is every disaster; recoveries are distinctive in that no two are alike. What works well in one instance, may not work at all in another.” So, prescribing a single solution would be ineffective.

The lack of investment in resilience. The ICMA survey found that 87% of communities responded that they have plans in place for disaster response, such as emergency evacuations. However, less than one-third have resilience plans in their communities to reduce in advance the potential impact of natural disasters such as floods or fires. Even fewer—about one-fifth—reported that they dedicate a line item in their budgets for environmental sustainability, including disaster readiness. FEMA’s former deputy administrator, Joseph Nimmich, observes that the single biggest opportunity for reducing the impact of disasters in a community is to invest in a resiliency approach via thoughtful long-range land-use planning, building standards, and zoning.

Overlapping challenges in infrastructure, management, and finance. The ICMA survey results also highlighted concerns about three common, interrelated challenges: deferred maintenance in infrastructure such as water treatment plants, sewer systems, etc.; the management challenges of preparing for a range of different potential disasters; and the financial challenges of being able to build a cushion of reserve funds in the event that a disaster affects a community’s revenue base. But these enduring challenges are really all about thinking long term—not just responding to specific disasters in the moment.

Promising Practices

Based on interviews with local officials, the research team identified a number of strategies that successful communities adopted to manage disasters. The overarching strategy was to adopt an enterprise or whole-of-community approach. This means integrating and unifying the efforts of all city, county, and state departments and offices as well as local business and nonprofit partners. While FEMA’s incident command system is good for the actual emergency response, having relationships in place in advance (as well as having conducted exercises together), and having a recovery structure after an event may be even more important to returning to normal.

More specifically, the authors recommend that local leaders:

Adopt a resiliency strategy to reduce the impact of disasters in advance. For example, a city administrator in Nebraska told the researchers: “Following the flood of 2011, we took advantage of FEMA mitigation funds to build berms around water and wastewater plants. After struggling to keep plants dry in the 2011 flood, in the 2019 flood we simply raised the flood gate, turned on emergency pumping and had to do nothing else. Mitigation plan and project worked perfect.”

Develop a formal network of partners and engage the whole community. Externally, local leaders must develop and grow a steady network of partners, horizontally and vertically to manage as successfully as possible through disaster. Horizontal partners would include community groups, private businesses, nonprofits, neighboring jurisdictions, and regional pacts. Most immediate support for disaster relief will come from a local government’s horizontal partners. Typically, this is done via mutual aid agreements to share services (such as fire trucks, debris removal equipment, and staff). In addition, local leaders have to attend to their vertical relationships with their state and federal disaster response and recovery agencies.

According to the research team, most local governments (98%) responded in the ICMA survey that “they have at least one type of mutual aid agreement with nearby governments; these agreements regard public works, public safety, public transportation, social and human services, animal control, and/or payroll or financial services.” In addition, “half of local governments (50%) reported having established formal partnerships with local nonprofit organizations, community groups, and religious societies to support recovery and restoration activities in the event of a natural disaster.”

Develop informal relationships with government and nongovernmental partners. For example, one city administrator in Kansas said: “We have gotten good support from county officials, county emergency management and county public health. We all know each other. People go to church together and to the same grocery store. So, we expect more of that kind of relationship.”

In addition to governmental relationships, local officials need to enlist volunteers, nonprofits, businesses, and residents. The researchers note that “Volunteers and nonprofits provide utility payment assistance, meals, shelter, debris removal, and medical care. Local governments

have built neighbor to neighbor response teams.” One city administrator in Kansas noted: “We have established strong relationships with civic groups and nonprofits. When we needed a place for people to shelter, between schools and churches, we had more space than we needed. The school superintendent said, ‘I have keys to every building.’ They fed people with their staff and their money. Knowing those resources are there helps lessen the budget burden.”

The research team also noted the importance of pre-disaster joint training exercises so the formal and informal networks have a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities, and who they can rely upon. There is no one, single approach that works—being ready for the unknown helps when you know where to turn for help before the state or federal responders arrive. After all, what are the chances of something going wrong?

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The Future of Work Post-Pandemic: We’re Not Going Back

John Kamensky — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 14:29:25 -0400

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius opined recently that “there’s no question that we’ll be living in a different world post-pandemic.” He writes that more than half of Americans “believe their lives will remain changed in major ways.”

Technology will allow people to work and live remotely, Ignatius writes, and they will continue the habits developed over the past seven months. He cites a survey by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. that reports private sector companies pivoted to the new work arrangements 40 times faster than they expected possible. It estimates that companies jumped three to four years ahead into the future workplace in the space of a few weeks.

Shifts in How Government Work Gets Done

It’s not just the private sector that has changed. Governments are also beginning to adapt to the new normal by transitioning services online that they had been traditionally reluctant to redesign, such as:

Initially these shifts to the web were done as temporary emergency measures. However, in many cases they are beginning to be incorporated into a new normal for agency operations.

In addition to changes in how work is done, the governmental shift in where work is done—using distance work arrangements much like the private sector—may well stick. At the federal level, there was initial surprise in productivity increases in some agencies, as noted by telework expert Kate Lister in testimony before a Senate committee this past July. In fact, the vice chief of staff of the Air Force said recently: “it’s changed the paradigm on how we’re going to do work” and that he envisions one-third of its workforce remaining in a distance work arrangement after the pandemic subsidies.

Why do these shifts in how and where work is done matter? Alice Armitage, a law professor at UC Hastings in San Francisco was quoted as saying: “This pandemic will open everyone’s mind, and gets people to move out of their silos.”

Shifts in Where Work Gets Done

It is this shift in mindsets over the past several months since COVID lockdowns were instituted that is highlighted in a new report by the IBM Center for The Business of Government: Distance Work Arrangements: The Workplace of the Future Is Now, which I edited, with contributions by Emily G. Craig, Michaela Drust, Sheri I. Fields, and Lawrence M. Tobin. This report comprises a series of essays by IBM colleagues who observed and experienced the transition in the public and private sectors, and in their own lives, over a six-month period.

Initially, many thought the coronavirus would be an inconvenience to organizations for three or four months, and then everything would go back to “normal.” Well, it hasn’t and we are constructing a new normal.

Distance work arrangements, such as telework, remote work, and distributed teams, have been a growing trend in the workplace for more than a decade. But the adoption of these arrangements was slow, and industry observers predicted it would take years to transition. However, in mid-March, the coronavirus pandemic struck and much of the U.S. pivoted to a new workplace—home.

Suddenly, the conversation about distance work arrangements—in particular telework—has shifted from “do we have the right technologies in place?” to “do we have the right people policies and training in place?” And it isn’t just putting signed agreements onto paper, but changing how work is done, how teams work together, and how managers manage.

The rationale for telework quickly pivoted from being seen as family-friendly policy to a vital element for the continuity of operations in both public and private sector organizations.

Shifts in How We Manage

Distance work arrangements involve different ways of working, as individuals, teams, and organizations. The most obvious is how we personally manage ourselves. There are lots of tips being offered and the benefits of increased personal autonomy and job satisfaction are well-reported, as are the challenges of maintaining work-life balance and staying connected are.

The larger challenges of preserving and creating interpersonal ties with colleagues and peers continues to be a new learning curve. Building these ties, along with developing trust and norms, is part of the new dynamics of working in teams. Organizations and leaders have to find new ways to lead, to maintain productivity, and to create alignment around common goals. As workplace guru Glenn Dirks says, “the more you go ‘virtual,’ the more the quality of management matters.”

Managers have to learn to manage a distributed team differently—informal taskings or in-person, non-verbal communication are no longer an option. At the same time, new forms of team communication, through chat boards on telework meetings, can add new insights. In any event, managers will increasingly have to trust their workers to do the right thing and to ensure their team has the support, information, training, and tools to do it.

There will always be jobs that can’t be done remotely, such as emergency response, or garbage pickup, or hospital care. But for a large segment of government work, distance work is an option and will likely be here to stay as leaders become more comfortable with managing these arrangements for both the employees and mission continuity.

Kinks That Need to be Worked Out

Still, there are challenges to longer-term distance work arrangements that need to be resolved, including:

Ensuring adequate cybersecurity for both workers and data
The formation and maintenance of informal interpersonal relationships
Networking and trust building within teams and between individuals
The inculcation and maintenance of organizational culture
New ways to manage one’s self, teams, and career paths

Like the private sector, governments will have to figure out the solutions to these challenges, but with a concerted effort—and maybe even a joint effort—it can be done. And as these challenges are addressed, a new normal will become the norm.

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Saying ‘Thank You’ Matters

John Kamensky — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 15:18:09 -0400

Last month, the Office of Management and Budget announced its annual “Gears of Government Award,” the latest incarnation of White House-level employee recognition over the past 30 years.

This year’s awards recognize 225 individuals and/or teams that improved mission results, customer service or demonstrated accountable stewardship. Six were highlighted for the President’s Award. For example, one team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was recognized for fixing an instrument failure on a newly launched, $1 billion weather satellite—from a distance of 22,300 miles. Absent their ingenuity, it would have been a total loss.

This award is a real turnaround from the way OMB used to work. Tongue in cheek, but probably with some grain of truth, a veteran staffer at OMB once told me when I was working on the Clinton-Gore Reinventing Government initiative in the 1990s that their stance with federal agencies was that “reward is the lack of punishment.”

The career civil service system has a series of employee recognition awards and a bonus system. The most prominent are the Presidential Rank Awards for career senior executives. There are also externally-bestowed awards and recognition. For example, for individuals, there are the Service to America Medals, the Arthur S. Flemming Award, the Theodore Roosevelt Government Leadership Awards and the William A. Jump Award. And for agencies, there is the Best Places to Work recognition, bestowed by the Partnership for Public Service.

But being recognized by the White House is special. Over the past 30 years, there have been other recognition awards bestowed by different administrations as White House-level recognition for team or individual performance.

Hammer Awards (1994 - 2001). Shortly after the National Performance Review submitted its report and recommendations to President Clinton in late 1993, the task force director, Bob Stone, said that we had to go out into the field and find teams of civil servants who were modeling its principles of “putting customers first, cutting red tape, empowering employees, and cutting back to basics” so they could be recognized by the White House.

I pushed back, saying we had just released the report and we have to give employees time to implement it. He countered that there were teams already doing it naturally and that we needed to find them quickly to demonstrate to their peers what success looks like. He directed a top staffer, Doug Farbrother, to get on his motorcycle and travel around the country to different federal offices looking for examples of what a “reinvented government” would look like in practice.

Meanwhile, the rest of us were left with coming up with some sort of award. Michael Messinger, who was a whiz at tchotchke, modeled Liberty Bells and other designs, including a hammer, which would be used to break down bureaucracy and build a better government. Conveniently, it also recalled the moment when Vice President Gore broke a government-issued ashtray with a hammer on the David Letterman Show.

