Introduction: What Is Happening, Why, and So What?

Alan P. Balutis

In mid-2007, the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) began an effort to contribute to the new administration’s management initiatives, which are designed to better implement the president’s policy agenda and improve the operations, effectiveness, and efficiency of the government. IBSG developed a four-part program, consisting of small group seminars, publications, coalition and collaboration activities, and a website devoted to new ideas in government.

Individuals who participated in the series of monthly seminars were invited to prepare articles for the Winter 2007 and Spring 2008 issues of The Public Manager, which were reprinted in a special Spring 2008 issue of TPM. In addition, insights were posted on several blog sites, as well as Cisco’s New Ideas Website (www.newideasforgovernment.com).

Since that time, Barack Obama was elected president, a smooth transition occurred, a new cabinet came into office, and sub-cabinet positions and senior management jobs around government were filled—with more developments still to come. During this time, the financial markets seized up, credit froze, the economy went into a nosedive, and several massive financial, economic, and auto industry rescues were enacted. As the first year of the Obama presidency draws to a close, some assessment is in order.

Updates and Status Reports

In this Forum, the same team of analysts, experts, and government executives who outlined a management agenda for the new president report on the administration’s actual agenda. Without suggesting a causal link, much of what was advocated in the Spring 2008 issue of TPM has come to fruition. In the president’s FY 2010 budget, the administration’s new management and performance agenda is based around these themes:

• putting performance first by replacing the existing Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART) with a new performance improvement and analysis framework
• ensuring responsible spending of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 funds
• transforming the federal workforce
• managing across sectors
• reforming federal contracting and acquisition
• enhancing transparency, technology,
• and participatory democracy.

Readers are invited to examine this Forum to get an update and status report on

• human resources from W. Frederick Thompson, Stephen Benowitz, Steve W. T. O’Keeffe, Robert D. Childs, and Childs’ colleagues at the Information Management College at Ft. McNair
• acquisition from Allan Burman
• technology from John Sindelar, Tom Hughes, and Daniel Mintz
• performance from Robert M. Tobias
• citizen-centric government from Martha Dorris and David McClure
• collaboration and managing across boundaries from Robert J. O’Neill and Elizabeth K. Kellar
• overall management reform from Alan P. Balutis and Donald F. Kettl.

Alan P. Balutis is director and distinguished fellow in Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group. He is also chairman of The Public Manager Board of Directors. He can be reached at abalutis@cisco.com.

Change Is in the Wind for HR Management

by Stephen Benowitz

While long-term change does occur, it’s often at glacial speed because of the political issues associated with implementing it. As a result, transformational change in policies that govern the federal civil service rarely occurs. Has this happened with the Obama Administration—the party of “change”? It certainly has reversed a number of personnel policies that were adopted by the previous administration, many at the urging of employee unions.

Stephen Benowitz is a retired federal executive with more than 30 years experience in human resource management. He now serves as a consultant to government agencies and private sector clients on HR issues. He can be reached at stevebenowitz@comcast.net.

HR Strategies for Driving Change: Finding the Right Road

by W. Frederick Thompson

Economics has long held that when there is a common shared resource that none of the parties own, competing parties will pursue their own short-term interests at the expense of long-term outcomes and will thereby over time destroy the systems on which they rely.

Politicians, federal employees, and their managers are bound together in a common civil service system that they all want to change and improve. But they each have very different visions of how to do this. Past history need not lead to a future stalemate. We do not have to have winners and losers to make progress.

W. Frederick Thompson is an advisory fellow with Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group and a senior advisor to the Pew Charitable Trusts' Center on the States. He can be reached at frethomp@cisco.com.

Telework Tango: Take Two, From the Top

by Steve W. T. O’Keeffe

Government managers who oppose telework are like the ballroom dancing aficionados in college; we know there are a lot of you, but nobody’s out on the floor. Telework is certainly not a new craze in government. In fact, Uncle Sam has spent decades trying to move his distributed workforce to the beat. Despite legislation, the $4 gallon of gas, bird flu, H1N1, hurricane planning, green initiatives, cloud enablement, traffic gridlock, and so on, many agencies still have two left feet in telework.

Against this awkward backdrop, is there any hope that regular Feds will get to dance cheek-to-cheek with telework? Even with the false starts, a series of agencies are getting hip to workforce empowerment.

Steve W. T. O’Keeffe is executive director of Telework Exchange and founder of MeriTalk. He can be reached at sokeeffe@okco.com.

The Future Workforce: Gen Y Has Arrived

by Robert D. Childs, Gerry Gingrich, and Michael Piller

Going viral can be a great thing for an organization’s products and services. In the current Web 2.0 environment, favorable electronic communications that go viral give a big boost to the featured organization. Does your agency recognize the potential power of viral postings? Does it encourage its employees to create communications that might go viral?

Generation Y, also called the Millennial Generation, understands the importance of going viral. Bound by a hunger for IT, especially social media and other Web 2.0 technologies, Gen Yers spend enormous amounts of time, both professional and personal, communicating electronically. Learning how to go viral and how to jump on the beta wagon will be much easier for your organization if you reach out and connect with Gen Yers through the world of social media.

Robert D. Childs, EdD, is the senior director of the Information Resources Management (IRM) College and an expert on the competitive use of information, information technology, organizational models, and building educational programs. He can be reached at childsrd@ndu.edu. Gerry Gingrich, PhD, is a professor of systems management at the IRM College, and has more than 25 years experience leading, managing, and teaching organizational and technological strategy, innovation, and leadership. She can be reached at gingrich@ndu.edu. Michael Piller, PhD, directs the IRM College Laboratory Center,a hands-on environment for experiential learning. His expertise includes instructional technology, human-computer interaction, and simulation and game-based learning. He can be reached at pillerm@ndu.edu.

The Past Is Prologue: The Obama Technology Agenda

by John Sindelar, Daniel Mintz, and Tom Hughes

In spring 2008, our TPM article reflected on the progress of e-government under the Bush Administration and what it portended for the future of the new administration beginning January 20, 2009. While many of the themes and challenges cited then were relatively accurate, our self-congratulations is tempered by the realization that—in the words of that great philosopher Yogi Berra—“The future ain’t what it used to be.”

As we approach the end of the first year of the new administration, it is fitting to compare our past observations with the changes now upon us in the world of information technology (IT) and related governance. We begin by revisiting the macro trends of e-government (recognizing that this terminology is no longer in vogue); then moving to the critical drivers of Web 2.0 technologies; and examining the changing role of the federal chief information officer (CIO).

John Sindelar, client industry executive at HP, is a recognized leader in the field of electronic government, having worked closely with the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, federal agencies, and the private sector. In February 2007, he retired from federal service after a 33-year career with the U.S. General Services Administration and Treasury Department. He can be reached at john.sindelar@HP.com. Dan Mintz is chief technology officer of the Civil and Health Services Group at Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and a former CIO at the U.S. Department of Transportation. He can be reached at dmintz@csc.com or on Twitter under the handle technogeezer. Tom Hughes is currently a director at CSC, working in the civilian and public health organization. Until recently, he served as CIO of the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA), overseeing e-goverment initiatives, computer security efforts, IT portfolio financial management, a second national data center, and a national Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solution for the agency. He also served on the federal CIO Council. He can be reached at thughes26@csc.com.

Inherently Governmental Functions: Has the Debate Changed?

by Allan Burman

There has been a long-standing policy, codified in the United States Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), that functions intimately related to the public interest should only be performed by federal civil servants. Typically, these types of “inherently governmental” functions require either the use of discretion or the making of value judgments to apply government authority.

Some observers have expressed frustration that laws and policies offer agencies no bright-line test. As a result, contractors often perform work that should be carried out by civil servants. The Spring 2008 issue of The Public Manager asked the question: Should the government rethink its long-standing policy on contracting out work? The answer: Yes.

Allan V. Burman, PhD, is a former administrator for federal procurement policy of the U.S. government and president of Jefferson Solutions in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at aburman@jeffersonconsulting.com.

Performance Management Progress

by Robert M. Tobias

In addition to being the most powerful person in the world, the person elected president of the United States also is the chief executive officer (CEO) of the executive branch of government. Ordinarily, the organizational results “buck” stops at a CEO’s desk, but recent presidents have seemed more interested in running against the machinery of government.

Unlike his predecessors, however, President Obama has chosen to reverse this trend. He has announced that he plans to adopt a “lead-from-the-top” strategy to improve executive branch performance. Rather than pretend that the executive branch is inhabited by aliens who operate on a separate planet, President Obama seems to be taking responsibility for the results of executive branch performance.

Robert M. Tobias is the director of the Key Executive Leadership Programs and the Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation at American University. He can be reached at RTobias@American.edu.

Developments with Intergovernmental Cooperation

by Elizabeth K. Kellar and Robert J. O’Neill

In our article, “Now Is the Time for Collaboration,” we urged the new administration to seek honest dialogue and pragmatic solutions to the most important nondefense issues facing our nation: jobs, healthcare, security and safety, education, environment, and long-term economic security (retirement, Social Security, and Medicare).

What progress has the Obama Administration made on the intergovernmental cooperation agenda since taking office? We had an open-ended conversation with Donald Borut, executive director of the National League of Cities and Raymond Scheppach, executive director of the National Governors’ Association, to discuss what is working—and what has not yet been addressed.

Robert J. O’Neill is executive director of the International City/County Management Association (ICMA). He can be reached at roneill@ICMA.org. Elizabeth K. Kellar is president and CEO of the Center for State and Local Government Excellence. She can be reached at ekellar@slge.org.

The Obama Technology Agenda: Open, Transparent, and Collaborative

by David McClure and Martha Dorris

The Obama Administration’s technology agenda is game-changing, bringing collaboration, participation, and transparency to government in a big way. As more information makes its way onto the Internet, an increased level of focus and flexibility is required to balance privacy and security concerns with the desire to make information more readily accessible. To maintain perspective, focused leadership from government executives and managers is paramount.

The collaboration and transparency push has already made an impact on government in some very interesting ways. Collaboration within government has improved through the use of lightweight, and often free, tools and technologies that provide fast, cheap and effective support and enable us to expand government’s reach and engage with citizens more broadly. 

David McClure is associate administrator for the Office of Citizen Services and Communications of the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). Martha Dorris is deputy associate administrator for the Office of Citizen Services and Communications of GSA. She can be reached at Martha.dorris@gsa.gov.

Obama’s Stealth Revolution: Quietly Reshaping the Way Government Works

by Donald F. Kettl

Government reform has been a staple of presidential management for the last 50 years. President Kennedy brought in his whiz kids, led by Robert McNamara. President Nixon upped the ante with a management-by-objectives budget system, and President Carter trumped him with zero-based budgeting, which promised to force budgeters to explain the extra value that marginal dollars would bring.

During the Clinton administration, Vice President Al Gore identified hundreds of recommendations for reinventing government, and by day 200 of his administration, President George W. Bush had launched a top-down performance system tied to the budget. Does Team Obama have something on the way?

Donald F. Kettl is dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and author of The Next Government of the United States (Norton, 2009). He can be reached at kettl@umd.edu.

The Obama Management Agenda: Five Steps Toward Transformation

by Alan P. Balutis

In the Spring 2008 Special Issue of The Public Manager, nearly 20 current and former government executives, academicians, and private and nonprofit sector leaders outlined a management agenda for the incoming 44th President of the United States. It’s been one year since a healthy majority of American voters elected Barack Obama to change America. So we reassembled almost all the original contributors—and added just a few new ones—and asked them to assess the Obama Management Agenda.

Alan P. Balutis is director and distinguished fellow in Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group. He is also chairman of The Public Manager Board of Directors. He can be reached at abalutis@cisco.com.

To download the complete PDF version of this Forum, click here.

by Bill Damaré

The Department of Defense and private sector have reaped the benefits of standardizing project management tools and techniques for many years. Improvements in the way projects are estimated, scheduled, monitored, and completed have dramatically improved organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Large sums of taxpayer money are invested in complex projects, so federal, state, and local government agencies have begun to take a keen interest in institutionalizing standard project management practices. When these practices are not institutionalized, inconsistencies and variations in project manager and staff knowledge, skill, and experience can lead to mismanaged, overbudget, and, ultimately, failed projects.

Instituting new rigor and formality in project management is rarely associated with improved morale and job satisfaction. In reality, implementing a comprehensive project improvement initiative results in multiple benefits—from improved communications and less risk to better value for the dollar spent—especially when an organization can strategically integrate project management principles and practices across the entire enterprise.

The Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (DMH), which serves about 10 million residents in California, is the largest mental health system in the United States. It has faced a tremendous increase in demand and workload over the last few years due to program growth following the passage of the Mental Health Services Act. This growth prompted the department to embark on an integrated, strategic approach to maturing its information technology (IT) project management capabilities, which now serves as a model for other LosAngeles County departments and agencies.

Speaking the Same Language

When managers look to improve their project management team, too often, they simply look at the skills and experience of individual project managers without much consideration for the extended team members’ involvement in developing a project’s charter, work plan, or acquisition strategy. They attempt to close skill and knowledge gaps by sending individual project managers to training delivered by various sources that advocate a variety of methods, tools, and techniques. Inconsistent or isolated training events usually fail in the end because a project management team is only as strong as its weakest link.

A new trend in projectmanagement training takes into account the entire project responsibility life cycle (Figure 1), including team members from the business analysis and acquisition communities. This approach recognizes that business analysts, project managers, and contract managers (procurement) work on a project continuously, yet they are engaged in various capacities and at various intensities during the course of a project. Along with the customer (the end user, who has a stake in the ultimate success of the project), the project team needs to have an understanding of how their roles and responsibilities overlap and fit into the larger picture.

New integrated training techniques and programs focus on blending skills across the project team. Integrated approaches ensure adequate multidisciplinary training to perform consistent and effective project execution. IT project managers, for example, understand their part of the project management life cycle and the details of IT. However, the transition from gathering requirements to setting up the actual project team and developing the project plan often doesn’t happen smoothly. Business owners often communicate their wants and needs from their perspective without a full understanding of the impact the project may have on other projects or the enterprise. The IT project manager usually has a broader perspective of the organization’s infrastructure and the potential impact for change. In the requirements analysis phase, the project manager must learn how to ask questions that elicit the business owner’s desired project outcomes.

Defining requirements to build a project plan is the cornerstone of any successful project. Unfortunately, many project managers don’t have the business analysis training or background to understand how to gather, document, and validate user requirements. Most important, many do not know how to define a project around what is achievable to meet those requirements. Therefore, a comprehensive project management training initiative should include a heavy emphasis on the front end—business analysis and defining requirements.

Integrated training should focus on aligning the project team’s work by adopting the following principles.

• Create a Synchronized Project Management Team
  Project managers, business analysts, and contract managers often work in silos—each handling one piece of the project management pie. This disjointed approach flies in the face of how a well-run project should be executed, adding a new definition to the triple constraint. Each element of project scope, time, and cost builds upon the other, and any missteps lead to problems later on. The analyst must verify the user requirements. The project manager must build a work plan, set up the project organization, and define the tasks in as much detail as possible. From an accurate plan, contract management can create a solicitation that includes specific milestones taken from the project’s work plan to measure vendor performance and outcomes. Today, a comprehensive training program must ensure that the team works in alignment and, most important, can even perform aspects of each other’s job function.
• Train Simultaneously
  Project management training works best when classes comprise staff members from all three areas—business analysis, project management, and contract management. Simultaneous training helps teams develop a common understanding of methods and each other’s responsibilities to ensure cohesiveness and collaboration. Communication within physical and virtual project teams improves significantly. DMH applied this new trend in project management training when, in November 2004, California voters passed Proposition 63, now known as the Mental Health Services Act.

New Legislation Prompts Training, Restructuring

The historic Mental Health Services Act levied a 1 percent tax on individuals with personal incomes exceeding $1 million to be directed to new mental health programs in the state of California. This “millionaire tax, ” which was projected to generate nearly $600 million in fiscal years 2004–06, affected a number of organizations throughout the Golden State. But few were as affected as the Los Angeles County DMH.

In the wake of theMental Health ServicesAct, DMH found itself suddenly inundated with requests for new IT projects and services. Dealing with unprecedented demand, and about a 30 percent increase in workload, DMH’s chief information officer, Dr. Robert Greenless, realized that his staff needed more formal training and consistent methods for project success. He was also faced with transforming his IT enterprise from one with roots in a mainframe world to one organized around the PC and Internet.

After an extensive search, DMH engaged ESI International to develop a training roadmap for its IT organization that would allow the teams to more effectively execute a series of IT projects, including a new Electronic Health Record (EHR) system.

“We had an increased workload, but had a staffing shortage of 54 people. So, we had a clear vision of how effective project management training could be valuable to help us face each new challenge in a consistent way without having to reinvent the wheel each time, ” says Greenless. He points out that his team didn’t share the same experience, training, and vocabulary in project management and business analysis. Even specification documents, for example, would vary on the basis of who wrote them. “We needed a common system, a common set of methods and a common language. ”

In concert with Greenless and Sharon Carlson, associate chief information officer, ESI developed a training road map for DMH to ensure an integrated training curriculum—not just disparate courses. DMH required training content that combined aspects of business analysis with globally recognized, standard project management knowledge consistent with the Project Management Institute’s A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge. An important factor in the selection of ESI was the final exam administered at the conclusion of each class. “It served as an important measure of learning and challenged participants to be fully engaged in the learning process” remarks Ms. Carlson.

An added bonus of the program was that staff members received recognition and documented credentials when completing the entire curriculum, including a formal certificate from ESI and ESI’s academic partner, The GeorgeWashington University.

Building a Training Roadmap

Since 2005, three cohorts of DMH employees and managers from the Chief Information Office Bureau have followed a consistent, methodical business analysis and project management training program. According to Carlson, this was a wise decision. “Managers who went through training were able to more effectively pair employees to projects that aligned with their new skill sets. ”

In addition, a number of DMH executives and managers from non-IT business units completed theManaging IT Projects course. This helped facilitate and promote a better understanding of the processes involved in many of the department’s projects.

ESI’s courses had to be taken in a specific order and were designed to build upon each other for maximum effectiveness. The first set of four courses (Introduction to BusinessAnalysis, How to Gather and Document User Requirements, Managing IT Projects, and Process Modeling Management) purposely focuses on business analysis and the role of the project manager during the requirements gathering phase.

For example, the Process Modeling Management course aims to teach team members how to perform the business analyst’s role and responsibilities in defining requirements during the planning phase of a project. By having both project managers and business analysts attend the same course, the business analyst can work in concert with the project manager to ensure that newly implemented processes enhance the success of a project and increase the project’s ability to meet the organization’s business goals. The project team further focuses on competencies necessary to perform workflow modeling to ensure processes can be documented, benchmarked, and measured.

One course, How to Gather and Document User Requirements, is particularly helpful in providing tools and techniques to better elicit and manage requirements. Communication breakdown often happens at the onset of a project because business analysts and project managers often lack the training and communications skills to collect the right information from end users to define requirements.

“Before training, our analysts didn’t have a common approach to eliciting useful information from those they interviewed and often lacked the confidence to take control and really engage the end users, ” says Mark Cheng, Manager/Enterprise Project Management and Planning Division, noting that frequently, “Meetings with end users would often go around in circles producing very little in terms of useful requirements and workflow definition. ”

By learning successful facilitation techniques, business analysts and project managers can effectively help stakeholders define their needs, form these needs into documented requirements, motivate group participation, build consensus, manage conflict, and maintain session focus. After completing the final three courses, Facilitation Techniques for Requirements Development, IT Risk Management, and Scheduling and Cost Control, team members were awarded a Master’s Certificate in Project Management fromThe GeorgeWashington University’s School of Business.

Training Put into Action

Los Angeles County’s DMH quickly put its training to the test when it embarked on a series of projects, including a medical professional credentialing system, meant to lead to the ultimate goal—an EHR system. “We took ESI’s methodology of examining our ‘as is’ situation relative to our ‘to be’ situation when assessing our EHR system. We quickly recognized that there was an enormous gap between what we had in place and what we needed to do in order to support data integration between counties and across agencies, ” says Greenless.

DMH not only provides mental health services to its clients, but also acts as a mental health plan administrator, contracting with Medicaid providers to deliver services. The State of California Department ofMental Health has a vision to allow the safe and secure sharing of client medical information across multiple counties in California— no matter where a client is seen, the clinician could access their record and see the entire medical history.

Seen as one of the first steps in this ambitious EHR agenda, according to Greenless, “the credentialing project has become a textbook case of good project management. ” The project became a priority when DMH decided it needed to improve, simplify, and better coordinate its process for validating the licensure and training for physicians and other licensed professionals, including psychologists, registered nurses, and other health care providers in preparation for the EHR system.

“We certainly couldn’t do the credentialing manually anymore, ” said Greenless. “We decided to automate the credentialing and purchase a system that could be integrated with and feed into the eventual EHR system. ”

Following an IT projectmanagement method reinforced through ESI training, the assigned team embarked on documenting requirements and procuring a new credentialing system. The first step was the project initiation phase, where the project was officially requested and a business case was built around the credentialing system (Figure 2).

In the second phase, project planning, DMH analysts met with five separate business areas that already performed credentialing and assembled requirements, and then worked successfully with the project manager to define one overarching process that could meet everyone’s needs, along with developing the work breakdown structure, budget estimate, and resource plan.

As the project developed, the DMH team moved into the project control phase, managing processes to make sure the actual project performance aligned with planned performance. The project is now moving into project execution, where the system is implemented and tested. This will be followed by the project closeout phase.

“Our training provided a clear starting point on how to elicit requirements, then how to staff and build a project plan and clearly define who does what. Considering we were severely understaffed at the start of the project, so far, we have kept it on schedule and within budget, ” notes Greenless.

This is all the more notable since DMH’s IT department is the first one to concede that its project management success rate had previously been “uneven, ” noting some false starts and projects that went unfinished.

Training Roadmap Becomes Model for County

In 2006, DMH prepared a 2007–08 business automation plan for the Los Angeles County Chief Information Office. Greenless points out that the Chief Information Office noticed how productive it had been, despite severe staffing shortages, in addressing the challenges of the Mental Health Services Act. This prompted the office to look more closely at DMH’s training program, along with other public-sector models across federal, state, and local government, to create a county-wide, consistent training “road map. ”

Sanmay Mukhopadhyay, associate chief information officer, created a Project Management Office advisory committee with representation from several large LosAngeles County departments, including DMH. Taking the best ideas from several programs, the Chief Information Office selected a series of seven IT project management courses, concluding with a county-specific IT orientation class, and established the LosAngeles County IT project management certificate track (see Figure 3).

Training Fosters Teamwork

The ESI training, by its very nature, is designed around class exercises and requires collaboration during the course. By training together, the project teams rely on each other to get the job done. “After training, I can certainly say that confidence andmorale shot up. When I walk around the work areas, I frequently see ESI manuals on desks used as reference. If people are stuck with their project management or business analysis tasks, they quickly refer to their manuals or engage their colleagues for help, ” says Cheng.

DMH currently has no plans to slow its training initiative, and many of the bureau’s planned new hires over the next year will be taking courses. “We now have a formal process to follow, logical steps to take, and training that allows our staff to practice what they learn through exercises that mirror real-world situations. Now, when a project comes along, no one is scratching their heads and stymied about how to take the project to the next stage. Training has obviously eliminated many fears, ” says Cheng.

When people hear the term “public servant,” they think of presidents, governors, legislators, cabinet secretaries, agency directors—the political officials featured on news broadcasts, on political talk shows, and in newspapers. These officials are an important component of our system of governance, deserving of our scrutiny, praise, or, sometimes, disdain, but they are only a very small portion of the legion of people responsible for governing the nation.

The nation’s career civil servants implement the laws, carry out the programs, deliver the services, and manage the resources that keep the nation functioning. Many of them are public managers responsible for directing the programs and organizations of federal, state, and local government. They are selected through merit systems designed to ensure competence and continuity in the operation of government. They often operate in a hostile environment, in which criticism, cynicism, and resistance greet the actions of government.

Public managers also operate in an environment that affords many opportunities to improve the lives of others and contribute to the proper functioning of a democracy. The ability of the nation to address its most pressing and complex problems largely depends on the effectiveness of career public managers. The nation’s most daunting challenges—those often beyond the capacity of the market and other institutions—are assigned to government, and the hard work of finding solutions falls uniquely on public managers.

The literature of public administration is replete with ideas about the roles and responsibilities of managers and administrators. These roles, such as resource management, strategic planning, and internal and external communication, remain fundamental activities for public managers. Each requires its share of knowledge and skill, both elements of any manager’s effort to improve the effectiveness of a program or organization.

