OMB wants to change the tone of management

By Jason Miller
Executive Editor
FederalNewsRadio

The Office of Management and Budget isn't just asking agencies to change how they manage programs and people, it too is going through a transformation.

The biggest alteration is OMB's move away from command and control toward a focus on collaboration.

Jeffrey Zients, OMB's deputy director for management and chief performance officer, says this new approach is about agencies setting their own priorities instead of OMB deciding on what is most important.

Zients detailed his plans for a new approach today during a speech at the Enterprise Risk Management conference in Arlington, Va., sponsored by the Government Accountability Office and George Mason University.

Zients says OMB will go "from oversight to partnership; from shipping reams of guidance to a two-way dialogue around how we achieve the desired outcome; from transparency not just for accountability but for idea flow and to find the best practices and share them broadly; from ad hoc engagement with stakeholders such as Congress to regular communication."

"That is a sense of the change we have underway for me and my team at OMB," he says. "I'm sure we will mess up and slip into old patterns so call us out on that. But I'm committed to you that we will serve you differently than in the past."

OMB is developing a new set of management goals. Zients has not yet settled on a name nor has he finalized what those goals will encompass. He says the approach is about 80 percent done and may be a few more months until the methodology is final.

A few things are clear: improving technology, changing the way agencies buy goods and services and reforming how the government hires employees are among the governmentwide initiatives that OMB will spearhead improvements around.

"This is where we should focus our energy freeing up the people serving government to get things done for the American people," he says. "I propose this be my main mission as chief performance officer: focusing on building a culture of results across government."

Zients says he conducted a governmentwide listening tour during the first 100 days he's been on the job and time and again, federal employees said they face the same set of barriers that impede their progress.

These include:

• Senior leadership focus. Political appointees tend to focus on policy, not management.
  
  
• Failed IT. "We have outdated systems across government. Too many processes remain paper based."
  
  
• Contracting. "It's a cumbersome process and it's slow, and we don't take advantage of our position as the world's largest purchaser."
  
  
• Hiring. "It's very difficult to compete for talent when it takes almost a half a year to hire someone."

"People know what needs to be done, but there are too many barriers to getting it done," Zients says. "Some of these challenges are unique to government, but I think we can learn from large corporations that have focused on execution."

Zients says execution and implementation are more important than the strategy an organization uses to achieve their goals.

"Execution determines success or failure and it's most challenging in government," he says.

Another part of the Obama administration's management approach will be to prioritize, make information transparent, engage all stakeholders and achieve results rapidly.

"To focus on everything is to focus on nothing," Zients says. "Naming priorities with clarity is the first principle of execution."

This starts with each agency naming high-performance goals-anywhere from three to eight.

"The goal setting conversations are engaged at the right level," he says. "This is the first step to overcome the barrier of senior focus."

Zients says agencies will post those goals online after they are finalized as part of the fiscal 2011 budget process.

Zients adds OMB-and other agencies-are engaging their employees and public in a way to promote innovation and ideas. OMB's Securing Americans Value and Efficiency (SAVE) Award contest is one example of how the administration is doing this.

He points to the IT Dashboard and Data.gov as examples of transparency, and dashboards around other functional areas are coming as well.

And around rapid results, Zients says the Citizen and Immigration Service's effort to reform immigration in 90 days is a model for how future change will occur.

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On the Web:

OMB-- Performance evaluation memo (pdf)

FederalNewsRadio-- OMB details approach to program evaluations

FederalNewsRadio-- Feds come up with 38,000 ways to make the government better

FederalNewsRadio-- OMB's new performance framework to combine the best of the past

FederalNewsRadio-- Agencies taking diverse paths to performance measurement

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