Pentagon to automate personnel management systems

The Defense Department is introducing two automated human resources systems this month in order to modernize performance management and benefits processing.

Starting in mid-June, supervisors in the National Security Personnel System will rate their employees' job performance with the aid of a computerized system. The nameless system will house digital performance plans and electronically link individual employee goals to broader departmental objectives.

NSPS -- which replaces the familiar General Schedule with broad paybands and new job classifications and bases annual pay raises in part on performance ratings -- is designed to encourage high performance among civilian workers. The password-protected computer system, which will be available to all civilians as they enter NSPS, is designed to help achieve those objectives.

Automated performance plans will include job goals and feature benchmarks so employees can see how far they have come and where they need to improve. It will also give supervisors and employees the opportunity to document feedback throughout the year.

The hope is that employees and their managers will periodically check in with the system to monitor and update their plans, promoting a back-and-forth beyond the traditional stiff once-a-year mandatory evaluation.

"We want to make the performance management process more robust," said Brad Bunn, the NSPS deputy program executive officer. "Instead of having your two conversations a year about it … it can happen over time with feedback sessions and with those performance plans at your fingertips instead of buried in a filing cabinet somewhere."

Using an embedded spreadsheet within the system, supervisors will be able to toy with different scenarios for ratings, and subsequently pay, for their employees. Policymakers within the department will also be able to analyze the success of NSPS by using data, for example, on how often performance evaluations are taking place.

Most employees will not have access to the computerized performance review system right away -- only 11,000 are working under NSPS right now, in part as a result of legal problems. But Patricia Bradshaw, the deputy undersecretary for civilian personnel policy at the Pentagon, said the department is launching a different automated system to provide every employee pay and benefits information.

Called MyBiz, the soon-to-be-deployed system offers self-service access to personnel information. Gone will be the days of multiple phone calls to the human resources department. Now employees will be able to log in for details on their salary, benefits, awards and bonuses, as well as to update personal information. They will be able to revise disability status, race and foreign language abilities.

Both systems were developed in-house and operate within the broader Defense Civilian Personnel Data System.