So that led to Vice President Gore’s Hammer Award—a $6 TrueValue hammer, decorated with a red, white and blue ribbon, all in a gold-and-black velvet box frame with a card personally signed by Gore thanking each individual team. By the end of the Clinton administration, there had been 1,378 Hammer Awards presented to teams of federal employees who had demonstrated “reinvention principles.” For example, the first Hammer Award went to a regional office of the Veterans Benefits Administration for cutting a 25-step process for approving benefits to an 8-step process that empowered a team of employees to improve service to veterans and dramatically reduced processing time.

Interestingly, departmental secretaries and other agency heads also created similar awards to recognize staff who were trying to innovate, as well. One agency created the Scissors Award, for cutting red tape, and another created the Giraffe Award, for employees who “stick their necks out” to try new things.

These various awards disappeared with the advent of a new administration.

Management Excellence Awards (2002 – 2008). The Bush Administration chose to focus recognition on departments and agencies for their achievements in management excellence. It showcased an existing award, also known as the President’s Quality Award, which has been administered by the Office of Personnel Management since 1988. President Bush himself bestowed the honors in 2002 to three agencies, noting that the award is the federal version of the non-governmental quality management award, the Malcolm Baldrige Award, overseen by the Commerce Department.

Subsequent annual ceremonies recognizing other agencies were hosted by OPM. This award ceased in 2009 with the onset of a new administration.

Customer Service (2015-2016) and SAVE Awards (2009 - 2014). The Obama Administration’s Cross-Agency Priority Goal to improve customer experience included a component that was somewhat reminiscent of the Hammer Awards. Starting in 2015, the Federal Customer Service Award recognition program showcased both individuals and teams that exemplified outstanding customer service.

There were department-level awards, such as the Interior Department, as well as presidential-level awards. I was privileged to serve as one of the judges in selecting potential presidential-level award recipients from among nominations submitted by their departments and agencies. It was an inspirational experience to see so many instances of selfless service to others. For example, one of the recipients was Jack Tran, a Social Security Administration field staffer who went out of his way to help reunite a homeless, mentally disabled customer with his family, who had been searching for him for more than 20 years.

An earlier program, the SAVE Award (Securing Americans Value and Efficiency), was launched in 2009 as a way to encourage federal employees to identify potential money-saving opportunities and then used crowdsourcing with the public to sift through and highlight the most promising practices.

The program lasted about five years, ending in 2014. More than 90,000 ideas were surfaced and more than 90 were incorporated by OMB into the president’s budget for implementation. The winners would get to personally present their ideas to the president in the Oval Office. For example, in 2012 the award was given to Fredrick Winter, in the Education Department, for recommending that when federal employees turn 65 they automatically switch from Metro’s regular fares to the reduced senior citizen fare.

In addition to recognizing the deeds of individual civil servants, in 2016 the president also highlighted the impact of career employees more broadly in a final nod to public service during his last month in office. In this “impact report,” he thanked all federal employees and showcased specific examples of initiatives that improved the lives of Americans, such as streamlining airport security and small business loan procedures.

Like the Hammer and the Excellence Awards, these recognition programs disappeared with the coming of a new administration.

Gears of Government Awards (2018 - present). The Trump Administration created its own awards program in 2018 with a twist. It wasn’t just recognition for customer service but also for superior mission delivery or stewardship of taxpayer dollars. It celebrates exceptional performance for individuals and teams at the agency and at the presidential levels. Dubbed the Gears of Government Award to reinforce the Administration’s management agenda emphasis on priorities that were seen as the “gears” of government operations. It presented its first set of awards in 2019 and I was privileged to be one of the judges for the President’s Award. The nominees were impressive and inspiring. One of my favorites was Barbara Morton, who led a catalytic, veteran-centric initiative at the Veterans Affairs Department that organized what VA does around the veteran, not the bureaucracy. This contributed to an increase in veterans’ trust in VA from 71% in 2017 to more than 90% today.

OMB annually posts agency-level and presidential award winners on the Performance.gov website. The recently-announced 2020 winners include six that received presidential-level recognition, and 218 others—individuals and teams from departments, agencies, or interagency councils. Some winners were recognized for internal improvements, such as the Defense team that accelerated acquisitions by cutting 60% of the paperwork and reducing warfighting capability delivery time by six months. Other individuals or teams reengineered processes to improve services to citizens or businesses. For example, the Federal Housing Administration streamlined its refund and adjustment requests from lenders, cutting processing time from 60 to 21 days.

Insights for Future Leaders

It is symbolically important to continue to offer recognition to career civil servants and teams from the top of the government. First, it is a high-leverage way to communicate, using symbols, what is valuable or a priority to an Administration. But more importantly, it is inspiring to the rest of the workforce by identifying concrete, real heroes within the ranks of the career civil service; monetary recognition isn’t as important as just a sincere “thank you.” As the Partnership for Public Service puts it: “Recognition for outstanding federal workers should be the norm.”

This post is part of a series developed by the IBM Center for The Business of Government that reflects on lessons from past government reform efforts. Listen to the podcast discussion here.

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Innovation In Government: What the Transition Teams Should Understand

John Kamensky — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 16:55:39 -0400

Innovation isn’t something the public typically associates with government. However, there are more than a few scattered pockets of innovators across federal agencies who sometimes come up with startling changes to operating models, business processes, services, or management. Some of these initiatives are orchestrated from the top of an agency, but many happen organically on the front lines in response to a specific problem. How have federal approaches to innovation evolved over the past 30 years? Following are four of the more prominent initiatives over this period.

Reinvention Labs

In the 1990s, the Clinton Administration’s reinventing government initiative promoted bottom-up innovation through a White House-sponsored initiative called “reinvention labs.” The initiative was touted as “unshackling workers so they can re-engineer their work processes to fully accomplish their missions” and it led to numerous innovations. Examples include:

The IRS used a reinvention lab to pilot an early version of electronic tax filing.
The Veterans Benefits Administration reengineered its benefits determination process at a lab in New York City that dramatically reduced processing time.
The Customs Service developed a partnership with American Airlines in Miami to expedite passenger processing.
The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s field office in Minneapolis piloted the use of self-directed teams.

For the most part, units within an agency would seek to be designated a reinvention lab by the National Partnership for Reinventing Government in the Vice President’s office under the direction of its project director, Bob Stone. Sometimes, agencies would strategically identify projects to be piloted and assign a senior executive as its champion and scale successful reinvention lab projects, such as an Interior Department project to streamline the civil rights complaint processes across the department.

Each reinvention lab was granted streamlined authorities to waive departmental regulations (but not statutory-based requirements), which was an incentive for many to apply. Over the eight years of the Clinton administration, there were about 350 reinvention labs across the government. In a 1996 report, the Government Accountability Office observed: “Many of the labs are addressing issues that are at the cutting edge of government management ... more innovations are possible in these and other areas as agencies review and rethink their existing work process."

The labs were good at developing new ideas and ways of working from the bottom up, however most never scaled across their departments or the government. This approach to innovation was abandoned at the end of the Clinton Administration.

E-Gov Initiatives

In the early 2000s, during the George W. Bush administration, innovation initiatives tended to be technology-centered and orchestrated from the top. A series of E-Government initiatives changed business models and service delivery in a number of high-profile areas. A three-part E-Gov agenda was developed under the direction of Mark Forman, who was appointed as the Office of Management and Budget’s first “Associate Director for E-Government and IT” (this position was eventually re-designated as the federal government’s chief information officer).

The first part was dubbed “Project Quicksilver” (described in more detail by Dan Chenok in an earlier blog post), which developed a portfolio of 25 cross-agency initiatives that showed the greatest potential for improved service to four portfolio groups: citizens, businesses, state and local governments, and government employees.
The second part was the development of a Federal Enterprise Architecture and the creation of a new position of Chief Architect, a post first held by former U.S. Postal Service Executive Norm Lorentz.
The third part was the creation of shared services for lines of business that were common across agencies such as payroll, financial management, human resources, and grants management.

An Innovation Strategy

The Obama Administration’s approach to innovation was also top-down and technology oriented, but more strategic. It was largely led out of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, initially under the leadership of Aneesh Chopra, the first Chief Technology Officer, and his deputy Beth Noveck. They developed a three-prong approach, as described in a report for the IBM Center:

Creating new institutional roles for innovation leadership.The Administration created a series of new leadership roles to institutionalize and integrate innovation into government operations. The White House created the roles of chief technology officer and chief data scientist, and many departments followed suit in their own agencies. Some agencies even created the position of chief innovation officer. The Administration also brought on new talent via the creation of the Presidential Innovation Fellow program to attract technologically-skilled individuals from academia and the private sector.
Creating policies and legal frameworks to support innovation. This included initiatives such as crafting a common set of Terms of Services with social media providers, thereby allowing agencies to use social media platforms to innovate in the delivery of services and information. It also included the Open Government directive, to improve digital services; the Open Data policy making government data open and machine-readable, and the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, which led to more transparency in government spending data.
Creating new technology and organizational platforms. An example of a technology platform is the data.gov Open Data portal, which is a one-stop shop for over a quarter million federal data sets. Examples of organizational platforms include the creation of Innovation Labs in agencies (such as the Office of Personnel Management and the Environmental Protection Agency), the U.S. Digital Service in the White House, and the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies in the General Services Administration.

The strategy began the process of weaving innovation into the fabric of government, leading to agency-level efforts to change their operating culture to be more innovative by finding and championing the innovators in the system, connecting them, and providing them the tools to succeed.

Public-Private Innovation

The current administration promotes public-private innovation via a series of governmentwide and agency-level efforts. It has built on the foundations from preceding administrations such as the continued development of the governmentwide U.S. Digital Service under Matt Cutts and GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, formerly led by Anil Cheriyan, which “applies modern methodologies and technologies to improve the public’s experience with government.” TTS helps federal agencies build, buy and share technology to achieve their mission-specific digital transformation and modernization goals. Both efforts draw heavily on private sector talent to advance their efforts.

In addition, there are agency-centric, small offices embedded across the government, such as:

The Defense Innovation Unit, which accelerates the adoption of commercial technologies to address national security issues
The Center for Digital Development in the U.S. Agency for International Development, which strategically researches emerging trends in commercial digital technology that may be applicable in developing economies, and
The Census Bureau’s xD Program, which is also an emerging technology lab applying AI to government problems.

A more in-depth example of an agency-level public-private innovation unit, the Commerce Department’s Opportunity Project, demonstrates the adoption of agile principles in solving problems.