Too many public managers emphasize operating and perfecting processes, procedures, functions, and hierarchical structures. The rules and accountability structures of large organizations impose this orientation on them, but public programs are expected to solve complex public problems. The traditional orientation of public managers does not position them to confront public problems, which appear in myriad forms and do not fit neatly within the authority of one law or jurisdiction. Taken together, the problems confronting public managers present a dizzying array of harms.

A successful public service that helps lead the country by addressing its problems requires managers and leaders who understand and embrace the new imperatives of public management. These new imperatives mean that public managers need to serve as strategists and entrepreneurs, masters of improvisation, champions of effectiveness, reflective practitioners, and stewards of the public interest.

Strategists and Entrepreneurs

Public managers can no longer succeed if they remain in their traditional roles as technicians and administrators concerned only with controlling and refining organizational functions and processes. They now need to be strategists and entrepreneurs who identify emerging needs and demands, frame new opportunities for their programs and organizations, and reposition those programs to respond more effectively.

Public managers operate in an onrushing stream of public problems that emerge in many forms: risks, threats, inequities, conflicts, breakdowns, failures, and inefficiencies. These problems compete for a place on the public agenda. Simply put, the formal mandates to which public managers hold title are often inadequate to address these problems, which do not fit neatly into existing laws, programs, and hierarchical organizations.

Effective public managers now need to develop the diagnostic skill and discipline to anticipate and identify problems, analyze them to understand their causes and interrelated parts, characterize their severity and urgency, and triage them to set priorities for action.

Public managers also need the skills and discipline to devise and implement appropriate responses. To do so, they must develop a set of tools (policies, programs, and capabilities) that can be applied to problems; select the appropriate combination of these tools to apply to each problem; look beyond their organizational boundaries for partnership opportunities with parties that offer resources, expertise, and authority for solving the problem; exercise both agility and persistence in implementing solutions; and measure the progress made.

Masters of Improvisation

Public managers need a broad perspective not fixed on the status quo. They must be comfortable with constant surprise, able to function in the midst of significant change, and anticipate a wide range of future scenarios.

Public managers often find themselves surrounded by ambiguity—about the problem they are asked to address, authority they can bring to bear on that problem, resources available over the long term, challenges they will encounter, and difficulties of measuring success. They need to develop a large appetite for dealing with ambiguity, turning it from a liability into an asset. In ambiguity lies opportunity, the chance to fill the gap left by statutory language, better define a public problem, and design tailor-made solutions.

The worsening fiscal crisis in government can be a constraint or barrier to innovation and improvement, but it also provides an incentive or mandate for public managers to be more creative, innovative, and improvisational. Although resources (funds and personnel) are likely to continue to decline, demands for government intervention are likely to continue and expand, and the problems assigned to government may well become more complex and threatening. The government takeover of stricken financial institutions is the most recent, but surely not the last, of these emerging challenges.

Public managers need to be masters at developing adaptive business models that allow programs and organizations to adjust to new circumstances and still produce valuable results. They need to adapt to being conveners, leaders, or members of networks and other collaborative structures that combine the resources, expertise, and authority of multiple organizational entities. Such networks offer opportunities for new creative partnerships that can address problems and deliver services more effectively and comprehensively. In doing so, public managers need to be mindful of the tradeoff between the improved capabilities the networks provide and the difficulty of ensuring accountability of the multiple public and private partners in these networks.

Champions of Effectiveness

Public managers need to be relentless advocates for creating and measuring results and outcomes. They need to use performance-based management to ensure that their programs or organizations use resources wisely, produce useful activities and quality services, and achieve outcomes that support the mission or purpose for which they were created.

The principal tool available to public managers who wish to focus on results and outcomes is a set or system of meaningful performance indicators. A critical skill for effective public managers is a keen ability to identify, design, and use performance indicators or measures. Such indicators need to be relevant (to goals, objectives, and priorities), transparent (promoting clarity and understanding), credible (based on complete and accurate data), functional (encouraging effective and constructive behavior), feasible (cost-effective), and comprehensive (addressing important operational aspects).

Most programs have some capacity to count or measure activities or outputs (such as the number of enforcement actions taken by a regulatory agency). Some measure final outcomes (such as an improvement in ambient air quality or industrial workplace safety) though the program may only be one influence on these results. Intermediate outcomes—the territory between outputs and final outcomes—hold the greatest promise for achieving performance-based management.

These intermediate outcomes (such as reduction or elimination of noncompliant behavior) have several advantages:

• They provide a more meaningful account of program performance than outputs, offering a more compelling story about program accomplishments for the public and political overseers.
• In contrast to final outcomes, they directly relate to outputs.
• Measuring them presents fewer technical challenges than measuring final outcomes (if any).
• They manifest more quickly than final outcomes.
• They provide insight for managers and others about whether activities contribute significantly to final outcomes.

Identifying, developing, and using performance indicators is an iterative, incremental exercise: a journey rather than a destination. The benefits for public programs— better control of operations, stronger justification for scarce budget resources, enhanced understanding of patterns and relationships between activities and outcomes, and clearer demonstration of program effectiveness— are well worth the considerable effort.

Reflective Practitioners

Effective public managers continuously examine current practices, reviewing whether procedures and policies still make sense and evaluating the impact of their programs and organizations. They also continuously scan for ideas and approaches, assessing their applicability and potential for improving effectiveness. They do not allow the press of day-to-day business to hamper their ability to raise issues about current reality or search for new ideas. Moreover, they create a marketplace of ideas in their organization and convey constant openness and receptivity to better ways of doing business.

Practitioners should cultivate an active dialogue with academic experts and thought leaders in public management and public policy as sources of fresh thinking. Any gulf between public management practitioners and academicians is unfortunate as they have much to learn from each other, and both would be strengthened by a closer relationship. Practitioners can help improve academicians’ relevance, and academicians can help improve practitioners’ effectiveness.

Given the magnitude and complexity of the public problems government must address, the public manager’s success can no longer be left to ad hoc approaches to learning about supervision, management, and leadership. Instead, public managers need the formal, continuous education other professions—such as doctors and lawyers—use to stay current with developments in their professional field.

Stewards of the Public Interest

The “public interest” is a lofty concept, but individual public servants and managers can contribute to this public interest through their day-to-day activities in their particular sphere of public policy and administration. They can objectively view the nature and causes of public problems and the options for addressing and resolving them. They can ensure balance and fairness in decisions affecting competing or conflicting interests. They can open public policy processes for participation in collaborative efforts to make decisions on public issues. They can use public funds and resources prudently and effectively. Finally, they can embody a passionate commitment to the mission of the organization and serve as a model for its members.

Our public discourse is often driven by chronic partisanship and short-term political gain. The tactics include fear, distortion, intellectual dishonesty, and a cynical brand of simplification that obscures the complex nature of public problems and solutions. Our political culture sometimes glorifies and celebrates individual freedom without regard for the common good, social equity, and need for shared sacrifice.

This situation suggests a broader, emerging stewardship role for public managers. In these times, the nation desperately needs citizens who have not lost sight of the public welfare and demand that the public interest receive the deference it deserves. Joining such citizens are public servants who, as they tend to the public interest in performing their job, provide a balancing force or countervailing influence to the excesses of our public discourse and political culture. They can help form the core of public-spirited citizens who still believe we have obligations to each other, responsibilities to preserve democratic ideals for future generations, and a need to be constructive citizens of the world.

Answering the Call

The public sector usually has responsibility for addressing the nation’s most serious, sweeping, and intricate problems, and career public managers must devise and take practical steps to identify and implement solutions. The conventional wisdom sometimes is that government is broken, incapable of addressing even simple tasks, and not up to the challenges of the future. Much evidence in the past ten years supports that view.

Contrary to that conventional wisdom, government also has an impressive record of achievement. In Government’s Greatest Achievements, Paul Light examines the most noteworthy accomplishments of the federal government in 1950–2000. Included among his top ten achievements are rebuilding Europe after World War II, expanding the right to vote, promoting equal access to public accommodations, reducing disease, ensuring safe food and drinking water, strengthening the nation’s highway system, increasing older American’s access to health care, and promoting financial security in retirement.

Many of these accomplishments may seem distant or quaint, but a world in which these endeavors were not undertaken is hard to imagine. From that perspective, many of these accomplishments have made America the most successful democracy in history.

Light points out that progress was made on the pre-2000 accomplishments due to several common factors: passage of multiple laws over a relatively long period, which required persistence; involvement of both political parties and productive relationships between the executive and legislative branches; collaboration and a mix of policy strategies tailored to the problem; and continued creativity. To these factors, we can add effective public management, which calls for career managers who have the characteristics described above.

The challenges on the horizon are just as daunting, if not more so. Consider the magnitude and complexity of solutions needed to reduce and reverse global climate change, develop alternative energy from renewable sources, respond to terrorism, address the upcoming fiscal crisis in entitlement programs, manage the federal government’s growing stake in the recovery of our financial system, and somehow tame the monstrous deficits that stretch into the foreseeable future.

These challenges will test America’s system of politics and governance, but they can be conquered if our system is propelled by a cadre of dedicated public managers who understand the new imperatives of their profession.

References

Light, Paul. Government’s Greatest Achievements: From Civil Rights to Homeland Security (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002).
Moore, Mark H. Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995). This reference effectively describes a more entrepreneurial style of management.
Sparrow, Malcolm. The Regulatory Craft: Controlling Risks, Solving Problems, and Managing Compliance (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000). This reference is a detailed and very useful exposition of the “problem-oriented approach” in public management. See also Sparrow, Malcolm. The Character of Harms: Operational Challenges in Control (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

One of the most difficult problems for local governance is to determine institutional arrangements and boundaries for local goods and services that are preferred by citizens in different geographical areas or that possess different production characteristics.The local governance system in British Columbia, Canada, has a practical set of institutional arrangements, the British Columbia regional district system, which deals with the variety of boundary and institutional issues associated with local public services. Like most institutional innovations, it was created by politicians and administrators to solve pressing practical problems, and it is doubtful that they were aware of scholarly debates associated with the issues they were trying to resolve. Forty years after its origin, the system is still solving many of the problems posed, but not resolved, in academic and political debates over how to govern metropolitan areas in the United States. The system is equally useful for non-metropolitan areas.

Regional District System

Like states in the United States, provinces in Canada are responsible for local governments. British Columbia, along with Alberta and in contrast to the rest of Canada, has a long history of policies allowing local citizens to take the initiative regarding local government structure. Municipalities have responsibilities similar to those of municipalities in the United States, except that welfare is a provincial government responsibility. In the areas outside municipal boundaries, the provincial government provides roads and policing.The province contains no county governments, but it does have school districts and improvement districts (called special districts in the United States) for specific functions. Although British Columbia is geographically larger than Washington, Oregon, and California together, 87 percent of its population resides in the 156 municipalities that encompass 1.4 percent of its area, and 60 percent of its population resides in 19 municipalities of over 50,000. It has two major metropolitan areas: a population of more than two million in greater Vancouver and 350,000 around the capital of Victoria.

In 1965, provincial legislation set out procedural rules for the creation of regional districts.Twenty-nine areas were designated to cover the province, but it was up to the local governments in these areas to decide if they wanted to incorporate a regional district. If incorporated, they were essentially a shell, with procedures for representation, financing, adoption of activities, and definition of boundaries for different activities. However, except for authorization for land-use planning and zoning outside of municipal boundaries, it was up to the citizens in the municipalities and in unincorporated areas to determine how they were to be used.

Twenty-eight of the original twenty-nine areas incorporated themselves over the next four years, and today there are twenty-seven (one split into two and three have merged), covering all parts of the province except the northwest corner where very few citizens reside. Over time, the provincial government and municipal representatives have decided that municipal borrowing through the Municipal Finance Authority (MFA) should be processed by regional districts. The only local government functions that regional districts subsequently have been mandated to perform are planning for solid and liquid waste disposal, which they can do as an entire district or divide up among municipalities and unincorporated areas, as appropriate for their region. Otherwise, regional districts can perform as rural governments for unincorporated areas, serve as a forum for and administer local government services for any combination of municipalities or unincorporated areas, and serve as a regional government for the entire region, all as decided upon within the region.

Regional districts have an unusual combination of attributes. On one hand, they are forums for municipal representatives and representatives elected from unincorporated areas to get together and agree to engage in joint activities. On the other, they are a “government” with the powers of regulation and taxation when agreement has been reached locally on assigning jurisdiction over an activity to the regional district.To understand how regional districts work, it is necessary to examine their governance and financing structure and the services they provide.

