Pentagon to finish personnel system tweaks Friday

The Pentagon is scheduled to complete revisions to its personnel reforms Friday, ending a self-imposed delay in training for the new system.

Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, the top official overseeing the National Security Personnel System, is set to sign off on improvements to the performance review portion at a briefing Friday morning, according to program executive officer Mary Lacey.

If England approves the redesigned performance management system, the Defense Department will publish new documents, called "implementing issuances," detailing the changes. Those documents will be subject to change after consultation with labor groups and will be released on the NSPS Web site after the unions receive them.

The department then will be free to resume training on the system, in preparation for the first group's entrance on April 30.

"I called for a delay a couple months ago because of my dissatisfaction with the performance management system," Lacey said Wednesday at the Human Capital Management for Defense conference. "[The system] was very, very elegant. It was very, very robust. It was also very hard to understand."

In a Dec. 23 letter, Lacey told program managers to halt all content-specific NSPS training.

"We need more time to focus on simplifying the performance management design, getting performance objectives right, and ensuring the system is simple, clear and understandable," she wrote at the time.

On Jan. 11, Lacey convened a 14-member working group to fix the problems in the performance management system. Defense spokeswoman Joyce Frank said the group's members are from the Pentagon and the Office of Personnel Management.

Frank declined to reveal their names, but said members include people from the original NSPS design team, line managers and managers in Defense demonstration projects.

Lacey said Wednesday that her office is committed to getting the massive personnel overhaul right, which is why she called for the delay. NSPS replaces the General Schedule with broad, flexible paybands, reduces the number of job descriptions and ties annual pay raises to performance measurements.

"Taking an approach like this leads to delays," Lacey said. "As we learn, we stop and fix along the way. That's what we're doing right now."

The internal delay is not the only factor slowing implementation of the system. Soon after Defense published the final regulations for NSPS, a coalition of unions sued the department, saying the system illegally cuts into collective bargaining rights.

A judge heard arguments in that case in late January and asked the department to suspend the labor relations portion of the system until March 1, when he can issue a decision.

In a related case, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit set an April 6 date to hear arguments in the appeal of a decision finding the Homeland Security Department's similar personnel system unlawful.

The case will be heard by panel with three members: judges Harry Edwards, Raymond Randolph and Thomas Griffith.