OPM Director Berry offers peek at the future of the federal personnel agency

By all accounts, John Berry, the Director of the Office of Personnel Management, has a long "to-do" list.

He wants to reform the Federal hiring process. He wants to get more military vets hired in Federal agencies. He wants to revamp the way Feds are compensated.

On top of all of that, he is also facing a year-end deadline to totally reorganize OPM.

Berry, delivered the Tuesday keynote address to the HCMF 2009 conference yesterday at the Key Bridges Marriott hotel in Arlington. HCMF stands for "Human Capital Management Federal". Federal News Radio is a co-sponsor of the conference.

Following the speech, Berry spoke to reporters about what is quickly becoming one of this favorite topics these days, the top-to-bottom reorganizatiton of his agency:

We're going to create five simple "silos" that go to the core mission of the agency, that I believe will defy an acronym. They're going to be so simple that anyone will be able to get what we're doing:

• Employee Services
• Retirement Services and Benefits
• Merit Systems Compliance
• Security Clearances
• Business Products

One of the "silos" in the newly re-organized OPM that is expected to get particular attention will be the Retirement Services and Benefits department.

This past Spring, Berry led a review of the effort to computerize and modernize OPM's retirement system, called "RetireEZ".

"We're going to be recruiting widely," he told reporters, "to find a new leader.

Internal candidates will be welcome to apply, but we're going to look for a new visionary leader to help us lead that retirement program, and figure out how we're going to get this working right."

Later, OPM's Office of Public Affairs wrote to clarify that, for now, nothing concrete has been decided on the subject of Retirement System Modernization, other than such an office has been proposed. An OPM spokesman says "negotiations are ongoing."

Berry says that one of his reasons for taking the time to speak to the conference is that it allowed him the opportunity to meet, and get feedback from, federal personnel managers who he believes are the "front-line troops" in his efforts to revamp OPM, and to make significant improvements in the Federal personnel system.

The sentiment was, you're going in the right direction, you're asking the right questions, and now is the time to do this. The last person to ask a question said "go for it", now is the time to push, and make it happen.

One of the top personnel managers who heard Berry's speech is Jim McDermott, the director of the Office of Human Recources at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Rockville, widely consisdered as one of the most popular agencies in which to work in the Federal Government.

John Berry is dead-on on what we're doing. He's got it right, and he's got it in the right order. Coming from where he's come from, he knows that you've got to have the right blend of low-hanging fruit that you can do, and then he's got to have some really major fixes that you can do downstream. He has a keen appreciation of the woes that beset performance management. Unless you fix performance management, you're going to have blood in the streets in trying to link pay to it.

The HCMF 2009 concert concludes this afternoon.

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