The Opportunity Project (TOP) serves as a catalyst in adapting agile techniques to solve complex agency mission problems through a process that brings together agencies, industry, and citizens. The Project’s website says its goal is to be “a process for engaging government, communities, and the technology industry to create digital tools that address our greatest challenges as a nation. This process helps to empower people with technology, make government data more accessible and user-friendly, and facilitate cross-sector collaboration to build new digital solutions with open data.”

TOP works with other federal agencies to identify significant challenges, and then facilitates partnerships among agency leaders, industry and non-profit innovators, and citizen users to collaborate as teams in developing innovative approaches to address those challenges. The teams leverage agile techniques to build prototype technology and process solutions over a 12-14 week time frame, and then show their work to the public so that agency stakeholders from all sectors can learn from and adapt the solutions. TOP represents a unique, cross agency program that provides a model for how agencies can work with private sector partners to develop practical approaches to complex problems in an agile, iterative fashion.

Lessons Learned

Efforts to institutionalize innovation have moved from ad hoc approaches to a more systematic effort over the years in the federal government. Two IBM Center reports chart the lessons:

Sandford Borins, in his 2014 observations of two decades of Ford Innovation Award winners, encourages practices similar to those of the reinventing government era: encourage frontline involvement, create communities of practice, support local heroes, measure and report on results.

Beth Noveck and Stefaan Verhulst ’s 2016 report for the center highlights ways to institutionalize innovation on a larger scale: Expand the analytic capacity of agencies; promote a culture of innovation by creating key positions such as chief knowledge officers, and prioritize evidence-based innovation via evidence and testing. One of Noveck’s recommendations that may be particularly timely is the incorporation of an innovation ethos into presidential transition teams by including IT and data scientists on every transition team.

This post is part of a series developed by the IBM Center for The Business of Government that reflects on lessons from past government reform efforts. Listen to the podcast discussion here.

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Too Many Americans Still Don’t Receive Acceptable Service from Federal Agencies

John Kamensky — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 06:13:21 -0400

A 2016 Forester Research report found that the federal government had a “near monopoly on the worst experiences.” By 2019, the company’s Customer Experience Index survey showed that Americans’ experiences with federal services “remains weak and uneven,” even though the White House requires federal agencies to provide a “modern, streamlined, and responsive customer experience across government, comparable to leading private sector organizations.”

There are positive signs though. In June, the Veterans Affairs Department reported that veterans’ trust in the VA reached 80 percent in April – a 19 percent increase since January 2017. This increase is significant, as the VA is one of the largest federal agencies and its reputation was seriously damaged after a 2014 scandal about hospital wait times. Since then, it created its Veterans Experience Office which promoted greater integration within VA of various services the department provides to veterans as well as a major effort to improve veterans’ experiences with VA. Just last year, VA formally codified “customer experience” as a core organizational value. The General Services Administration’s Office of Customer Experience is helping share these kinds of initiatives, as well.

Concerted federal efforts to improve customer service reach back to 1993, when improvements were touted as a key element to reinventing the federal government. In fact, one of the first presidential executive orders issued to implement the reinvention agenda was about improving customer service. The early focus was to get federal agencies to set customer service standards and post them publicly. This was inspired by the British “Citizen Charter” initiative when the U.K. set out to improve customer service. This was followed several years later by a shift from standard setting to customer satisfaction surveys and a visible campaign to reach out to citizens about their experiences with government. There was also a shift from attempting govermentwide improvements to a focus on a smaller subset of agencies that have the most interaction with the public.

Improving customer service took a back seat for several years during the George W. Bush administration but was resurrected as a priority in the Obama administration, which designated “customer experience” as a cross-agency priority goal. Both of the last two administrations have focused on high-visibility government services as the focal points for improvement.

Setting Standards

The 1993 reinventing government initiative’s initial report to President Bill Clinton recommended improving services to the public, with the vision of “a government where services are customer-driven” and “judged based on the public's expectations.” Within days after the report was delivered, Clinton signed an executive order stating: “The standard of quality for services provided to the public shall be: Customer service equal to the best in business.” The directive required agencies to develop plans, standards, and surveys and its implementation was led by Bob Stone, Greg Woods and Candy Kane on the reinventing government team.

Since the use of surveys of the public is governed by clearance requirements with the Office of Management and Budget under the Paperwork Reduction Act, the initial emphasis was on setting customer service standards within each agency. The reinventing government team compiled agency responses into the first inventory of customer service standards across the government in early 1994 that would be publicly posted in each agency: “This report presents more than 1,500 customer service standards, representing commitments from more than 100 federal agencies. This is the first time most of these agencies have set standards.” For example, the U.S. Postal Service committed to a standard of no one having to wait in line for more than five minutes.

The following year, a presidential memo was issued to step up agency attention to this effort. This memo stated: “Agencies shall, on an ongoing basis, measure results achieved against the customer service standards and report those results to customers at least annually.” These reports were integrated into agency annual reports to the president and Congress on their overall performance. By 1997, 570 federal organizations had committed to more than 4,000 standards. A status report highlighted dozens of examples of improved customer service.

From Standards to Surveys

Standards were a start, but to be effective, agencies had to find ways to get feedback from their customers. The reinventing government team worked with the Office of Management and Budget to develop a generic clearance for a customer survey instrument that could be used by all agencies so they would not have to get OMB clearance on each survey. This led to the widespread use of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, developed by the University of Michigan. That index is still used by agencies today and ACSI publicly reports trends overall for government as well as for specific agencies.

A Focus on Key Agencies

The reinventing government effort shifted its strategy on customer service again in 1998. It decided to focus efforts on the 32 “high impact” agencies that had 90 percent of the government’s interaction with the public – such as the Park Service, the IRS, and the Passport Office. Vice President Al Gore, who led the president’s reinvention efforts, challenged these agencies to deliver specific results by September 2000. President Clinton reinforced this new initiative, directing agency leaders to visit their customers across the country during the course of the coming year and have conversations with them to learn first hand what their service experiences have been, and how they could improve.

By 2000, 80 percent of agency managers saw service goals aimed at meeting customer expectations, up from 36 percent in 1992. Also, 30 agencies were measuring satisfaction with their services via the ACSI which compared government services with the private sector. It found the gap was close and narrowed between 1999 and 2000.

A Shift from Service to Experience

The White House emphasis on improving customer service paused during the Bush administration and resumed in 2011 under President Obama with an executive order requiring each agency to develop “a Customer Service Plan to address how the agency will provide services in a manner that seeks to streamline service delivery and improve the experience of its customers.” To implement this effort, OMB directed each agency to identify one “signature effort” and appoint a senior official to lead their efforts. Michael Messinger, an alumni from the reinventing government effort in the 1990s helped push this forward. In 2014, the Government Accountability Office assessed progress in five agencies and recommended that they “implement formal feedback mechanisms to improve customer service.”

In 2016, OMB’s Lisa Danzig championed the designation of customer experience as one of a small handful of “cross-agency priority goals.” The shift in emphasis from “service” to “experience” harkened back to the original reinventing government principle of looking at services from the customers’ perspective, not just the specific transaction, such as issuing a passport. OMB also shifted emphasis from a governmentwide focus to a smaller set of “high impact service providers,” much like the reinventing government initiative had done in its later years. OMB also created a cross-agency “core federal services” council to lead the effort. The emphasis was on improving specific services, not on the agencies providing the services. The effort also included a customer service award to individuals or teams in agencies that demonstrated exemplary customer service.

This initiative carried over to the current administration as a cross-agency priority goal, which is co-led by Pamela Powers, the acting deputy secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, OMB, Matt Cutts, the head of the U.S. Digital Service, and OMB’s Dustin Brown. The current emphasis is on improving the digital experiences of the customers of 26 high impact service providers, such as FHA home loans, the issuance of patents, and the delivery of veterans benefits. The current initiative has developed a wealth of tools that reflect proven private industry best practices such as the use of journey maps, human-centered design, and real-time service measures.

Helpful Resources

The evolution of approaches toward improving Americans’ interaction with government services over the past three decades has led to a rich trove of resources and capacity that agencies can draw upon. For example, the General Service Administration has created an Office of Customer Experience and a Center of Excellence to help agencies develop their customer experience strategies. Likewise, the U.S. Digital Service has developed an online toolkit for agencies to use.

Still, the success of any customer service improvement lies with agency leadership and attention, and a shift in the operating culture on the front lines of service delivery in an agency. That’s what the VA has demonstrated with its multi-year effort, which serves as a potential model for other agencies to emulate.

This post is part of a series developed by the IBM Center for The Business of Government that reflects on lessons from past government reform efforts. Listen to the podcast discussion here.

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Promoting Employee Engagement In a Time of Crisis

John Kamensky — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 10:00:00 -0400

Instead of attempting major civil service reform, the Obama administration focused on employee interaction and workplace improvement rather than civil service reform. Those efforts offer lessons for today.

When President Obama took office, it was the depth of the Great Recession and he froze pay and bonuses for the civil service to reflect the economic downturn across the country. However, the Administration undertook several efforts to improve the working environment for employees by:

Restoring labor-management councils,
Promoting work-life programs and family-friendly workplaces, and
Prioritizing efforts to reform the hiring process.

After several years, the administration homed in on several personnel-related issues that were widely seen as sticking points to improving the government’s workforce and culture:

Senior career executives were not being developed or held accountable to be successful in an increasingly complex work environment; and
Managers and applicants continued to complain about a broken recruiting and hiring process that stymied them from getting the best talent.
Federal employees were expressing less positive views about their leaders, supervisors, work experience, and other drivers of employee engagement.

In 2014, the White House created an advisory group to strengthen the career Senior Executive Service, jointly overseen by Katherine Archuleta, director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Meg McLaughlin, head of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, and Beth Cobert, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The group proposed administrative reforms to streamline the hiring, onboarding, pay, succession planning, and career development of executives. Most of the committee’s recommendations were incorporated into a 2015 presidential executive order. Probably the most prominent of the recommendations was a requirement that agencies rotate about 15 percent of their senior executives to different positions for at least a four-month period to help them better develop as leaders.

Efforts continued to improve the recruiting and hiring process, but this remained a perennial issue during the entire course of the Obama administration. OPM identified existing authorities and flexibilities and set out to map the processes in major agencies to identify areas for improvement. Under Angela Bailey’s leadership, OPM worked with both the President’s Management Council and the Chief Human Capital Officers Council to develop a hiring reform “one stop” website as well as a “myth buster” guide to both educate HR staff and agency managers about what is and is not possible.

Near the end of the administration’s tenure, OMB and OPM jointly launched a “Hiring Excellence” campaign to spread best practices and help agencies use existing authorities to meet their needs.” Based on insights and lessons learned from the campaign, OPM and OMB also released a joint memo, in late 2016 that required agencies to commit to focus on improvements throughout 2017. A subsequent report by the Government Accountability Office in 2019 found little progress, offered another set of best practices, and encouraged agencies to adopt them.