Governance and Finance

Following incorporation, all regional districts have the same basic governing structure. The governing board is composed of directly elected members from electoral areas outside municipal boundaries and of municipal counselors appointed by their elected municipal councils. Individual members of the board are called “directors.”

The total number of directors and the nature of their weighted votes are determined by population, and voting rules vary for different kinds of issues.To adopt new services, including borrowing money to finance them, generally requires a referendum by citizens in the participating areas, but there are significant exceptions. One is that a municipal council may approve new services on behalf of its electors. Another includes provisions for regional district directors to override the objection of an electoral area director on area-wide services where no borrowing is undertaken.There are also limited provisions where a service can be adopted unless there is a citizen-sponsored counterpetition (a process similar to a citizen initiative).The net effect of the rules is that, for almost all new activities, the consent of the municipal council of each separate member municipality (or the voters in electoral areas) participating in the service is required.

What is also important to recognize is that activities do not need to be undertaken just for the entire region.Any combination of municipalities and electoral areas, or only part of an electoral area, can join together to provide an activity through the regional district structure.This offers infinite flexibility in the design of service areas, although municipalities do not divide themselves up internally as often as electoral areas. In practice, the boundaries for most activities appear to be set to include entire municipalities and developed parts of electoral areas but not to cover the entire regional district.

Once activities are adopted, different rules apply for governing individual services. In general, region-wide business is decided by one vote for each director, budgetary matters for region-wide services by the weighted votes of all directors, and services provided to subparts of the regional district by weighted votes from the directors in the participating areas. For most services, the costs are divided among the municipalities and electoral areas in relation to the property tax base.However, simply financing through shares of the property tax base also has led to conflicts.A 1999 review of regional district operation identified mismatches between control, financing, and benefits as the major source of disputes. This was because the relative property tax bases of different areas differed from the population and benefits received from the service.Thus, the area with relatively high property tax bases but smaller population was often dissatisfied with the arrangement—although because its population was relatively small, it did not have the votes to constrain expenditures or make changes to the agreement.

Custom Agreements

The solution to these problems turned out to be greater use of “custom agreements” for new activities and a provincial mediation process to revisit previous agreements where custom agreements had not been used and problems had arisen. Custom agreements are used to relate voting strength more closely to use of a service and to financial contributions rather than financing from different areas in relation only to the property tax base. Custom agreements can also create a committee or commission to govern the activity, and the agreement may provide for committee or commission members who are not directors. Examples of custom agreements within one regional district include financing based on the following:

• 50 percent assessed value and 50 percent population— for a theater and an arena
• The number of cases during the previous year— for permitting and regulation of soil deposit and removal
• One-third converted assessed value, one-sixth land area, one-sixth population, and one-third highand medium-priority discharges in the previous year—for storm water quality management
• Population—for 911 emergency service.

In another regional district, the number of members of the committee to oversee water supply is based on water consumption in the different areas the previous year. Many more examples could be cited, but all custom agreements appear to bring governance and financial contributions closer to benefits for either individual users or member municipalities.

Tax Assessment and Collection

The financial obligations of each member municipality are set out as each new activity is undertaken by the regional district.The regional district administration calculates the amounts during its annual budgeting process and sends a requisition to each municipality. Each municipality can raise the amount owed to the regional district any way it prefers, although many actually list regional district services on the property tax bills sent to their ratepayers.The regional district also informs the provincial property tax collector, who collects all property taxes in rural areas, how much is owed by each electoral area, and the collector calculates the rates needed and adds them to the property tax bill it sends out to collect school taxes, taxes levied by the provincial government itself, and for any improvement districts. Municipal and provincial tax collectors then pass the requisitioned revenues on to the regional district.

The process for allocating costs among municipalities and custom areas in electoral areas works because the British Columbia Assessment Authority has a complete database on all properties in the province with an annual updated estimate of the market value.This database makes it possible to record all service area memberships for each property, obtain total assessed values for all properties in a service area for budgeting and rate-setting processes, and calculate the taxes due for each service for each property.

There is no question that regional districts can become complex organizations. However, their organizing philosophy is rather simple: they provide a forum and institutional framework for local governments to make binding decisions jointly with their neighbors and with boundaries for a service different from their own, where governance and financing matches the benefiting area. Their voluntary adoption of functions and flexibility is reminiscent of the flexibility that special districts introduce into the local governance system in the United States.However, unlike the United States, where each service may generate its own special district with no necessary relationship to municipalities, other special districts, or a regional organization if there is one, the British Columbia approach embeds the numerous combinations of activities into a common regional district governing and financing framework.

Regional District Services

Given the existence of institutional structures to facilitate cooperation in the provision of local services, just what services have regional districts evolved to provide? Two examples follow.

Regional District of Comox-Strathcona

The Regional District of Comox-Strathcona on central Vancouver Island encompasses 7,900 square miles and has a population of approximately 36,000 in eight electoral areas and 70,000 in eight municipalities. The 1999 survey identified forty services it provided to various geographic areas (Table 1).

Only four services cover the entire region, and a significant number (twenty-four) involve unincorporated areas only. However, twelve services involve multiple municipalities, and eleven of those include service areas where parts of electoral areas surrounding the municipalities are included. The services include water supply, community planning, community parks, 911 emergency services, regional parks, exhibition grounds, fireworks regulations, aquatic center and ice arena, solid waste planning, street lighting, house numbering, fire protection, economic development, regional sewer, cemetery, animal control, sports track, grants for search and rescue, victims’ assistance, building inspection, regional library, transit, several community halls, several sewer systems, several water service areas, several refuse collection areas, and several local transfer stations and recycling centers.

Although the regional district board governs regional district services, committees oversee general activities, specific geographic areas, and activities such as fire departments in electoral areas where the local people elect a board to oversee the service, which is then ratified by the regional district directors.Very little of the actual business of running the services comes before the regional district board in other than a committee report.The actual production of most activities is contracted out, some to private firms, others to community organizations, and some to municipalities to provide a service beyond their boundaries on behalf of the regional district.

Capital Regional District

The Capital Region District (CRD) of British Columbia, on southernVancouver Island, has a population of nearly 350,000 within 925 square miles. In 1999, it included twelve municipalities ranging in population from 1,563 to 107,026 and four electoral areas. Seven of the municipalities were between 10,000 and 20,000 in population and three were smaller. One objective of the 1999 survey was to identify how activities where there may be economies of scale beyond the size of most of the municipalities (population of 10,000 to 20,000) were provided in the metropolitan area. Of the 283 activities making up twelve major functions, eighty (28 percent) were identified as having economies of scale due to the need for specialized equipment or personnel. Fourteen (3.5 percent) were identified as having economies of scale due to the need for a large capital facility, and some of these could be provided on a smaller scale as well.Table 2 summarizes the results for capital facilities.

The CRD is involved in nine of the fourteen major capital activities,but only five of the nine cover the entire regional district (each of the other four has a different boundary).There is also some kind of arrangement to provide for the other capital services on a larger scale than that of a single municipality.The summary of information here does not include all of the areas of regional district involvement, but it shows that, given a forum for systematic cooperation, municipalities have used the regional district to undertake activities jointly for mutual benefit to a reasonably high degree. The study also shows that the regional district has flexibility in setting the boundaries for services and uses that flexibility.

Observations on Regional Districts

Regional districts are a useful institutional innovation in British Columbia.Their most important attribute is that they provide a systematic authoritative framework that lowers decision-making costs to facilitate cooperation among local governments to provide activities on a variety of scales. Their staff also often takes the initiative in identifying where costs can be saved or services improved through cooperation.They can adjust boundaries to match either demands to provide a service for a group whose boundaries differ from those of existing local governments or they can adjust boundaries to achieve scale economies in production, depending on which is more beneficial for that particular service. The choice is a local one, and local people are most likely to make the right tradeoffs when there is an incompatibility.They are also designed to achieve fiscal equivalence for services whose boundaries do not fit existing governments, and this can take into account the huge number of specific activities that make up the local services in an area.

A second important characteristic is that they do not engender competition and rivalry between elected politicians at the local and regional levels.Virtually all major local government functions have activities that are both local and regional. Thus, if responsibility for the function is assigned to either level, there will always be activities more appropriately provided or produced at the other level.With regional districts, the same elected officials are responsible for the functions regardless of the level at which the activities are provided or produced. The British Columbia experience shows that local officials in different local governments can cooperate in the provision and production of local services for the benefit of their citizens.

Relevance of Regional Districts

A very important characteristic of the regional district system it that it assumes local representatives know their own situation best, and that by providing a forum for cooperation, they will undertake activities for mutual benefit. It places a great deal of faith in citizens and locally elected officials, but given the diversity in local service conditions, there does not seem to be any reasonable alternative. Regional districts offer the opportunity to achieve fiscal equivalence in local government services for a large number of services where boundaries differ—without creating a different special government for each service.The result is an organization that does not fit neatly onto an organization chart, but a framework for a process that lowers decision-making costs of cooperation among local governments and encourages fiscal equivalence, two criteria that scholars have identified as important to a well-functioning system of local governance.The net effect of regional districts should be an improvement in the performance of local government. Understanding how regional districts operate can make an important contribution to the debate over how we govern in metropolitan areas.

References

Bish, Robert L. Local Government Service Production in the Capital Region (University of Victoria Local Government Institute: 1999). www.rbish.ca and http://web.uvic.ca/padm/ cpss/lgi/publish.htm (reports section).

———. Regional District Review—1999: Issues and Inter- Jurisdictional Comparisons. Prepared for the Ministry of Municipal Affairs (University of Victoria Local Government Institute: September 1999). www.rbish.ca and http://web.uvic.ca/padm/cpss/lgi/publish.htm (reports section).

——— and Eric G. Clemens. Local Government in British Columbia (Richmond: Union of British Columbia Municipalities, 3rd edition, 1999). Other references are cited in this reference, and other studies are available at www.rbish.ca and http://web.uvic.ca/padm/cpss/lgi/ publish.htm (reports section). This reference also describes the MFA, another British Columbia innovation. Because small municipalities had difficulty undertaking debt to finance infrastructure, the provincial government passed legislation creating the MFA, which is a cooperative of local governments, to undertake joint borrowing. Since its creation, it has achieved an AAA bond rating and its rating is often higher than that of the provincial government itself, ranking only lower than the Government of Canada, and the Province of Alberta in Canada.

Ostrom, Vincent, Charles Tiebout, and Robert Warren. “The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry.” American Political Science Review, Vol. 55, December (1961), pp. 831–842. This articles poses the most important theoretical issue for the organization of government in metropolitan regions. It discusses designing institutions to accommodate the diversity in preferences for public services in different geographic areas and how to accommodate production arrangements to the diversity in efficient scales for different activities within different functions. Bish, Robert L., “Local Government Amalgamations” (Toronto: C.D. Howe Institute Commentary 150, March 2001), summarizes evidence on these issues.

In an increasingly multisector workforce environment, public managers can infuse results expectations into performance documents to achieve desired outcomes and ensure accountability.

by Joe Alexander and Phil Kangas

Citizen demands on federal, state, and local governments require the delivery of premium services at the best cost. These demands cannot be met by government workers alone. The complex challenges facing government today require a much larger workforce—including nonprofit groups, volunteers, and private-sector contractors—with a dynamic mix of skills and capabilities. Together, these groups form the network to deliver public-sector services.

Increasing mission obligations coupled with decreasing budgets require public-sector leaders to optimize resources and improve operations. The next administration’s challenge will be to institute broad-based policy and management guidelines that allow federal agencies to achieve these goals by leveraging all components of the service delivery network. The challenge will be to find the right balance in workforce composition and to institute cost and performance accountability controls across integrated service delivery teams. Civil servants and political leaders at all levels of government should focus on how to maximize the delivery of these services through single-agency, intergovernmental networking, and intersectoral (public-private–not for profit) coordination.

To this end, government executives and managers must

• link agency mission goals to measurable performance metrics,
• apply a reasoned business case analysis or feasibility review to optimize resources through service delivery team composition, and
• institute accountability controls across the delivery teams to optimize mission delivery.

Figure 1 illustrates this approach for optimizing mission delivery through infusing performance planning and accountability controls across the service delivery network.

These steps will improve delivery of services, establish performance goals across integrated teams, make resource decisions to reduce cost and risk, and implement tactical accountability processes. Informed decisions by executives and managers are the key to driving performance accountability and efficient delivery of limited government resources.

