Just the Beginning

Some agencies may have thought the first round of the Government Performance and Results Act was over last month when they turned in strategic plans required under the law to Congress. But a new General Accounting Office report underscores what many already knew: Work on the plans has only just begun.

"These plans are living documents that are going to be revised," says Alan Stapleton, assistant director of federal management and workforce issues at GAO. Indeed, GAO suggests in its report, "Managing for Results: Critical Issues for Improving Agencies' Strategic Plans" (GAO/GGD/97-180), that many revisions in the plans are needed.

Released last week, the report is based on early drafts of 27 agencies' plans, and thus offers the first overall assessment of how federal managers are handling the strategic planning chore. GAO describes strategic planning as a "dynamic and continuous process," during which calls for revision are to be expected.

In the report, GAO identifies six "planning issues most in need of sustained attention" as agencies continue to develop their plans:

• Better linkage among key interdependent planning elements (such as the linking of goals to strategies for achieving them).
• Stronger long-term strategic goals, which must be focused and carefully designed for usefulness.
• More fully developed strategies to achieve goals.
• Better efforts to improve coordination with other agencies that have similar programs.
• Better capacity for gathering performance information, or identification of the need for such capacity and a strategy to achieve it.
• More attention to program evaluations.

GAO and the Office of Management and Budget are preparing a review of the latest drafts of agency plans in preparation for a hearing, expected to be held later this month, before the House Government Reform and Oversight Subcommittee on Government Management, Information and Technology.

Both GAO and OMB officials stress the need to see strategic plans not as final documents, but as successive products of an ongoing planning process. "At a minimum, agencies will be re-issuing new versions in three years," says Stapleton. "But also even sooner, according to the guidance from OMB, agencies can use the annual performance plans they're supposed to prepare by February to make some changes to their strategic plans."