Measuring Employee Engagement

The personnel-related initiative that gained significant traction and attention was a concerted emphasis to increase federal employees’ engagement with their work. In the private sector, this was seen as an important element in both improving organizational performance and improving talent retention. It was also a way to listen to the voice of the employees while setting personnel priorities.

The annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey begun under the Bush Administration was a critical component of this initiative. By 2009, it was a robust instrument that provided insights at a granular level in most agencies, so leaders could both see what was going on at the frontline and be held accountable for making improvements.

The results of the survey were popularized through a “Best Places to Work” report prepared by a nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, which also held recognition award ceremonies for the top-ranked and most improved agencies. These rankings were used by OMB to encourage agency leaders to pay attention to their own agencies’ rankings and develop strategies to improve in following years.

In a joint 2014 memo to agency heads, the heads of OMB, OPM and the Office of Presidential Personnel cited their commitment to a cross-agency priority goal to improve employee engagement and directed each agency to designate a senior executive to be the point person for this effort.

For example, in 2009, the White House asked the Secretary of Agriculture to prioritize improving USDA’s Best Places to Work score. At the time, the department ranked in the lowest quartile of the rankings for large agencies. While a few agencies within the department used survey data to assess employee engagement, there was no departmentwide, systematic approach. The Secretary designated Greg Parham, assistant secretary for administration, to lead the effort.

Dr. Parham shared data with the secretary on a monthly basis on aspects of employee engagement and he traveled the country, visiting field offices to learn firsthand what initiatives were working and what might be done to improve engagement. This concerted effort turned around the department’s trends and improved its standing. In 2016, USDA was lauded for ranking in the top 10 agencies for the first time.

At the National Institutes of Health, Camille M. Hoover, Executive Officer of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, developed action plan that focused on empowering managers, setting standards, and holding them accountable for action. She stressed that managers need to be able to talk about the elements of the survey instrument – like improving communication and recognition for good work – day in and day out. And managers need to explicitly tie it back to the survey so employees see that the managers are in fact acting upon their survey responses. Hoover and her staff translated the elements in the governmentwide survey into actionable behaviors, based on analyses and comparative data they developed.

Insights for Continued Improvement

Going forward, an employee engagement initiative needs to create a new bottom-up demand for improving organizational health and performance, a demand tailored to the needs of different missions and units. A 2018 study by the National Academy of Public Administration looked at agency efforts and recommended creating a bottom-up demand by leveraging three strategic components:

Strengthen unit-level health and performance. Assess and diagnose the state of unit-level organizational health and performance by using existing data, such as the employee engagement index derived from the annual government-wide employee viewpoint survey. These survey data are available to 28,000 work units across the government. Expand and refine analyses over time to include the use of other data sources, such as operational and mission support performance data.
Create a learning-based approach to improving results. To act on these assessments, create a learning-based approach (rather than a directive approach) to improve organizational capacity and performance in agencies. Engage organizational units to develop their own individually tailored plans for improvement. The specific elements would be defined within each major mission area. The strategy may cross program and agency boundaries. Plans would be peer-reviewed.
Employ the power of data analytics to manage. To sustain the learning-based approach, help managers make effective use of new data available to managers relevant to their operations by giving them tools to access, analyze, and apply those data, as well as the skills to manage in this new data-rich environment. Encourage the creation of communities of practice where managers can learn from each other’s experiences well as from more formal training opportunities.

The emphasis on improving employee engagement was subsequently incorporated into the current administration’s management agenda as an element of its cross-agency priority goal on developing a 21st Century Workforce. The cross-agency goal assesses progress top-down, across the government and at the agency level. The National Academy of Public Administration’s recommendations can serve as a benchmark for fostering bottom-up, unit-level improvements within agencies.

This post is part of a series developed by the IBM Center for The Business of Government that reflects on lessons from past government reform efforts. Listen to the podcast discussion here.

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Empowering HR and Managers: Lessons from the Bush Administration

John Kamensky — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 10:00:00 -0400

While the reinventing government effort in the 1990s sought to empower frontline workers, subsequent reform efforts sought to strengthen the role of human resources and managers. In early 2001, the Government Accountability Office designated “Strategic Human Capital” as one of the federal government’s high risks for potential failure. This issue is still on its list today, even though there have been concerted efforts by subsequent presidential administrations to address the issues raised by GAO.

GAO’s concerns at the time were that agencies did not:

Strategically plan for their current and future human capital needs
Create succession plans to ensure leadership continuity among career executives
Acquire and develop staff with skills needed to deliver agency missions
Create a results-oriented organizational culture

The PMA Scorecard

The George W. Bush Administration announced in August 2001 that strategic human capital would be a key part of its broader President’s Management Agenda (which was discussed in an earlier blog post in this series by Dan Chenok).

The Bush administration’s strategic human capital element was one of five sets of criteria scored quarterly (green, yellow or red on an actual scorecard) to rate the progress of each of the major agencies. The human capital scorecard used a set of seven criteria to rate an agency as “green,” including:

Develop comprehensive strategic workforce plans and link them to annual business plans and individual performance to achieve organizational goals.
Put in place performance appraisal plans for senior executives and managers that link to agency mission, goals and outcomes, and effectively differentiate between high and low performers.
Put in place succession strategies for career executives.
Significantly reduce skill gaps in mission critical occupations and competencies.

Many of its criteria were in direct response to GAO’s concerns and the scorecard served as a guide for the eight years of the Bush administration.

Beyond the Scorecard

In addition to the scorecard, the Bush administration undertook several other human capital initiatives that helped empower agencies’ human capital functions in an effort to address weaknesses identified by GAO and others. Some initiatives reflected the administration’s ideological leanings, such as eliminating the labor-management partnership councils created under President Clinton and a push for contracting out functions that could be seen as commercial in nature.

Not all of these initiatives bore fruit, but it is worth highlighting them to understand the context for future personnel reform efforts, and lessons for future reformers. The initiatives that were institutionalized include:

Formalized the role of Chief Human Capital Officers and created a cross-agency council via legislation.
Legislated the annual federal employee viewpoint survey as a way to understand frontline employee perceptions of their work culture, workplace, and managers.
Revised the senior executive service personnel rating system to focus it more on the achievement of agency mission results and differentiations between high and low performers.
Created the Human Capital Line of Business (which eventually became a component of the Shared Services initiative underway today) to allow agencies to share common HR services instead of develop their own systems.
Created the Human Capital Assessment Accountability Framework (which became the Human Capital Framework in 2016) that allows agencies to self-assess against governmentwide standards.

The first two were legislated; the remaining three were acted upon administratively. In each of these cases, efforts were made to engage stakeholders in supporting the development and implementation of these initiatives.

Several bolder Bush proposals to reform the governmentwide civil service pay and classification system were never acted upon, largely because of the inability to gain consensus among stakeholders. This inability to undertake broad civil service reforms preceded and followed the Bush Administration, largely because of an inherent conundrum reflected at a 2006 GAO-sponsored forum: “a governmentwide framework should balance the need for consistency across the federal government with the desire for flexibility so that individual agencies can tailor human capital systems to best meet their needs.”

Pay for Performance: A Success That Failed?

In addition to its scorecard and governmentwide efforts, the Bush administration invested substantial energy in targeted efforts to create pay-for-performance systems for civilians in the Defense and Homeland Security departments (with the intent to expand them to other agencies). These were put in place but later reversed.

In August 2004, the Office of Personnel Management and OMB issued regulations establishing rules for a new pay-for-performance system for senior executives. Pay levels and pay adjustments for thousands of executives are now determined by the evaluations earned under appraisal systems that make meaningful distinctions based on relative performance. The incentive for agencies to participate was that, if agencies certify that they comply with the regulations, they could pay their executives more than the statutory ceiling on pay.

In parallel, nearly 60 percent of the federal civilian workforce was authorized by law to be subjected to similar links between pay and individual performance. The 2002 Homeland Security Act creating the Homeland Security Department also granted the authority to establish a new personnel system that would have based all individual pay increases on performance. Similar changes were adopted by Defense under the National Security Personnel System. In late 2007, OPM reported that nearly 300,000 employees were covered by a performance pay system. It concluded that the initiative was successful, but that “agencies need to monitor and focus more closely on their implementation efforts.”

This move to performance pay was supported by a 2003 GAO report that described the characteristics of organizations that have successfully linked individual performance to organizational success. It examined high-performing organizations that were early adopters of this approach and saw linking performance and pay as a way of “fundamentally changing their cultures so that they are more results-oriented, customer-focused, and collaborative in nature … high-performing organizations have recognized that an effective performance management system can be a strategic tool to drive internal change and achieve desired results.” In addition, a 2004 IBM Center report by Howard Risher provided a guide for managers on the transition to a performance pay system.

However, GAO also cautioned that agencies that pursue this approach must have “modern, effective, credible, and validated performance management systems” to both protect workers and ensure accountability. This caution was the downfall of the initiative and a lesson for future reformers: initiatives that work in selected environments may not work more broadly because an organization’s underlying culture and operating environment have to be seen as trusted by employees before they will accept a performance appraisal system that makes distinctions with personal consequences, such as pay.

Did these pay-for-performance initiatives fail because of poor planning and execution? Or did they fail because the concept of linking pay to performance is flawed?

A 2009 article in FCW that assessed the initiatives’ failure, stated: “One of the most common complaints from employees is that their job objectives are too broadly defined to be measured in a meaningful way, which gives managers a lot of subjective latitude when it comes to rating performance … The result is that many employees feel as though there is little connection between their performance on the job and the assessments they receive.”

This seems to imply poor planning and execution may have been the underlying cause for the failure – it wasn’t the concept of pay-for-performance but the inability of managers and employees to clearly define the work and expectations. This circles back to GAO’s high risk designation and its admonition that agencies need to create results-oriented cultures.

Lessons for Remote Work Today

While there are few efforts in the federal government to pursue pay-for-performance, the lessons of its implementation challenges are relevant today. Defining an employee’s work more concretely suddenly becomes important because a majority of the federal workforce is working from home as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Best practices for effective distance work arrangements typically emphasize: “Clearly communicate which job positions are eligible for telework and which functions within each job position are suitable for off-site work.”

Whether it is distance work or working in a traditional office, if job objectives are vague, how will managers be able to assess the performance of their employees? And how will employees know what is expected of them? The bottom line seems to be less about empowering managers via a pay-for-performance system than it is empowering front line workers to do their jobs, by being clear about what is expected, being given the tools to do their jobs, and help them develop the skills to be successful.