Rise in Size and Mission of Government

Recent analysis shows that the actual workforce delivering government services is larger than ever. Government service providers span not only federal workers, but their support contractors, not-for-profit grantees, and volunteers. This dynamic, multisector workforce combines to deliver the mission of government organizations. This trend of a diversified network of service offerors is a movement of increased importance in the delivery of the government’s services. The work of government is critical in preserving the American way of life. Public servants, both civilian and military, protect our homeland, design plans for energy independence, deliver stability internationally through the execution of our foreign policy, provide services for our nation’s poor and elderly, coordinate disaster relief, and support countless other critical services.

Delivering such services requires cross-government coordination, intragovernmental shared services arrangements, thoughtful leveraging of industry’s innovations and staffing depth, and aligned performance accountability. With the ever-rising public debt and drain on tax revenues from a slowing economy, government executives and managers will continue to face pressure to deliver services at the lowest possible cost. Challenges abound with competing mission priorities, duplication of efforts, and conflicts of interest. Government leaders need the tools and processes to maximize delivery of their mission effectively and efficiently.

Balance in Workforce Composition

Establishing service delivery teams to perform government missions is a complex endeavor. The interpretation of where to draw the line between functions performed by government staff members and those of contractors or volunteers historically has been a political one. Labor unions and pro-industry groups have faced off on either side to push this line to their advantage. Striking the right sourcing balance in workforce composition directly impacts organizational effectiveness. Government decision makers should determine how best to use their network of service offerors by conducting a careful business case review of the agency’s functional characteristics.

This business case analysis should include a review of the following factors:

• The market capacity for and interest in performing such services and the economic impacts of changing the current service provider
• The relative critical-to-mission nature of the work and associated risk implications of external service provider performance
• The organization’s stability and workforce dynamics
• Workload and technology issues
• The legal and regulatory compliance environment specific to the work.

The combination of these risk factors should determine the mix of sourcing solutions for team composition to deliver optimal performance. Applying these factors to a scenario-based feasibility assessment will help government decision makers determine the most appropriate mix of options. The options will impact efficiency drivers to control costs and improve performance. Table 1 describes these considerations.

Function-Based Business Case Review

The result of this analysis will show which sourcing options are most feasible for optimal performance. Among the sourcing solutions from which public managers can choose are in-house performance, public-public partnerships, public-private partnerships, outsourcing, or divestiture. Figure 2 illustrates the options and performance accountability drivers associated with potential sourcing alternatives.

Table 2 shows further information on each of these alternatives and the associated mechanisms for performance accountability.

Tailoring Accountability Controls

Cost and performance controls are crucial for federal government mission delivery. How the government manager designs the service delivery team composition drives accountability controls. The goal is delivering highquality services at low cost to the taxpayer regardless of service provider. Managers must first align performance metrics to mission priorities and vision accomplishment. These metrics should then form the basis for government employees’ individual performance plans, service expectations for memoranda of understanding across government teams, and performance evaluation factors for contractors. Beyond setting the performance metrics to organization mission, effective delivery requires tactical accountability checks, which include periodic management reviews, evaluations, and audits. Equally important is structured and timely performance feedback to the service providers from executives and managers.

Government Management Improvement Trends

The U.S. federal government is both the largest organizational entity and largest buyer of goods and services in the world. With this size comes a constant need for innovations for better management. Such management goals are not new: each administration in modern times—from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to George W. Bush’s President’s Management Agenda—has espoused responsible stewardship of public resources. The next administration should build on these efforts to imbed accountability controls in government, improve performance, and maximize limited resources.

Regardless of the residual effect of current initiatives, the larger trends in government management will dictate the management imperatives of tomorrow. In the environment of blended service delivery teams, government managers must apply accountability controls internally and externally. In the case of outside service provider delivery, contract administration activities and cost controls drive performance accountability. In-house performance and public-private partnerships require similar accountability mechanisms. Continuous improvement initiatives, business process improvement efforts, public reporting of activity results, and activity-based costing and management all support service team integration. Transparency of operations— including the reporting of both cost and performance results—is a tested accountability control to increase public trust and focus corrective actions.

Conclusion

The next administration must build a management agenda that infuses performance accountability throughout its service delivery network. Doing so will increase public trust in government stewards and instill confidence in public-sector operations. Evaluation of service offerors through a structured business case analysis will allow government leaders to make the most of their available service delivery network. Maximizing the effectiveness of this network hinges on clearly linking performance expectations to mission requirements, evaluating sourcing options using risk and reward scenarios, and establishing robust accountability controls.

Reference

Light, Paul C. Fact Sheet on the New True Size of Government. Center for Public Service, The Brookings Institution, Wagner School of Public Service, New York University, 2006.

Joe Alexander is a director in Grant Thornton’s Global Public Sector, with over thirty years’ professional experience in government and consulting, most recently supporting federal civilian and defense organizations. He is a retired Army officer, who has also worked as a civil servant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense before his career in consulting. He can be reached at Joseph.Alexander@gt.com. Phil Kangas is a senior manager in Global Public Sector with over twelve years’ professional experience in government and consulting, most recently helping the Department of Homeland Security improve performance and manage cost. He has worked as a federal, state, and local employee before his consulting work, most recently as director of constituent services for a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He can be reached at Phil.Kangas@gt.com.

Federal executive boards now play a pivotal role in emergency planning, response, and recovery.

By Kimberly E. Ainsworth

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy established federal executive boards (FEBs) by presidential directive to achieve better interagency coordination and communication among federal departments and activities outside of Washington, DC. In 1982, the Executive Office of the President transferred authority for the FEB functions to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which today oversees the FEB program.

The need for effective coordination among federal organizations’ field activities was clear then and is even more important in today’s environment. About 88 percent of the 1.5 million federal employees work outside of the national capital area, and regional and local offices of federal departments and agencies administer many federal programs. Regional and local federal officials are the federal government’s principal representatives to the vast majority of our nation’s citizens.

The boards function as

• forums for the exchange of information between Washington and the field about programs,management methods, and administrative issues;
• coordinators of local approaches to national programs as approved by the OPM director;
• communicators from Washington to the field of management initiatives and other concerns for the improvement of coordination; and
• conveyors to the national level of problems that cannot be resolved locally.

Today, FEBs are located in twenty-eight areas with significant federal populations. Each FEB comprises the highest ranking local officials from federal agencies in the FEB area. Board leadership and structure consists of elected officers (chair and vice chair), councils, and committees specific to FEB programs.An FEB staff, usually of one or two people,manages the daily operations of the board.

A host department or agency provides administrative funding for each FEB, and the local member agencies normally furnish project funding.The FEBs draw their general operating instructions from the responsibilities outlined in Title 5 U.S.Code Section 960.

In 2007, the FEB network was restructured to meet the changing needs of the federal workforce, and two new lines of business were unveiled:human capital readiness and emergency preparedness, employee safety and security. This article focuses on the FEBs’ role in emergency planning, response, and recovery.

Emergency Preparedness, Employee Safety and Security

In May 2007, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report, The Federal Workforce: Additional Steps Needed to Take Advantage of Federal Executive Boards’ Ability to Contribute to Emergency Operations. Among other things, it highlighted the network’s efforts in emergency planning, response, and recovery over the years and recommended ways to expand its role, particularly relative to a pandemic influenza outbreak. In September 2007, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Government Management, the District of Columbia and the Federal Workforce, chaired by Senator Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), hosted a hearing to further explore these recommendations and learn more about the network’s efforts. I testified at this hearing, alongside my counterparts from Minnesota and Cleveland, as well as representatives from GAO, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and OPM.

Also in 2007,with help from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), FEBs nationwide were granted access to the Law Enforcement On-Line (www.leo.gov) and United States Public and Private Partnership (usp3.org) communications systems. The Dallas-Fort Worth FEB and the Dallas FBI office spearheaded this effort, seeing the mutual benefit of expanding what was an interagency communication pilot program nationwide. FEBs now have the ability to communicate individually or collectively using a consistent tool.

Demographics

The U.S. government is the nation’s largest employer and among the top five employers in many metropolitan areas across the country. During emergencies, the federal workforce has the responsibility to collaborate and act uniformly as one government to ensure the safety of its employees and customers.To that end, FEBs play a vital role in workforce planning.

Although FEBs are not first responders, emergency managers, or law enforcement professionals, they play an important role in public safety.They are positioned to provide crucial communication links among federal agencies and state and local officials.They also ensure that agency leaders receive accurate,up-to-date, and consistent information from local subject matter experts to Kimberly E. Ainsworth is the executive director of the Greater Boston Fed- make informed decisions affecting the federal workforce.

Continuity of Operations

Although each federal agency is responsible for the safety of its employees and continuity of operations (COOP), FEBs complement these efforts by facilitating collaboration on many levels.This collaboration is extremely important because, as noted, 88 percent of the federal workforce resides outside the Washington, DC, area. Collectively, the goal is to keep federal employees and customers safe and secure and ensure that the essential business of government continues.

FEB regions vary in size (geography) and scope (number of employees), but the overall lines of business ensure that their goals are consistent. FEBs have the unique ability to facilitate collaboration nationwide while analyzing and understanding the often localized needs of their federal communities.

Greater Boston

Before 2001, the Greater Boston FEB primarily focused on extreme weather events, but in the post-9/11 environment, federal agencies, particularly in field locations, have more needs and greater expectations of this FEB. Its emergency preparedness role has expanded and procedures have evolved.

More than 180 federal agencies have a presence in the Greater Boston area, and according to the most recent Census data, more than ninety thousand people work in civilian,military, and postal positions in Massachusetts. Boston is, in many cases, the hub for the New England region, which includes Massachusetts, New Hampshire,Connecticut,Rhode Island,Maine, and Vermont. The federal workforce has a significant presence, and its impact is widespread.

Emergency Decision and Notification Plan

In 2002, the Greater Boston FEB unveiled a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive Emergency Decision and Notification Plan. Developed by an interdisciplinary work group, this plan outlines an all-hazards approach to emergency preparedness, response, and recovery from a workforce planning perspective for the local federal community. Potential hazards range from human-made and natural disasters to widespread civil unrest or a pandemic influenza outbreak.

As part of this plan, the FEB collected 24/7/365 contact information for local federal agency decision makers and at least one backup. It developed a variety of communication strategies designed to widely disseminate accurate, up-to-date, and consistent information around the clock.

Boston’s plan has been enacted and tested on several occasions since its launch, and the FEB has learned that it provides significant service to its members during “perceived” emergencies.The U.S. Senate subcommittee was particularly interested in learning more about this viewpoint and gaining an understanding of the FEB’s continual contributions to public safety.

2004 Democratic National Convention

For example, the FEB learned much during the Democratic national convention, which took place in Boston in July 2004, the first since the 2001 terrorist attacks. In May 2003, the convention was designated a national special security event, or one that could be a terrorist target that requires federal counter terrorism capabilities. An event of this national stature had the potential to draw both organized and ad hoc protests.The FEB represented the interests of the federal workforce during the year-long security planning and the event itself. It gave federal leaders accurate, timely information to make informed decisions every step of the way. The Boston FEB built on the experiences of the FEB in Los Angeles, site of the 2000 Democratic national convention.

The Boston FEB played a key role in the planning efforts to ensure that the interests of the many federal employees in Massachusetts were considered and that they would be kept informed. It has since chronicled its experiences in an after-action report that has been shared with key OPM officials and the Denver and Minnesota FEBs in preparation for the national political conventions in 2008.

2005 Threats

Boston learned more lessons on January 25, 2005, when the local media reported that a group of Chinese terrorists had issued a specific and imminent threat to the Greater Boston area. Several were reporting from outside local federal sites, and the public became increasingly nervous.The FEB stepped in quickly to collect and share real-time information from subject matter experts about this alleged threat. It invited local federal heads to participate in an online chat with federal law enforcement leaders,who helped dispel rumors and outlined heightened alert measures.As a result, federal managers were able to alleviate the fears of their employees and get back to work.

On July 7, 2005, the FEB employed similar procedures when Americans awoke to reports of a series of coordinated terrorist bomb blasts that hit London’s transportation system during the morning rush hour.At 9:30 a.m. on that same day, in Boston’s downtown, two underground subway trains were involved in a minor collision. Already on high alert and not yet knowing the nature of the accident, dozens of police and fire personnel and the Massachusetts State Police Casualty Unit responded.

Although local public safety officials were quick to determine that there was no link to the London events, an intense flow of misinformation circulated quickly. Federal managers grappled with determining the course of action that was in the best interests of their workforce.The FEB again quickly coordinated widespread information-sharing among the agencies.