Interestingly, some agencies where productivity can be measured, such as work of Veteran Benefits Administration and Social Security claims examiners, productivity seems to have increased as employees moved to telework during the pandemic.

This post is part of a series developed by the IBM Center for The Business of Government that reflects on lessons from past government reform efforts. Listen to the podcast discussion here.

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Empowering the Federal Workforce to Get Results: An Enduring Problem

John Kamensky — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 14:22:52 -0400

Moving to distance work arrangements have suddenly shifted from a “nice to have” to an agency’s “continuity of operations” survival in the age of coronavirus. But as IRS managers have found, this is an uncomfortable shift because it involves a culture change for managers. They have to trust their workers to do the right thing and empower them with the information, training, and tools to do it.

This discomfort is not a new challenge. In 1993, the Clinton Administration’s reinventing government initiative set out to empower employees to work in ways that would improve customer satisfaction and better achieve mission results. Its premise, though, was that the federal government was overstocked with too many supervisors and “systems control” staff to support them, and that they were barriers to effective operations. In fact, the reinventing government team referred to them as the forces of “over-control and micromanagement” and believed that they needed to be pared back significantly.

By the end of the Clinton Administration, the federal workforce had shrunk to the smallest it had been since the Eisenhower Administration in the 1950s. But today, the federal workforce has returned to the size it was before the Clinton downsizing efforts.

What was intent of the reinventing government empowerment effort via downsizing, and what are lessons for the shifts in today’s workforce to “reskill” and to empower employees to better achieve results? The imperative to reimagine how work gets done has a new urgency.

The Big Idea

Perhaps the most controversial recommendation made by the 1993 reinventing government initiative, officially called the National Performance Review, was its proposal to reduce the 2.1 million civilian federal workforce by 252,000 (later raised by Congress to 272,900) over a five-year period.

This recommendation ran directly counter to a well-regarded 1989 study by Mark Goldstein that decried the “hollowing” of government and warned about the “incapacitating consequences of continuing austerity” for federal agencies.

NPR recommended cutting in half the number of supervisors and “system control” staff (e.g., personnel, audit, finance, legal, procurement), in part by doubling the span of control of supervisors from an average of a 1:7 ratio to a 1:15 ratio.

The rationale of the NPR recommendation was: “Working toward a quality government means reducing the power of headquarters vis-vis field operations. As our reinvented government begins to liberate agencies from over-regulation, we no longer will need 280,000 separate supervisory staff and 420,000 ‘systems control’ staff to support them. Instead, we will encourage more of our 2.1 million federal employees to become managers of their own work.”

The report went on to conclude: “Put simply, all federal agencies will delegate, decentralize, and empower employees to make decisions. This will let frontline and front office workers use their creative judgment as they offer service to customers and solve problems.”

The reductions were premised on a parallel reduction in statutory and regulatory requirements. Such as streamlined hiring, simplified acquisition requirements, and reengineered work processes that would shift the emphases of employees from compliance with outdates rules in order to improve customer service delivery. The report encouraged “the use of employee empowerment, self-managed teams, simplified control structures, and better use of information and communications technology.”

Reality Intervened

Broadly, the idea was to reduce the total number of supervisors and systems control staff in half – from about 700,000 to 350,000 – by shifting about 100,000 from headquarters to field to improve customer service, and to allow the remaining 250,000 to take a buyout or retire over a five-year period. The goal was that the federal government’s overhead staff – about 30 percent of the workforce – should parallel the overhead costs in the private sector – about 15 percent of a corporation’s workforce.

Members of the President’s Management Council – mainly the departmental deputy secretaries – were charged with developing plans for their agencies since they were in a position to know the best way to cut administrative costs while improving performance.

Prior to NPR, streamlining efforts directed by central management agencies had involved across-the-board cuts. While these efforts led successfully to temporary cuts in staffing, they did not result in improved performance and left behind many of the same problems without changing the culture.

But the “thoughtful” cuts did not happen as envisioned. Congress intervened, mandating cuts at a faster pace, without providing the flexibility envisioned by streamlining personnel or acquisition requirements. Agencies tended to cut field staff, not headquarters. They also were not strategic in their cuts – for example, cutting the personnel offices first, when the demand for their services in processing buyouts, retirements, and transfers were the highest. Also, federal “bumping rights” allowed more senior people to retain their jobs if their positions were eliminated by taking another less-senior job even if they were not qualified for that less-senior role. One apocryphal story was that a scientist replaced a mailroom clerk so he could stay on long enough to qualify for retirement benefits.

Long Term Consequences

The long-lasting effects of the downsizing initiative was that many agencies froze hiring in certain professional fields, such as acquisition, for years and that created cohort gaps so that 15 or 20 years later, there was a smaller pool of seasoned employees to serve in senior management roles.

There was also a residual bitterness by some who were affected by the downsizing initiative, even if they remained in the civil service for the rest of their careers. For example, Jeff Neal, who at the time was in the Defense Department and later was the chief human capital officer at the Department of Homeland Security, recently wrote about the current problems of the Office of Personnel Management stemming from NPR: “OPM’s problem is not its people, nor is it the Civil Service Reform Act that created the agency, or the changing nature of the federal workforce. The real problem is that OPM was basically gutted by the National Performance Review (NPR) in the name of “reinventing government” between fiscal 1993 and fiscal 1996. . . . The NPR branded OPM as a ‘systems control’ agency and slashed its budget and staffing and that was supposed to lead to great things happening.”

Steve Kelman, who was the head of federal procurement during the reinventing government period, reflected on this as well: “The events of 1993 launched major changes in the procurement system, which has continued to evolve in the past 25 years. In general, that evolution has seen the procurement culture shift its focus from compliance to performance, yet despite that shift, it is hard to say that the system's performance has improved.” He continued, noting: “the reinvention that produced a procurement system more oriented toward performance was also the one that produced cutbacks in the procurement workforce, which prevented improvements in the system from being translated into better performance.”

Lessons Learned

For me, the biggest lesson was that a strategic idea – empowering frontline employees – doesn’t easily translate to on-the-ground implementation in a large, diverse, and decentralized government. Implementers in agencies will superimpose their own priorities within a broad range and focus their compliance on an easily-measured bottom line – personnel cuts as an end in of themselves – not the less-easily measured goal – shifting authority and empowering frontline workers.

This lesson is currently front and center with the sudden shift by agencies to telework as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. There is a growing likelihood that the model for work in the foreseeable future will continue to involve telework. But how will agencies adapt? Studies on effective telework says that managers will have to empower and trust employees to do the right thing, and use measurement and feedback as their management tools, instead of direct, physical observation. This works in many private sector settings, as well as in some of the long-time pioneers in the use of telework in the federal government.

So, the reinventing government goal of empowering employees to deliver results on their agencies’ mission may get implemented – in a different way, for a different reason, in a different time.

This post is part of a series developed by the IBM Center for The Business of Government that reflects on lessons from past government reform efforts. Listen to the podcast discussion here.

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The Mindsets of Innovators in Government

John Kamensky — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 17:03:18 -0400

There is a governmentwide strategic push to support the development and use of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and hybrid computing. The action is happening via cross-agency communities of practice and incubation hubs supported by the federal chief information officer and the General Services Administration.

As these initiatives move forward, real innovation is happening on the front lines of government. Dr. Alan Shark, executive director of Public Technology Institute, undertook a series of interviews this past Spring to learn from a handful of champions of cutting-edge innovation just what they were doing and how they were doing it. His interviews and observations are reflected in a new report for the IBM Center.

In talking with José Arrieta, chief information officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, Shark learned that by using agile approaches, Arrieta was able to create the HHS Protect web platform back in April in days, not years. HHS Protect supports the governmentwide COVID-19 Task Force with near real-time information. This platform includes data from 6,200 hospitals, 3.0 billion data elements, and data from all 50 states plus all six U.S. territories—including all laboratories, all case information, and all of the diagnostic information that exists in the United States. Arrieta envisions the next step will be to secure these data via the use of blockchain technology so it can be more widely shared. Doing this would eliminate the cost burden of constantly replicating data as it moves into different databases.

In talking with Nico Papafil, the program manager of a venture capital-like program at the General Services Administration, called 10x, Shark also learned that there are scores of front line innovators across the government. In 2015, GSA experimented with running a single-day Shark Tank-like competition where federal employees could pitch their technology-related ideas to improve government services. The winning ideas were awarded a small grant to test them out, and the ones that worked were given more time and money to bring them to completion. This one-time event worked so well that GSA decided to institutionalize this approach to identifying, testing, and scaling new ideas by federal employees in a period of weeks, not months or years. Twice a year, 10x hosts a competition around a set of themes. For example, the next competition’s deadline is August 5th and GSA is asking for innovations related to disaster management, direct public service delivery, and diversity, inclusion and accessibility.

In an interview with local government innovators, Shark found that technology could effectively be a bureaucratic silo-buster when using artificial intelligence tools. He talked with Barbie Robinson, director of the Department of Health Services for Sonoma County, California, and her colleague, Carolyn Staats, the county’s director of innovation, about their approach. Their initial effort to integrate service delivery to vulnerable populations was jumpstarted after a disastrous forest fire in the county in 2017. The county formed an interdepartmental multidisciplinary team to work together to provide holistic services to those in need. They were able to move quickly by adapting the lessons and technology from a similar pilot effort in San Diego. That effort was several years ahead of Sonoma County and it had developed a data management tool that brought disparate decentralized systems together into a central hub. Robinson and Staats were not shy about taking a “lift and shift” approach. It saved them years of effort. Once the Sonoma team started putting the pieces together, they mastered 91,000 unique clients across the first four systems in just four months. They used artificial intelligence to manage case notes. So now homeless service workers, social service workers, or health clinicians can see the relevant information about a particular person as never before—and never before in one place.

Five Mindsets That Matter for Innovators

The most revealing insight Shark took away from his series of interviews was that oftentimes the biggest obstacles to technological innovation in government are not technical computer bugs and glitches, but the less clear-cut challenges of opening hearts, minds and wallets. Based on his interviews, he Identified five commonalities—mindsets, actually—which he thinks may be the keys to success for innovators in government.

An entrepreneurial mindset. Shark found that even in government one can have an entrepreneurial mindset. However, satisfaction in the public sector is derived from achieving goals for the public good as opposed to a personal motivation to achieve fame or fortune.

He learned from those he interviewed that they demonstrated a strong desire to serve their customers, often including other agencies as well as the public. Each of the leaders interviewed are business minded and self-motivated, and took reward from the satisfaction of accomplishing something worthy and for the public good. Shark summarizes the qualities of an entrepreneurial mindset to include:

Adherence to and passion for public service
Exemplify type A+ self-driven personalities
Passion for helping the citizen/customer
Ability to experiment without fear of failure
Secure enough to leave egos at the door
Self-motivated and driven by curiosity and problem-solving

A collaborative mindset. Each leader interviewed by Shark noted that their accomplishments represented the work of more than one and often many. These leaders were dynamic and keen on sharing ideas and concepts, and fearless in receiving feedback that might not always be positive. While each was proud of their accomplishments, they did not look to own success. More specifically, he found that a collaborative mindset includes:

An ability to build core groups and individual human networks of experts across complementary but different fields
Artfulness in crossing traditional agency and department boundaries
A willingness to share in success
Excellence at managing expectations and building champions of support
Exceptional ability to be part of and engage with multiple networks of innovators
An ability to cut across traditional boundaries of thought and past practice

An adaptive mindset. Shark observed that each of his interviewees had an adaptive mindset. This was demonstrated by their desire not to get comfortable always doing the same things in the same way. They viewed themselves as objective thinkers and strategists, with a solid grasp of the current state as well as the ability to contemplate improvements by doing things differently. Other observed qualities of an innovation mindset include:

Willingness to experiment and adapt based on results intended and unintended
Strong focus on emerging technologies and how they are being adapted
Motivated by trying to improve business processes that positively impact the citizen/customer experience
Recognition that innovation is a creative process that has more do with people and governance than technology itself

A mastery of emerging technology mindset. While not all innovation has roots in technology, all of Shark’s interviewees did have roots in technology. As a result, they are readily able to grasp which technologies might best address a given challenge. Each individual tracks the latest technologies and applications, and comprehends the interrelationships of how emerging technologies work together as a system or suite of offerings. Other observed qualities of a mastery of the use of tech tools and emerging technologies mindset include:

Confidence in the program’s approach and direction
Grounded appreciation for the limits of technology
Deep understanding of the problem to be solved matched with the appropriate solution
Fearlessness in seeking answers to technology challenges
Ability to change course when unsurmountable roadblocks appear

A leadership mindset. Each of Shark’s interviewees were in positions of authority, but they led by example. They exuded self- assurance and yet they were also exceptionally modest. They all tend to have leadership qualities that inspire, and have a track record that earned the respect of both their senior leadership and the teams who report to them. Other qualities of a leadership mindset that Shark observed include:

Self-confident and inspiring to others
Knows when to pull back and let others take charge
Places the ego at the door
Encourages reasonable risk taking
Is open to new ideas and approaches and makes that clear to others
Sets high, ethical, and honest standards

In summary, champions of innovation need to convince their leadership of the need for improvement, create a plan to test it and procure funding to get it off the ground. They also need to define success, be ready to change the definition if necessary and create a way to measure progress. But to do this, “You need the right people in the right place with the right mindset,” says Shark. He and several of his interviewees—Barbie Robinson from Sonoma County and David Shive from the U.S. General Services Administration—explored this in more depth in an interactive panel session in early July.

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Veterans Benefits Administration May Be Having Its Best Year Ever

John Kamensky — Tue, 19 May 2020 13:54:31 -0400

There’s a lot of media coverage of the work of federal employees responding to the epic health, economic, and social effects of the coronavirus pandemic. But there’s also impressive work going on in federal agencies not directly related to the pandemic response, and in many cases this work is being done from home.

One of those agencies, the Veterans Benefits Administration, has even exceeded its performance targets set before the pandemic. And at the same time, Veterans Affairs Department Undersecretary Paul Lawrence, who leads VBA, has accelerated his personal outreach efforts to veterans via state tele-town halls where he’s connecting with tens of thousands of veterans in each state.

Lawrence, a veteran himself, started fiscal year 2020 back in October with a campaign to make 2020 VBA’s “best year ever” in terms of productivity and service to veterans. After successfully cutting the backlog of pending benefit claims in 2019, he set even more aggressive performance targets for 2020.

The pandemic almost derailed those efforts. However, the VBA team set up a “war room” in headquarters and developed work-arounds for how its 25,506 staff could get their jobs done via distance work arrangements.

In his most recent quarterly webcast on VBA’s performance, he lauded the eight business line teams for actually beating their quarterly goals. For example, the benefits team exceeded its quarterly target by 20%. In addition, VBA quickly adjusted some long-standing protocols to adapt to the coronavirus pandemic in order to continue serving veterans. For example, the compensation and pension business line halted its traditional in-person medical exams and switched to telehealth video and audio interviews while using private doctor treatment records. In addition, the GI Bill program will continue to pay housing allowances even if veterans are only able to attend online courses.

Lawrence noted that while VBA may have closed physical offices, agency employees are still working and ready to deliver services.

In addition to his team’s efforts, Lawrence imposed some stretch goals on himself—that he would personally connect with 1 million veterans via state tele-town halls and weekly national Whiteboard info sessions using LinkedIn Live and YouTube.

In these calls, he provides an update on VBA’s activities and how to apply for various benefits—housing, disability, GI Bill, insurance, etc. The calls are well-attended. For example, 59,300 veterans participated in the tele-town hall in New York, 33,000 in Ohio, and 9,100 in Alaska. In these calls, Lawrence personally answers questions posed by participants over the course of an hour.

While it’s unclear if he’ll meet his personal performance target of reaching 1 million veterans through these outreach efforts, as of May 12th, he had hosted calls with veterans in 14 states, with many more to come. So far, he says, he’s connected with more than 350,000 veterans.

While 2020 will be memorable for most of us as the beginning of a different way of life as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, at VBA it might well be remembered as the best year ever.

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Many Agencies Aren’t Ready to Manage in a New World

John Kamensky — Mon, 11 May 2020 12:34:48 -0400

Government leaders need to think more deeply about effective management both in the current historical moment, and for the longer-term. Understanding how well agencies are managed now would be a useful baseline for incoming leaders and for setting priorities for a new administration. Developing benchmarks to measure effective management would be useful to assess how agencies perform over time, how they compare with other agencies, and what best practices exist for potential adoption.

A new report by University of Illinois-Chicago academics James Thompson and Alejandra Medina provides a roadmap for how to develop measures for assessing well-managed agencies, something that has always seemed intangible. The report’s recommendations provide a foundation on which agency leaders can build agendas to improve their management quality.

More broadly, for government reformers, the report’s proposed framework may help implement piecemeal legislative fixes that were passed with good reason and intention, but have accumulated to contribute to systemic constraints on innovation and responsiveness. These fixes include creating new management leadership positions like chief management officers, new administrative routines such as quarterly reporting of progress on agency priority goals, or addressing constraints such as limitations on conference spending.

Why develop such measures? Creating an assessment framework has several benefits. First is the focus that would be placed on the management function and on the centrality of that function to good performance. One interviewee for the report commented, “often the reason that programs fail is because of bad management rather than because of bad policy. It is hard to get people to pay attention to management.” The creation of a set of quality measures would help bring focus not only to the management function and to those who participate in that function, but to the question of how to achieve management excellence. And second, the mere process of conducting an assessment would create a learning dynamic. Agencies judged as well-managed would become exemplars from which others can learn—providing information that can help agencies build their “learning agendas” as required under the 2018 Foundations for Evidence Based Policymaking Act.

A Short History of Management Assessments

Different approaches have been taken over the years to assess the quality of management in federal agencies. The Government Accountability Office had undertaken such an effort in the mid-1980s, which it called “general management reviews.” Those efforts eventually morphed into GAO’s now widely-known High-Risk List. While this list highlights major management and financial risks, it does not provide a broader framework for improvement absent additional research, such as this 2016 report for the IBM Center written by noted management scholar Don Kettl.

In the late 1990s, the Federal Performance Project—a collaborative effort by the Pew Charitable Trusts, George Washington University, and Government Executive magazine—attempted to grade how well agencies managed their finances, people, results, and more.

In the early 2000s, a Program Assessment Rating Tool was devised by the Office of Management and Budget, which attempted to assess the effectiveness of more than 1,000 federal programs using criteria such as program design, program management, and results. The resulting scores were used to identify areas for potential budget actions. Since then, there has not been any overarching effort to assess the quality of management in federal agencies.

While the U.S. federal government has not in recent years undertaken comprehensive assessments of the quality of management, there have been a number of efforts undertaken in the private sector and in other countries. These include:

The World Management Survey, begun in 2002, to benchmark public and private sector organizations.
The Baldrige Performance Excellence program, a public-private partnership to assess organizational excellence.
The Drucker Institute’s “Management Top 250” rankings of best managed companies.
The United Kingdom’s Capability Review Programme, in 2005, which was subsequently emulated in Australia and New Zealand.
Canada’s Management Accountability Framework, begun in 2003, to promote management excellence and cross-departmental learning.

Six Building Blocks

Based on their review and insights from a panel of experienced and senior government executives, the authors propose six building blocks for developing an assessment protocol to measure the quality of management in federal agencies:

First, sort out the design issues around developing a measurement protocol for management quality in federal agencies. For example, who would sponsor such an initiative? Which metrics best capture management excellence? Would the protocol have to be customized based on an agency’s size or mission?

Second, balance bottom-up approaches with top-down approaches to the design of a measurement initiative. The authors say this is an essential element in ensuring the long-term sustainability of any protocol: “ownership needs to be shared including by managers and executives from throughout the executive branch . . . with a focus on learning rather than compliance.”

Third, engage the federal management community in designing the protocol using techniques such as crowdsourcing and creating a community of practice that would continually refine the measurement protocols. The authors note, “it is at the program level and with those responsible for program delivery that management quality, or lack thereof, becomes manifest.”

Fourth, use the measurement initiative to rethink current management practices: “Whether an organization is assessed as well run ultimately is based not on how each of multiple individual functions operates but on the degree of integration that is achieved internally across functional units and between support functions and program management and externally as well.”

Fifth, evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of assigning grades to agencies. Based on the experiences of other countries, the authors note that “grading further tends to induce gaming behaviors.” However, “A counterargument is that absent consequences for a finding of poor management quality, agencies are less likely to divert the time, energy, and resources to achieving management excellence.”

And sixth, determine the extent to which the protocol will be based primarily on quantitative metrics vs. more subjective qualitative elements. The authors point to a number of existing metrics being collected today that could be readily incorporated into an assessment protocol, but ask whether “such a protocol needs to incorporate a qualitative element such as interviews, focus groups, or surveys.”

Thompson and Medina stress that developing and implementing a protocol to measure the management quality of federal agencies will need to involve a range of stakeholders from inside as well as outside government.

To that end, the Senior Executives Association has agreed to sponsor a task force to tackle some of the design questions identified by Thompson and Medina. The task force will be headed by Noha Gaber, an experienced career civil servant who has worked in several federal agencies, with other charter members drawn from the ranks of current and former government executives and several academics. This effort promises to help agencies adapt the recommendations as a practical measure, facilitating management excellence needed to address an unprecedented global crisis as well as build the foundation for sustained management improvement across government.