2007 Lite-Brite Scare

Most recently, on January 31, 2007, Boston made headlines nationwide when a marketing scheme went wrong. During the morning rush hour, a total of thirty eight electronic devices, resembling Lite-Brite toys,were placed in public locations around Greater Boston, including on bridges and in subway stations, to promote a movie.The suspicious devices sent public safety officials scrambling for hours, and the situation was uncertain throughout the day. Member agencies relied on the FEB to collect and disseminate needed information as the situation unfolded.

Other Federal Executive Boards

Although these examples are specific to Boston, FEBs nationwide have similar stories. From information sharing during large civic rallies to extreme weather events, FEBs play a vital role in ensuring the safety of the federal workforce and its customers.They have a unique ability to not only gain an immediate understanding of the needs and expectations of their local federal workforce, but to balance them with local and national interests.

Oklahoma City

On April 19, 1995, with the tragic bombing of the Murrah Federal Building, the newly created Oklahoma FEB demonstrated its essential role in assisting the federal workforce in its time of need.The FEB not only coordinated relief efforts for federal workers and their families, but served as the liaison with OP Mand other administration officials on a myriad of issues, including pay and leave. These efforts continued for years as trials were held and the community grieved. Oklahoma has also had its fair share of weather-related events in recent years, including devastating tornadoes. The FEB continues to be a unifying source of information-sharing and communication for federal agencies statewide and maintains a close working relationship with state and local emergency management officials to ensure that the needs of the federal workforce are met.

New York City and New Orleans

The same holds true for New York City.The FEB was instrumental in communicating with the federal workforce in the days and weeks following the 9/11 attacks. Further, the New Orleans FEB was, and continues to be, actively engaged in workforce issues related to Hurricane Katrina. Its impact is still felt more than two years later, and the FEB continues to serve as a forum for agencies to address common concerns on many issues and, in turn, ensure that the essential business of government continues.

Los Angeles and Atlanta

FEBs have demonstrated strong leadership in disasters, dating to their creation in the 1960s. In 1994, the Los Angeles FEB was engaged in communicating with federal agencies following the Northridge earthquake that crippled the area.The Atlanta FEB spent the better part of a year representing the federal workforce during the planning for the 1996 Summer Olympics and served as a focal point during the event itself.

Tabletop Exercises, Training, and Other Needs

In addition to communication and information sharing roles during an emergency, FEBs nationwide have been major contributors to the preparedness of the local federal community at large.They have been hosting interagency tabletop exercises featuring a variety of scenarios for many years.

Minnesota

Minnesota is a leader in this regard. Since 2001, its FEB has sponsored more than twenty half- or full-day seminars open to all agencies,with expert speakers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, FBI, Secret Service, FEMA,Transportation Security Administration, Department of Defense, and Minnesota state and local government agencies.The FEB hosted five major tabletop exercises, including the first large-scale pandemic influenza exercise in the country.The pandemic segment of this exercise was created by FEB Minnesota in conjunction with the Minnesota Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and the Minnesota Department of Health. Many localities nationwide have since emulated these efforts.

Boston

In Boston,more than one hundred federal agencies participated in a pandemic exercise in November 2006. The lessons learned spurred two additional educational forums, focusing on telework and workplace violence.

Almost all FEBs host COOP working groups or emergency planning councils to provide technical assistance, training, and education on a variety of COOP, health and safety, and emergency preparedness topics. These activities include state and local representatives.

Detroit

FEBs frequently work in cooperation with FEMA, the General Services Administration, and other key emergency planning components, to meet the ever changing needs of our local federal communities. For example, the Detroit FEB hosted FEMA’s COOP training for the first time three years ago. It followed up with two pandemic tabletop exercises and a COOP train-the-trainer program.Each had a significant interagency presence and assisted the federal community at large with its individual planning efforts.

Honolulu

The Honolulu-Pacific FEB has made strides in relationship building and is actively engaged with the state’s civil defense component, representing its large federal workforce. It also sponsored a variety of planning forums on emergency, health, and safety issues.

Strengthening Their Role

FEBs continue to be effective while overcoming recurring challenges, including diminished resources. In its May 2007 report, the GAO made several recommendations designed to strengthen the FEB network and its ability to deliver services in the emergency preparedness realm.OPM, FEMA, and key administration officials are currently addressing these recommendations.The first step was the development of the business plan,which includes the two lines of business. These have, in a short time, helped FEBs gain the attention of policymakers and increased credibility in their communities.

Getting Involved

FEB programs are not just for executives. Although the Code of Federal Regulations prescribes FEB membership to be the senior agency representative, agencies are encouraged to allow employees at all levels within their organizations to serve as FEB contacts, participate in FEB activities, and incorporate FEB shared services into their agency missions. FEBs host a series of interdisciplinary committees and councils to tackle a number of issues, including emergency planning, and expanded participation is always welcome.

Although we hope the FEBs are never again needed to assist in the aftermath of tragic events such as 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, or Hurricane Katrina, the fact that they are available, have extensive intergovernmental networks in place, and provide the means to disseminate essential information quickly makes them a tremendous asset to the federal workforce. Please visit www.feb.gov for more information.

Reference

GAO. The Federal Workforce: Additional Steps Needed to Take Advantage of Federal Executive Boards’ Ability to Contribute to Emergency Operations, GAO-07-515. May 2007. www.gao.gov/new.items/d07515.pdf

Government, privatesector, and citizen stakeholders must collaborate to reduce pipeline risks.

On November 1, 2007, a twelve-inch liquid propane line ruptured in Clarke County, Mississippi. Over the next forty-eight hours, eleven thousand barrels of propane were released through a 636-foot-long split in the longitudinal seam. This propane vaporized, and the vapor cloud eventually ignited, causing a fire that resulted in the evacuation of 250 people from their homes and $2.1 million in property damage.

In 2006, the failed pipe was internally inspected within its legal time frame, and the cause of the failure remains unknown. The National Transportation Safety Board, Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), and pipeline company continue to investigate. Clarke County, state, and federal officials want to know how this tragedy could have been prevented.

Pipelines are reportedly the safest means available to transport energy materials such as natural gas and petroleum that the United States critically needs. Transport by pipeline is safeguarded through many layers of protection designed to prevent and mitigate the consequences of pipeline incidents.

In rare occurrences, the layers of protection fail—as they did in Clarke County—having serious consequences. One woman, on oxygen and in poor health, lived in a trailer home less than twenty yards from the pipeline. When gas from the ruptured pipe filled her home and she was unable to be moved quickly enough, she begged her daughter to leave and save her own life. The daughter watched helplessly as the flames engulfed her mother and their home.

Tony Fleming, president of the Clarke County Board of Supervisors, was working in the area that day and was one of the first to respond to the explosion. When the pipe ruptured, he heard a blast, saw a fireball, and several seconds later heard a second blast. As a volunteer fireman, he instinctively started toward the scene before his pager went off. As an emergency responder, he had attended the pipeline operator’s annual safety meetings and was aware of a pipeline in the area. The emergency responders recognized the pipeline markers and knew to call the 800 number listed on them. Fleming helped coordinate the emergency response, consoled residents, and answered questions from reporters.

Improving Pipeline Safety

Since the event, Fleming has gained insights that will help county, city, and state managers improve pipeline safety. Although pipeline operators are required to communicate pipeline safety information to people living along their pipelines, residents may not recognize or retain the information. Fleming is concerned that many people living along the failed pipeline did not know of its existence and did not know how to recognize that a leak had occurred or what to do in such an event. Although emergency responders were aware of the pipeline, the county did not have maps showing the line, its size, or the product transported. Following the accident, Fleming searched tax records and located eleven pipelines in the county—all of which were subsequently added to the county maps.

Fleming witnessed the impact the accident had on the community. He is concerned that a new home has been placed on the site where the previous trailer home burned to the ground. At the time of the accident, the county had no permit requirements for dwellings located along the pipeline right of way and thus no way to prevent a replacement trailer from being installed. Compounding his concern are the calls he receives from residents worried about four new pipeline routes proposed in Clarke County. Most residents oppose the new lines and want to hire lawyers to fight the construction.

However, operators can resort to the use of eminent domain to accomplish pipeline extensions, and property owners are being asked to work with the pipeline companies to find ways to accommodate the energy pipelines in their communities. The county has held hearings to answer community questions about the pipelines, and some suggest the next step should be use of a land development approval process to bring area stakeholders together to reach a compromise.

Crossing Boundaries

Pipeline safety responsibility crosses political and sectoral boundaries: local, regional, and national stakeholders have a shared interest in pipeline safety improvement. Two months after the pipeline rupture in Clarke County, PHMSA asked stakeholders from around the country to join together at the first Pipelines and Informed Planning Alliance (PIPA) meeting to work on a process that could add more protection. Tony Fleming attended.

Residents of Clarke County, like many growing communities across the country, must find a way to address the issue of land use and development near pipelines. Community residents are fortunate that the incident happened after most people had left for work and children were at school. The low population density of the area also limited the extent of the tragedy.

Any citizen can play a role in reducing pipeline risks in the community by getting involved (see box). One way is to participate in the land-use and development processes, in which many questions must be answered. How much risk do pipelines pose to the community or jurisdiction? Should populations that are difficult to evacuate be given special consideration? Where can developers and planners find information about pipelines and their operators? What practices would help them minimize the risks in the event of a pipeline failure? Are there ways to utilize pipeline rights of way to enhance the community? How can new development safely coexist with pipelines? Could a buffer zone or more stringent building codes effectively reduce the hazards to the community? How do jurisdictions work together to mitigate pipeline dangers and educate the public, and how do they cooperate or subordinate in the event of a disaster?

When pipelines cross more densely populated areas or when development comes into proximity to pipelines, the risk of damage to the pipelines increases, as does the risk to populations near the lines. Figure 1 shows an increasingly familiar situation, a formerly rural area near a transmission pipeline in Washington State and the same area after construction of a new residential development.

Reducing Risk

Planners and developers often work under the pressure of conflicting goals: promoting economic viability while improving quality of life, developing infrastructure while ensuring public safety, attracting industry while limiting air and water pollution, and constructing new buildings while managing traffic congestion. They must balance community benefits and growth with individual landowner rights.

They must be aware of potential hazards and avoid them (ideally) or buffer the community from them. Pipelines are usually safe and generally invisible to the community, but they can and do pose risks. Checking pipeline location is the first step in consideration of pipeline risks in the landuse planning process (Figure 2).

As noted, pipeline regulatory protection already has many layers, beginning with established and proven pipeline design, manufacturing, and construction standards. They include regulatory requirements for pipeline operators to rigorously monitor, inspect, maintain, and protect their pipelines. Operators must also develop and maintain management practices to ensure the integrity and safe operation of their pipelines. Personnel working on pipelines must demonstrate they are qualified to perform the work. Operator personnel must demonstrate they can recognize abnormal conditions and respond appropriately to protect life and property.

In densely populated and other high-consequence areas, additional protective measures further ensure pipeline safety. These measures may include extra depth of cover over the pipe, lower allowable operating stress levels, and more stringent monitoring. PHMSA continually evaluates pipeline operator inspection and accident data to determine when operational practices need to be enhanced or other corrective actions taken.

To enhance pipeline safety, pipeline operators are required to develop and implement public awareness campaigns to communicate with people living along the pipeline, emergency responders, and government officials. They are required to provide very specific information to the affected public through public awareness programs under the American Petroleum Institute’s Recommended Practice (API RP) 1162.

Operators must inform the affected public about the potential hazards created by the pipeline in their neighborhood and how to recognize, respond to, and report a pipeline emergency. They must include in their programs procedures for advising affected municipalities, school districts, businesses, and residents along the pipeline; an overview of how pipelines operate; hazards that may result from activity in proximity to the pipeline; hazards due to possible pipeline operations; and measures undertaken to prevent impact to public safety, property, or the environment. They are required to give emergency and local public officials information on the location of transmission pipelines and on how operators prepare for emergencies to enhance emergency response and community growth planning.

The potential seriousness of pipeline accidents makes these many explicit instructions necessary. A significant challenge for PHMSA and the pipeline companies is ensuring that individuals and officials receive, fully understand, and implement the information sent to them as a result of API RP 1162. In an intergovernmental and intersectoral process as complicated as pipeline safety, building in detection mechanisms that serve as automatic early flags to potential problems is an important role for all stakeholders.