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The Early Internet Years in Government Are a Model For Fostering Innovation

John Kamensky — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 11:00:00 -0400

Not having a technology background, I had little appreciation for just how cutting edge we were in the 1990s at the National Performance Review, Vice President Al Gore’s reinventing government initiative. But I readily understood the power of letting innovators stretch their imaginations.

In the summer of 1993, I was sitting on my front porch editing, with pen and paper, a draft developed by the team that was writing the NPR report and recommendations for Reengineering Through Information Technology. Grumbling, I kept striking out “the spiderweb” and inserted “the Internet.” The term “Web” hadn’t entered common vocabulary yet, but I clearly lost that editing battle in the long run.

More importantly that summer, the Clinton administration (led by the vice president, the Commerce secretary, the Office of Management and Budget, and NPR) had agreed that the government should not “own” or “regulate” the emerging Internet. This policy helped pave the way for innovation in the years that followed and the massive expansion for the Internet’s place today at the center of most of the world’s economies and societies.

Creating Big Ideas

Looking back, NPR put some pretty big ideas on the table. Some we fulfilled, like getting an email account for every federal employee, moving to electronic benefit payments, and creating a single, governmentwide search portal long before Google was around.

Other ideas were highly optimistic and are still yet to be achieved. For example, the report recommended: “The entire IRS filing process must be reengineered to be less paper-intensive … The Secretary of the Treasury should eliminate or reduce the need for filing routine income tax returns by January 1998.” While that didn’t happen, the IRS did eventually move to electronic filing and allowed payments to be made online or via credit cards.

Remember, those were the days when the big tech advance was moving from 8-inch floppy disks to 3.5-inch disks, and Adobe PDF had just been released that same summer. There were no standards for federal agency websites. Some, like the Treasury Department, used a commercial .com email address. The White House didn’t have a website until October 1994. In fact, the General Services Administration didn’t take charge of the .gov web domain until 1997.

Creating a Governance Framework

Those were the days before agencies had Chief Information Officers. So, the NPR report recommended the creation of a cross-agency working group of federal career technology enthusiasts to provide strategic guidance and to champion the implementation of various recommendations in the NPR report.

The Government Information Technology Services Working Group first convened in November 1993 to chart out a plan for implementing the tech recommendations in the NPR report. Initially chaired by Greg Woods, and later by Jim Flyzik, the working group focused both on pursuing ambitious recommendations for better services to citizens as well as crafting the foundation for IT leadership in the federal government. For example, they worked closely with the Office of Management and Budget and Congress in crafting the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act, which significantly changed how the federal government purchased and governed technology.

Prior to Clinger-Cohen, authority for all civilian agency technology purchases of more than $500—including personal computers— was centralized within the General Services Administration under the 1965 Brooks Act. The Clinger-Cohen Act delegated that purchase authority to agencies, required agencies to designate Chief Information Officers to oversee their agency’s IT strategy and spending, and made OMB responsible for tracking agency spending on major technology purchases.

After enactment of Clinger-Cohen, the working group transitioned to become the Government Information Technology Services (GITS) Board, with many of the same members who championed the implementation of NPR recommendations, as well as developed additional projects, in an action plan called “Access America.” Individuals were designated as champions for each element in the action plan. For example, Bruce McConnell, then the OMB leader for information policy and technology (who was later succeeded in that role by current IBM Center Director Dan Chenok), took the lead for implementing the electronic benefit payments recommendation, Jim Flyzik from Treasury took the lead on electronic tax filing, and Neil Stillman from Health and Human Services was the champion for governmentwide email.

Fostering Innovation

To support the work of the GITS Board, GSA created an IT Innovation Fund pilot program, funded via a surcharge for agency useof its telecom fund under “FTS 2000“ (which has since gone through many iterations and is now the “Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions” program), to provide seed money for cross-cutting innovations with a multi-agency benefit. The fund allocated between $5 million and $8 million a year to promising projects.

By late 1999, NPR and the GITS Board had cataloged over 1,300 different federal web initiatives underway that were providing government information and services to the public. Some of those still exist today (albeit in a different form), such as the US Business Advisor and Recreation.Gov.

The Board and the fund were sunsetted toward the end of the Clinton Administration, as the cross-agency CIO Council (formally established in 1996 under Executive Order 13011 as part of the implementation of Clinger Cohen) began to mature with development of its five-year strategic plan and a stronger role by OMB.

Insights for Today’s Leaders

The experience of the early federal Internet offers two key takeaways: (1) when applying new technology, start with a compelling vision of how life would be better for the end user as NPR did, and, (2) let innovation and creativity flourish before formalizing and regulating online activity. Potential areas for applying these takeaways might include the use of emerging technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence.

While the “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach was appropriate in the early years, it was clear by the end of the 1990s that it was time to weed the garden. The then-incoming President George W. Bush administration did just that with its Quicksilver Initiative, which Dan Chenok helped to drive. More on that in an upcoming column.

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Where’s the Money? Keep an Eye on the CARES Act

John Kamensky — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 16:41:58 -0400

The Small Business Administration says it will start accepting “paycheck protection” applications from up to 30 million small businesses by April 11. The IRS expects to start sending out stimulus payment checks in mid-April to about 140 million taxpayers. And there are dozens of other provisions mandating action with impossibly short deadlines—all while much of the federal workforce is working from home.

In the midst of this frenetic action, the new law—officially the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act—also contains a series of accountability provisions to oversee this rapid spending. What are these provisions? How do they compare to those in the 2009 Recovery Act, which distributed $787 billion to mitigate the Great Recession? Are there insights from the 2009 oversight efforts that could help jumpstart current efforts?

First, what are the oversight provisions in the CARES Act? Essentially, there are five components, funded with about a quarter of a billion dollars:

Existing Offices of Inspector General. The inspector general offices in 14 agencies are receiving $139 million in supplemental appropriations to undertake oversight of their agency’s portion of programs and dollars in the bill. For example, the IG at the Small Business Administration received a $25 million boost in its budget to help oversee the vast expansion of SBA loans under the new law. This is more than double its current spending level and can be spent over a four-year period.

A New Special Inspector General in Treasury. A new, temporary Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery is being created in the Treasury Department to oversee the distribution of $500 billion in loans, loan guarantees, and investments that will occur in concert with the Federal Reserve. This fund could be leveraged to inject an additional $4 trillion in liquidity into the economy via the Federal Reserve.

The Special IG will be a presidentially-appointed and Senate-confirmed official with the same authorities as a regular IG. Responsibilities include the audit and investigation of the loans, loan guarantees, and other investments made by the Secretary of the Treasury under the provisions of the $500 billion fund. The Special IG’s office was given an initial $25 million appropriation; the office terminates in 2025.

The Special IG must also establish a tracking and quarterly reporting system that:

Describes the various categories of loans, loan guarantees, and other investments by the Treasury;
Within each category, lists each business, state, and locality that receive these loans and explains why the loans were made, and justify the financial terms of the loans;
Tracks the loans, repayments, interest charged and collected, collateral held, etc.

The statute also says the Special IG has the authority to request information from agencies in order to meet its reporting obligations and if not provided, “shall report the circumstances to the appropriate congressional committee without delay.” However, the president’s signing statement disputed this authority.

A New Congressional Oversight Commission. A Congressional Oversight Commission is being created to also oversee the implementation of the $500 billion loan fund by Treasury and the Federal Reserve. The five-member commission will be appointed by congressional leadership. The commission is authorized to hire staff, including detailees and contractors, to be reimbursed by the Treasury with “such sums as may be necessary.” The commission has a five-year life, terminating in 2025.

The commission is chartered to assess the impact of the loan fund on the financial well-being of people and the economy as well as on financial markets and institutions. It is also tasked with assessing the effectiveness of efforts to minimize costs and maximize benefits to taxpayers. It is charged with issuing its first report 30 days after the first loan is made, and then every 30 days thereafter. The statute also grants the commission the authority to hold hearings and request data from federal agencies to meet its oversight responsibilities.

The Government Accountability Office’s Role. The CARES Act directs the Government Accountability Office to also conduct studies on the $500 billion loan fund, with the first in November, and then annually thereafter until the loan fund dissolves. It is also charged with providing monthly briefings to congressional committees on the implementation of the new law, as well as quarterly reports to the public.

A New Oversight Committee of IGs. And finally, a Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) is being created to identify major risks cutting across program and agency boundaries, and to coordinate the work of the entire inspectors general community. This committee will basically be looking at everything other than the Treasury loan fund. The Defense Department’s acting inspector general, Glenn Fine, has been named to chair the committee.

The PRAC is constituted as a committee within the existing statutory Council of Inspectors General for Integrity and Efficiency. The chair of that council, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, selected Fine to lead the PRAC. Twenty-one other IGs have been appointed to the committee.

The PRAC will hire an executive director and deputy, with congressional consultation. The PRAC was appropriated an initial $80 million and given a five-year lifespan, terminating in 2025.

The PRAC will be a coordination hub for the IG community’s work overseeing the new law, but it also has independent authority to conduct its own audits and investigations in areas where there are major risks cutting across program and agency boundaries. It is given subpoena and enforcement authority, including over non-federal employees.

A major role of the committee will be to ensure transparency of how funds are used. It is mandated to establish a public-facing website by April 27th that will provide “relevant operational, economic, financial, grant, subgrants, contract, and subcontract information in user-friendly visual presentations to enhance public awareness of the use of covered funds and the Coronavirus response.”

Data Collection Requirements. The CARES Act mandates data collection requirements that are somewhat analogous to those created in the 2009 Recovery Act, but are updated to reflect better data collection capabilities created by the 2014 Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (which was inspired by the Recovery Act’s data collection requirements). In fact, the new law stipulates that the PRAC use the data reporting elements that were developed under the DATA Act.

Agencies are to submit their spending plans to PRAC by June 27th. They are also to submit quarterly reports to the Office of Management and Budget, Treasury, the PRAC, and appropriate congressional committees that detail how funds are spent on each project or activity. These data are then to be released publicly after 30 days via the PRAC website.

What’s Different From 2009?

How does all of this compare to the 2009 Recovery Act’s accountability provisions? The CARES Act is more than two and a half times larger than the 2009 Recovery Act. Its accountability provisions roughly parallel those in the 2009 Recovery Act with increased funding for existing IGs and the creation of a governmentwide, independent oversight body and a one-stop website providing spending transparency to the public.

A major difference is the availability of current spending data via the DATA Act. The new law does not create a parallel financial data collection system as was done under the 2009 Recovery Act, when reports were required to be submitted directly by recipients to the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board but it does require project-level reporting and unique trackable ID numbers for each, that are downloadable and machine-readable. The CARES Act also mandates the first public report to be available months sooner than was required for the 2009 Recovery Act’s first report.

Interestingly, the 2009 law invested about $67 million more in oversight than the CARES Act. In addition, in 2009 there was strong support for oversight efforts in the Obama administration. President Obama designated then Vice President Joe Biden as the focal point for implementing the act and declared: “We cannot tolerate business as usual—not in Washington, not in our state capitals, not in America's cities and towns. We will use the new tools that the Recovery Act gives us to watch the taxpayers’ money with more rigor and transparency than ever.” Five years later, observers found far less fraud and misuse than originally estimated. This has been attributed to the oversight and transparency efforts employed.

It will be interesting to follow how the IGs and the other new oversight functions are implemented and whether they build on the experiences of the oversight efforts developed in 2009 such as the creation of a centralized analytics and investigations support function. GAO identified a set of best practices developed during the implementation of the Recovery Act that improved public transparency of spending. These practices, which might be a template for the CARES Act, include using social networking tools and obtaining stakeholder input in the design of the website.

It will also be interesting to see if accountability functions will be further expanded as Congress considers additional spending legislation to address the country’s economic recovery in months to come.

Additional Resources:

Ed DeSeve, Managing Recovery: An Insider’s View (2011)

Charles Johnson, Katryn Newcomer, and Angela Allison, Balancing Independence and Positive Engagement: How Inspectors General Work with Agencies and Congress (2015)

Donald Kettl, Managing Risk, Improving Results: Lessons for Improving Government Management from GAO’s High Risk List (2016)

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A Framework for National Recovery From COVID-19

John Kamensky — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 14:43:46 -0400

How can agencies effectively implement programs to address the COVID-19? Given the surge of funding for response efforts, the answer to that question is critical. Following the 2009 Recovery Act, the IBM Center sponsored a number of research reports to explore the government’s response to the economic downturn that began in 2007, known as the Great Recession. Below are some of the lessons learned from that experience, and a potential governance framework that addresses the current environment for ensuring the dollars and programs make a difference for the American people.

First, some background: In 2009, there were several pieces of legislation that pumped money into the economy to address the Great Recession. Some bills dealt with bailouts for banks and businesses—mainly the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and support for the auto industry. Other legislation dealt with stimulus—monies for government programs—which totaled about $787 billion (with more added in subsequent years). Most of these dollars were allocated via the 2009 American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. These dollars were in three pots: Tax refunds ($288 billion); spending via mandatory programs, mainly Medicaid, ($224 billion); and spending via discretionary programs ($275 billion).

The third category, $308 billion in discretionary program spending, constituted more than 275 federal programs across more than 25 agencies and included a novel stipulation that these dollars would be closely tracked centrally in order to ensure the funds were not wasted or spent fraudulently. This system was overseen by the Recovery Act Transparency Board, composed of agency inspectors general.

The IBM Center followed the evolution of this central tracking system and how these dollars were spent in the subsequent 18 months of the initiative. Following are some highlights from these studies and related resources, with insights for what may evolve in coming weeks and months.

The Recovery Implementation Office

President Barack Obama appointed Vice President Joe Biden to lead the implementation of the Recovery Act. Biden hired a former federal executive, Ed DeSeve, to run a small, four-person office to coordinate implementation across federal agencies and state and local governments. DeSeve defined five responsibilities for his team:

Get the dollars out to agencies
Get the dollars into grants and contracts
Get the systems in place to make sure the recipients are doing what they are supposed to be doing to support infrastructure development and services
Monitor performance and produce results
Ensure citizens are getting value for money

DeSeve summarized the work of his office, and lessons learned, in a report for the IBM Center: Managing Recovery: A View from Inside (October 2011).

One of his senior aides, Frank DiGiammarino, also shared his insights with the IBM Center:

Doing Big Things Well in Government: A Lesson from the Past (June 2018)

The Recovery Act Transparency Board

This oversight board, composed of selected agency inspectors general, was charged by statute with tracking all dollars spent under the law and reporting them publicly on a quarterly basis. This had never been done before, yet the board was mandated to have a system operational by Fall of 2009. It rapidly developed data collection standards, unique identifiers for funding, and tracked dollars down to the sub-recipient level. The first quarterly reports were due from about 90,000 recipients. Ultimately, over 276,000 recipients reported their spending on the Recovery.gov website. States were also mandated to create their own versions of the website, as well.

White Paper by the Recovery Act Transparency Board (RATB) on lessons from building the data collection and the data reporting websites. (2010).

White Paper by the Government Accountability and Transparency Board—the follow-on to RATB—on lessons learned for future transparency reporting efforts. (2011).

Experiences of Agencies Implementing Recovery Act Programs

The Recovery Act mandated that at least 70% of the monies appropriated had to be spent within 17 months. Agencies had to ramp up 275 programs—existing as well as new—in this period. They invented new models for program design, innovated new implementation procedures, and developed new ways of engaging stakeholders and funding recipients.

For example, the Treasury Department was tasked with implementing two new programs to provide capital for low-income housing and renewable energy generation projects. Both programs provided cash payments in lieu of pre-existing tax credits. The housing program chose to use existing state agencies to deliver its new program while the energy program turned to an Energy Department lab to help it deliver its new program. Both programs were operational in weeks instead of the more typical multi-month approach when implementing more traditional programs.

Professors Richard F. Callahan, Sandra O. Archibald, Kay A. Sterner, and H. Brinton Milward wrote an IBM Center report based on a series of case studies and interviews with federal program-level executives who were personally engaged with implementing specific programs that describes the challenges they faced and how they overcame them: Key Actions That Contribute to Successful Program Implementation: Lessons from the Recovery Act (June 2012).

The Role of State Governments in Ensuring Accountability

States faced significant fiscal challenges during the Great Recession and the Recovery Act helped ameliorate some of the effects on state programs. However, the accountability provisions under the law were entirely new and required new ways of working with both their local governments (who had to report through their states to the federal government) as well as with federal agencies. Some states found the new transparency and information flows helpful; others perceived them as burdensome and shut down these data flows as soon as they could.

The IBM Center hosted a blog series by journalists Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene wherein they interview dozens of officials at the federal and state levels on what was going on, how the monies were being used, and what the actual impact was on-the-ground.

Dr. Francisca M. Rojas, in a report for the IBM Center, examined the experiences of six states with a range of experiences with the implementation of the Recovery Act’s transparency requirement – Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Texas, and Washington. Her insights found the transparency requirements tended to be most useful to federal and state agencies, not so much the public: Recovery Act Transparency: Learning from States' Experiences (July 2012).

Lessons Subsequently Incorporated into Operations

While the Recovery Act was largely completed nearly eight years ago and the RATB and its Recovery.gov website are long gone, the lessons developed in implementing the Act and creating the transparency and tracking tools have lived on in several ways. These include:

Using a Whole-of-Government Approach. The whole-of-government approach used to implement the Recovery Act became a model for other whole-of-government challenges. For example, one of the keys under the Recovery Act’s implementation success was using administrative processes already in place, with people who already knew each other via existing professional networks. The secret was leveraging the informal relationships, not the formal parts of the bureaucracy. These lessons were employed in the 2014 response to the Ebola Crisis, as well.

A forum hosted by the American Society for Public Administration examined these lessons for future use by public administrators.

The Digital Accountability and Transparency (DATA) Act of 2014. This statute was largely inspired by the success of the Recovery Act’s transparency requirements. This law gave agencies three years to implement a set of new reporting requirements to track federal spending. It was quite complex, requiring changes in federal regulations, and in the written terms of every federal grant, contract, and loan agreement of $25,000 or more. These changes were cascaded to agreements between states and localities with their sub-grantees and sub-contractors, as well.

In a forum at the National Academy of Public Administration in 2017, the implementers of the DATA Act summarized what they saw were the 10 success factors they had in implementing this new law on time. The first on the list: the value of a mandate.

Today’s Implementation Gap

The approach used to rapidly implement a vast array of federal programs under the Recovery Act a decade ago was appropriate for that era and provides a solid foundation to build upon. The federal government now has additional tools that can be leveraged to build a governance framework that addresses current conditions.

Over the past decade, the federal government has built the capabilities to provide greater transparency and reporting. Thanks to the DATA Act, we have much greater visibility and transparency. The federal government has invested in better transparency tools and greater analytics. Let’s use them.

Ten years ago, a major implementation gap was the lack of transparency and lack of timely, granular data for accountability across levels of government. Today, we have performance measurement and financial routines in place; the deputy secretaries work together and provide whole-of-government leadership across the government and within their departments; and there is greater transparency and accounting for dollars.

So where is the gap? Where do we need to focus? A major challenge is greater federal-state partnering, using existing data to create common ground. This points to the need for greater strategic and operational alignment between federal, state, and local governments. For example, states and localities need to know where the dollars are and what flexibilities they can leverage.

Clearly defined roles and responsibilities need to be established between levels of government, and a cadre of talented people who can work across these boundaries. At the federal level we need an intergovernmental focal point—possibly like the Recovery Implementation Office described above—that provides more holistic thinking and approaches to solving problems.

Is this overly idealistic? Look at what the Australian government has just done.

They also have a federal system, but with nine states instead of 50. They’ve used the COVID-19 crisis to develop a new intergovernmental governance model. Not unlike the U.S., there are political and philosophical differences between the federal and state governments. They’ve never worked jointly before. But today they have chosen to create, for the first time, a National Cabinet comprised of the federal prime minister and the nine state premiers (governors) and territory leaders.

They are using the existing Council of Australian Governments as their support framework and they are coordinating and delivering a consistent response to COVID-19. This includes information sharing, public health, social, and economic issues.

According to the Australian magazine Financial Review: “In just five days an extraordinary new federal operating model has been created that has defied the many critics who argue our federal structure has become the barrier for the many economic and social reforms that require a pan-Australian approach.”

An approach like Australia's approach can take the leadership lessons from the Recovery experience and adapt them for effective implementation today—enabling federal and state leaders to come together in addressing this unprecedented national priority.

Additional Recovery Act Resources

The Agile Government Center. Agile Federalism in a Time of Crisis (March 2020).

The Government Accountability Office. Recovery Act: Grant Implementation Experiences Offer Lessons for Accountability and Transparency GAO-14-219 (January 2014).

George Mason University, Centers on the Public Service. The Implementation of the Recovery Act: Networks Under Stress (February 2013).

Congressional Research Service. Authoritative Resources on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 R40244 (April 2011) .

White House. Report by Vice President Joe Biden. A New Way of Doing Business: How the Recovery Act Is Leading the Way to 21st Century Government (February 2011).

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