Pipelines and Informed Planning Alliance

Local land-use planning regulations can be one marker of prospective problems. To change these practices, planners, developers, and community leaders need guidance that is straightforward and not overly burdensome. To meet this need, PHMSA initiated the year-long PIPA effort to develop risk-informed guidance for land-use planning near transmission pipelines. It is partnering with a variety of stakeholders, including state and local government, community planners, property developers, real estate professionals, concerned citizens groups, and pipeline operators. This risk-informed guidance will become an additional layer of protection.

During the inaugural PIPA meeting on January 15, 2008, stakeholder representatives presented material to illustrate the challenges they will face, potential benefits that risk-informed guidance can offer, and need to work jointly to reduce the risks associated with land use near pipeline rights of way. They represent federal government agencies, state and local government associations, pipeline industry associations, public advocacy groups, and associations representing stakeholders from outside the pipeline industry. They have expertise in risk analysis; risk communication; land-use management, planning and development; and development regulation.

Some stakeholders join out of curiosity, perhaps to learn more about pipelines or PHMSA. Some seek guidance for planning and development around pipelines. Some come to share their experiences in implementing risk-informed land-use planning in their own jurisdictions. Some have their own individual agendas, and others simply come to learn. Still others—moved as Tony Fleming was to participate— come because of local tragedies, unanswered questions, a sense of responsibility to their office, and a desire to make a difference so future lives can be spared.

Consensus Process

PHMSA is encouraging more local governments and property developers to attend the next PIPA meeting so there can be greater inclusion in the consensus strategy it is using. PHMSA is using this strategy in the PIPA effort because of its success in past similar situations. Carl Johnson, administrator of PHMSA, explains,

“PHMSA believes firmly that the most useful and practical guidance can be developed through a consensus process. A key element is promotion of all stakeholders’ interests. Participants are decision makers. Involvement is critical to obtaining endorsement of the decision-making process and ultimately support for the results from the project. Fostering input, participation, and sharing among those persons who have an investment in and adjacent to the rights of way increases the chances that the end product will be broadly implemented.”

Task Team Goals

The Transportation Research Board’s Special Report (SR) 281, Transmission Pipelines and Land Use: A Risk-Informed Approach, provides a basis for land-use practices, zoning ordinances, and preservation of environmental resources issues with regard to pipeline rights of way and their maintenance. (The Transportation Research Board is a division of the National Research Council, which serves as an independent adviser to the federal government and others on scientific and technical questions of national importance.) During the kickoff meeting for the PIPA effort, the participants divided into three task teams: protecting communities, protecting transmission pipelines, and communication. Each team developed goals using guidelines from a PIPA steering group and the recommendations of SR 281.

Protecting Communities

This team is addressing the question, “What should pipeline safety stakeholders do, or avoid doing, adjacent to the pipeline rights of way to reduce the risk to communities?” It is evaluating best practices and creating simple, risk-informed guidance for

•  
  • defining recommended characteristics of land use adjacent to transmission rights of way and
  • using enhanced building codes for structures adjacent to transmission rights of way.

Protecting Transmission Pipelines

This team is addressing the question, “What should pipeline safety stakeholders do, or avoid doing, on the rights of way to reduce the risk to transmission pipelines?” It is working to

•  
  • identify acceptable landowner uses and activities on the rights of way and ways to incorporate rights-of-way space in new developments;
  • compile best practices for specification, acquisition, and maintenance of the rights of way by operators (best practices are to include managing encroachments on and vegetation in the rights of way); and
  • develop best practices for the management and recording of land documents for planning agencies, operators, surveyors, and landowners.

Communication

This team is investigating the question, “How should the risks to transmission pipelines and communities be communicated to pipeline safety stakeholders?” They have begun to

•  
  • examine ways to foster early communication in the land development process among stakeholders;
  • determine best practices for real-estate disclosure of transmission rights of way to potential purchasers of property;
  • describe benefits, risk, and risk management of pipeline transportation; and
  • formulate the PIPA risk communication plan and design the format of the final PIPA work product to communicate all PIPA results to stakeholders.

Using a consensus approach, each team will work during the year to identify best practices for land-use planning and development near transmission pipelines and prepare guidance for communicating the information to various stakeholder groups. The best practice information may take the form of guidance, recommendations, model ordinances, or suggested planning policies, regulations, or legislation.

Conclusion

The Clarke County accident, and its aftermath, illustrates the issues that the task teams will be handling. One issue is that some residents along the pipeline may have been unaware of its existence, despite the requirements of API RP 1162. How do officials build more reliable notification and a clear explanation into the process? Another issue is that the county had no way to prevent the replacement of the trailer because it did not have permit requirements in place for the pipeline right of way. How do officials create a process that will provide flags to officials regarding development or occupancy activity along the pipeline right of way? These are difficult, complicated questions, but through public-private collaboration, they can be answered and the public made safer.

References

American Petroleum Institute. Public Awareness Programs for Pipeline Operators. API Recommended Practice 1162, first edition, December 2003. committees.api.org/pipeline/ standards/index.html.

Transportation Research Board of the National Academies. Transmission Pipelines and Land Use: A Risk-Informed Approach. Special Report 281 (Washington, DC: 2004). onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/sr/sr281.pdf.

The second generation of Web access will change the way government delivers services and its relationship with the American public.

by Daniel Mintz

In spring 2006, after becoming chief information officer at the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), I created a one-page, bulleted list of priorities and presented it in many forums inside and outside of the department. Various DOT stakeholders gave me feedback on these priorities, which I used for, among other things,modifying the list itself.

The original version of my fifth bullet (added in 2007), Government 2.0, said:“Exchange information in a consistent format and easy-to-access manner with key external and internal stakeholders, in particular the American public.” During one of my presentations, a senior official said they really liked the priority list, but could I change the beginning of the Government 2.0 bullet to “Exchange accurate information …”My response was that I was open to suggestions, but that the resulting bullet would be a lie.That is, the entire nature of the value of Government 2.0, in some sense, contradicts concerns over predictability, consistency, and accuracy for which we normally strive. In fact, the implications of Government 2.0—or, as it is sometimes called,Web 2.0— are more profound, and it will inevitably influence government, whether we plan for it or not.

The problems with my initial version of Government 2.0 were much broader than just the decision to insert or not insert the word “accurate.”Government 2.0 represents a better and more robust way of achieving timely and creative interaction with our stakeholders, in particular the American public. The federal government is using it more every day. The implementation of Government 2.0 raises numerous policy questions that will need to be addressed to take full advantage of the available capabilities.

Challenges

At present,most government agencies—as they grapple with ways to take advantage of the capabilities of this next generation of Internet—focus on the immediate problems it poses: security, privacy, and policy implications.The next administration will face two much larger challenges—we hope with the vision, focus, and stamina needed to address them—first, how best to build a government organization that can tolerate failure, at least in small doses, and second, how to make a government agency or department organizationally agile. Answering the first challenge will be necessary to start to take advantage of Government 2.0 capabilities. Answering the second will be required to maximize that utilization.This article does not provide answers to the two challenges, which would take too long and is outside its scope, but it does explain why those challenges are relevant and important.

Web 2.0

All the current candidates for president are using Web 2.0 capabilities, which provide the foundation for Government 2.0 efforts, as an integral part of their campaigns— including Web pages for online communication, Facebook and MySpace pages for social networking, and YouTube to hold presidential debates—much of which would not have been imagined during the last presidential contest a mere four years ago.The person elected from this group is likely to expect the same or more from government. Certainly, citizens drawn into the process by such campaign events will expect the same or more. Government 2.0 is fact already—and potentially transformational if it becomes a priority for the next administration.

Government 2.0

Historically (before the Internet), finding an item, or even the existence of an item, that met a defined set of requirements took significant amounts of time and (potentially) money. Researching a topic required physical effort. In many cases, such research would be impractical under time or cost constraints.

The first generation of the Web had people or companies creating content that others could access. Although this capability was powerful and useful, the information provided on the Web was static and passive. Once placed on the Web, it remained unchanged—unless and until the original provider updated it.

Government 2.0 is derived from the more general term,Web 2.0,which represents a second generation of Web usage.This second generation access differs greatly in at least three ways: it is participatory, pervasive, and integrated:

• Participatory.The original passive Internet—where a provider placed information on a Web page and a user read it—has changed. Users make their own content and, in the case of artificial worlds, become part of the Internet experience directly.
  
• Pervasive. Internet access has grown beyond the computer on a desk—to cell phones, cars, and even kitchen appliances. Hotels and coffee shops— and a growing number of other public and private spaces almost anywhere—feature wireless access.
  
• Integrated. More and more “things” are being connected to the Internet, from security access devices transmitting their status, to home security systems, to data devices implanted in a highway sending signals on the status of the road.We are entering a world where everything is connected to everything else.

Wikipedia and More

The initial impacts are felt in a variety of ways. For example,Web content is not controlled now by the original creator, who, over time, has become less and less clear. One of the best known examples of this is Wikipedia, which has become the largest single collection of information in existence. A small staff is responsible for coordinating all Wikipedia activities, but almost all of the content is provided by users, and most of the editing is accomplished by a coterie of volunteers.

The federal government has a variety of wikis. For example, the director of national intelligence has created Intellipedia, which is being used to collect information across a variety of federal intelligence agencies.The State Department has created Diplopedia,which allows its employees to share information about topics and experiences around the world.

The value of such wikis is that they allow groups of people who otherwise would have only limited contact with each other to pool their knowledge in a single repository available to all within that community. It not only increases information sharing, but also a sense of collegiality and partnership that otherwise might never arise.

Web 2.0, more recently, has taken an additional step—moving to a participatory model. Virtual worlds, the three-dimensional (3D) Internet, provide the capability to create an artificial world containing representations of real people called avatars. People are able to traverse such worlds, interacting with other people and obtaining information interactively.

One of the leading commercial examples is Second Life,where people or organizations are able to create islands where avatars (people) can congregate for social or business reasons. Second Life has become an active community, where information and services are bought and sold, social relationships thrive, training is conducted, and communities of interest are created.

A variety of government agencies have already created content on their own islands within Second Life. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has a presence where it discusses issues about weather and other aspects of its mission.The State Department has an embassy where it recently sponsored a jazz festival for Second Life participants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses its Second Life presence to provide health-related information.

New Challenges

The federal government faces a number of challenges that private industry does not when working with these kinds of public-facing Internet activities. First is the problem noted above—the desire that all published information produced by a government agency be “accurate.” Normally,wikis will undergo a continuous editing process, which allows them to approach “accuracy” over time, but they do not always start that way.

The second is a related problem, that any material a federal employee publishes can be taken as establishing or implying the establishment of formal policy. As anyone who has had their name appear in the press or has had to testify before the Congress will tell you, even offhand remarks and e-mails can be used in unexpected ways. A wiki or encounter in a virtual world is an “e-mail writ large.” Third, when the creation and maintenance of these sites crosses organizational boundaries—including federal, state, and local governments, as well as private stakeholders—responsibilities for the level of accuracy can become complex and unclear.

One final challenge when using 3D Internet sites like Second Life (as with any externally hosted solution) is a government agency’s inability to control what is happening anywhere in that virtual world—let alone on their specific island. Sometimes, what goes on can be embarrassing.

The Larger Context

Government 2.0 is not an isolated phenomenon but the next step in a continuum the Internet is forcing on all organizations as it continues to have an increasingly disruptive impact.

Cost

Economists use the term“transaction”to indicate the cost of an activity. By “cost,” they mean the resources required, whether money or a person’s time, to achieve the transaction.Not only does an organization change its behavior depending on transaction costs, but its structure.

In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams discuss the findings of Ronald Coase, a British researcher, who looked at why corporations existed and grew large. The reason Coase gave was that the cost of performing a transaction inside a corporation tended to be less expensive for many activities than for a transaction outside for that same activity. Thus, corporations over time acquired the activities that could be done less expensively in that fashion.

Measuring Results

For many years, computer technology did not have an impact on these inside and outside costs. The focus of information technology (IT) organizations and the organizations they supported, therefore,was optimizing the use of the computer technology. Thus, organizations focused on cost reduction, computer consolidation, centralized purchasing to achieve economies of scale, and, more recently, the creation of shared services throughout or across organizations (e-government initiatives, for example). The next logical step for government is to start focusing on how to measure and maximize the resulting programs rather than looking at how well the infrastructure supports them.

However, the Internet has changed this situation for the reasons noted. Now, the cost of performing a transaction may not be more outside an organization. For many larger organizations, the cost may be lower for increasing numbers and kinds of transactions outside rather than inside.

This is already having a dramatic impact on private sector organizations. Companies are increasing the use of external Internet-connected resources, including private individuals, to provide advertising advice, technical input, and even research and development capabilities that once would have been provided internally or from well-established and long-term partners.

Companies that learn to be organizationally “agile”—that can make internal changes to move specific functions outside the company and can train or hire staff members who understand how to use these new and changing relationships—will have a much higher chance of survival and success. The companies that are not agile run the risk of being driven out of business because of high-cost structures or their inability to move quickly enough to respond to changes in the marketplace.

Human Capital Implications

The impact on personnel will be significant. Capabilities required to define the business and contractual relationships and manage partnerships differ greatly from those for managing a hierarchical relationship. This change will require retraining or hiring new personnel who have these skills and capabilities.

Senior management will support these changes to obtain greater visibility into their organization. Junior staff members can more immediately impact policies and interface with the senior staff. Middle management will be threatened by these changes because its historic importance was often based on control of information up and down the organization.

Government will not be immune. Its private-sector partners will participate to stay in business; they will want to interface with the government in the same fashion. Young employees of the government will regard these capabilities as second nature; they will expect comparable capabilities in government—or they will look elsewhere for work.

Leadership Needed

We thus return to our initial challenges. Government 2.0 is in its infancy. No one knows what will work and what will fail. By its varied nature, these new Internet- enabled technologies allow unpredictable interactions between unexpected stakeholders producing unplanned results, none of which offer comfort to the typical government agency. To participate, government agencies will need to define small pilot projects and give the staff flexibility to experiment. In our current “blame first, ask questions later” environment, it will take strong leadership for this to occur.

The short-term advances of Government 2.0 are dramatic.The use of Internet-based information sharing and social networking has increased the opportunity to optimize the use of IT. Decreasing the costs of business transactions becomes possible. However, the real impact is likely to be organizational in nature—turning inside out the classical approach to organization structures and business relationships.

The federal government has struggled to make progress on the current set of e-government initiatives. It is a tribute to the Office of Management and Budget and the agencies that believe in the programs that so much has been done. The political and cultural hurdles of Government 2.0 will be more difficult to overcome, impacting more people more significantly. To have the best,most responsive government,we must tackle these issues.

Conclusion

There is argument about the date that Radio 2.0 was invented. Most of the important inventions relating to Radio 2.0 occurred in the 1920s. In its initial years, Radio 2.0 was treated the same as Radio 1.0—broadcasting stories and entertainment, essentially unchanged— even with the addition of video to Radio 2.0.

Over time, everyone realized that Radio 2.0,or Television, was not radio with pictures, but something entirely different. Television had a different relationship to its viewers,with a different method of participation and experience. None of that was obvious when it began. Similarly,what Government 2.0 will ultimately become and how it will affect government is only dimly understood today. It is likely to have a major impact on how government services are delivered, how government is organized, and ultimately how it relates to and with the American public.

Government 2.0 is a fact, not fiction. It will have an increasing presence in the next administration and will affect us all in ways barely imagined today.

References

Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Portfolio: December 28, 2006).

Daniel Mintz is chief information officer at the U.S.Department of  Transportation. He has had a thirty-five-year career in the computer industry in the private sector, where he worked with commercial and government customers. His responsibilities include policy oversight for a $2.5 billion information technology budget and cyber-security, as well as operational responsibility for much of the desktop and network communications infrastructure and telephony infrastructure.He can be reached at dan.mintz@dot.gov.

Working together, federal, state, local, and private-sector entities plan and execute an intermodal transportation breakthrough in Denvers Southeast Corridor.

By Van R. Johnston, Wendy Haynes, and Claire-Lauren Schulz 

The megaprojects environment has changed dramatically since the 1970s. Forming and maintaining the strong coalitions required to sustain multibillion dollar, multiyear, and multiterm megaprojects have become more complicated. Our new “do-no-harm” era challenges megaproject managers to aggressively mitigate disruptions and attend to stakeholder concerns. As explored by Altshuler and Luberoff, themes that permeate most contemporary megaprojects include maintaining core constituencies, entrepreneurialism, mitigation, bottom-up federalism, and locally painless project funding. Cost escalation, delays, and obstacles have become the megaproject norm.

As metropolitan growth continues, more freeway and mass transit systems across the country will require reconstruction or expansion. Citizens—the customers of public services—are demanding higher quality transportation options in a timely manner, for less money, and with minimal disruption. Despite the inherent complexities of multibillion dollar public works projects, they continue to be planned and executed, putting public leadership to the test.

Background

The Colorado Transportation Expansion (T-REX) project—a megaproject that has exceeded expectations— is characterized by intermodality, design-build experimentation, creative financing, accelerated construction, and collaborative partnerships. Project leadership has based its goals on community, quality, budget, and schedule. Project officials have met these demanding goals, an exceptionally rare feat for a megaproject. Exemplary elements of the T-REX project could pave the way for the next generation of megaprojects.

Like most cities, Denver is growing, and traffic congestion is a major issue. Volume along Denver’s Southeast Corridor had exceeded its maximum capacity of 180,000 vehicles per day and was quickly approaching gridlock. To solve this problem, the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) and Regional Transportation District (RTD) formed a unique partnership with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to plan and execute extensive highway improvements and add light rail service to the Southeast Corridor.

After six years of planning and preparation,T-REX construction began in 2001 (Table 1).The project team received full funding, obtained the necessary approvals, and utilized an innovative design-build approach. Because of its unique leadership collaboration, this project will be completed two years early and within budget. Construction is scheduled for completion in September 2006, and light rail service along the Southeast Corridor will begin in November 2006.

The $1.67 billion T-REX project will transform the way people in the metro Denver area commute and live. Knowledgeable observers predict that it will improve transit and motorist travel time and reliability, increase transit ridership, enhance safety for motorists, and replace aging infrastructure. Public officials also anticipate that the project will reduce travel time and congestion on various freeway segments and major streets and support rapidly growing residential and commercial areas served by the Southeast Corridor.

Early Joint Involvement and Collaboration

Uncontrolled entrepreneurial egos, political biases, and overuse of consultants too often obscure and neglect the public interest during project planning. In the early planning stages, the parties involved will likely perform more effectively if a common goal can unite them. In the initial stages of the T-REX project, the parties agreed to work together toward mutually held goals.

They studied the Southeast Corridor to determine the most effective solution for the growing traffic problems. Many solutions were discussed, but none appeared to guarantee that traffic would be able to flow as smoothly as possible throughout the corridor during the project. All parties involved refused to advocate an incomplete solution, foreshadowing that a solution would likely involve intermodal elements. CDOT and RTD performed a Southeast Corridor major investment study (MIS).The MIS report reinforced earlier perceptions of the need for an intermodal project and recommended a rapid transit line and some highway improvements for safety—but no major highway improvements.

The study led to a proposal for the equivalent of ten highway lanes and six lanes of light rail line.The suggested plan would require the removal of several homes and businesses, which CDOT and RTD believed would sit poorly with the public, and they needed as much support as possible. Therefore, CDOT pursued studies to determine how to create more lanes without taking properties. After analyzing a “depressed” section of I-25, engineers determined that it would be possible to add the four lanes needed by cutting side-slopes and building retaining walls. Experts deemed the approach feasible, and CDOT and RTD moved forward.

Overcoming Fiscal and Regulatory Hurdles

Obtaining fiscal support for megaprojects has changed since the 1970s. Federal funds are granted only if a project receives authorization through a federal bill; the primary constituencies of such legislation consist of mass transit advocates, environmental groups, and other critics and skeptics. These constituencies make compromising on priorities and resolving project-related conflicts more difficult. However, usage of the federal funds granted has become more flexible. This flexibility has allowed for wider distribution of available resources and fewer restrictions on various facets of a project, an advantageous development for state and local governments, as exemplified in the T-REX project. In 1997,CDOT faced a tight reauthorization deadline. Fortunately, “policy entrepreneurs” deftly navigated through the political straits and helped alleviate the situation. The Transportation Commission identified the Southeast Corridor project as one of the most important strategic projects in the state.The passage of Senate Bill 1 in June 1997 (sponsored by Senator Ray Powers of Colorado Springs) authorized local officials to accelerate the construction of the project. A 10 percent funding provision that could be utilized for transit was included in this bill, which gave CDOT $84 million toward the project. CDOT would be able to immediately offer this $84 million to match U.S. Department of Transportation funds.CDOT convinced rural commissioners to use the funds on something other than highways, and the agency persuaded then- Governor Ray Romer that CDOT should retain authority over the project.

Southeast Corridor Project Team

In May 1998, Congress passed the new Federal Transportation Bill,TEA-21.All corridors in the metro Denver area were authorized; the act also included $10 million in federal funding earmarked specifically for the Southeast Corridor.

CDOT and RTD officially joined forces to form the Southeast Corridor project team to design and build improvements in the corridor. Shortly thereafter,CDOT and RTD began the environmental impact statement (EIS) process for the project, required under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, hiring Carter and Burgess for the EIS. The EIS must demonstrate that a project can be built with minimal detriment to the environment and that the adverse impacts are mitigated. Public officials incorporated environmental issues, public comment, and project design into the T-REX EIS to provide a sound basis for an accurate estimate of costs. In efforts to further mitigate environmental concerns, the T-REX EIS also considered a wide array of consequences, including “build” and “no-build” alternatives, right-of-way acquisition, and condemnation.

Project leaders worked hard to involve citizens in the process through various public open houses and numerous presentations to public and civic groups.To the surprise of many, the EIS was completed in eighteen months. Informed observers attribute the speedy completion to the collaborative nature of this project, during which those involved set aside differences and focused on project goals.

Transportation Revenue Notes

Funding for the project soon found the spotlight. In 1999, Bill Owens, who supported the Southeast Corridor project, took office as governor. He wanted to execute the project without a tax increase. For this reason, and to minimize local objections, the cost needed to be as painless as possible locally. This required elected leaders to consider a bonding strategy that would minimize the impact of inflation while accelerating project completion. The Colorado State Constitution limits the state in contracting debt in any form, including bonds and other long-term debt, without voter approval.As a result, project officials pursued an innovative approach for funding, Transportation Revenue Notes—also known as Grant Anticipation Revenue Vehicle (GARVEE) bonds—which still require voter approval. (GARVEE bonding is a federal instrument that allows future federal fund allocations to pay off bonds issued by the state.)

To enable CDOT to use GARVEE bonds, the Colorado legislature enacted legislation in 1999 giving it eligibility.CDOT began a massive statewide outreach campaign to acquire the necessary voter support for the GARVEE bond strategy. Throughout the campaign, CDOT’s message was that all Coloradans would benefit, not only Denver residents. In November 1999, Colorado voters overwhelmingly approved the two bond initiatives to fund the highway project, as well as the light rail in the Southeast Corridor.

As project costs rose and federal aid decreased, GARVEE bonds provided local governments a means to accelerate T-REX while reducing costs.With this bonding strategy,RTD sold bonds for the light rail, and CDOT sold bonds both to help finance the highway portion of the Southeast Corridor and to help other state highway projects. CDOT also borrowed against federal funds not yet granted. Without the issuance of GARVEE bonds to provide up-front capital with the ability to use federal funds, CDOT would have had to default to pay-as-you-go financing, resulting in a project completion date of 2017 instead of 2006.

Other Public and Private Funding

In 1999, numerous bills passed, helping T-REX move forward.They allowed for contractor selection on design-build best value, increased private participation in public transportation facilities, petition for inclusion into the RTD tax district by landowners adjacent to preexisting RTD boundaries, and any necessary relocation of utilities.

The City of Seattle was not fulfilling its federal commitments to transit, which ultimately freed up $500 million in federal funds for transportation. Federal officials granted the City of Denver high priority for these funds, due at least in part to sound local planning and mitigation efforts. In November 2000, the FTA signed a $525 million full funding grant agreement in RTD’s name.With federal and state support, local governments pledged $30 million in matching funds.

The T-REX project has effectively reexamined and reengineered ways to obtain funding and overcome regulatory hurdles. As costs for public projects continue to rise, the processes associated with obtaining funding and complying with regulations will likely become more complicated and competitive. Other project officials should take heed of the T-REX experience and respond nimbly to changing circumstances.

A Different Project Delivery Method: Design-Build

Many past public projects have utilized the traditional design-bid-build approach. In this approach, the design plans are completed first, and contractors bid and build the sections in separate phases. Some public officials argue that this approach has resulted in higher costs, delays, dissatisfaction, and quality problems. Clearly, such undesirable outcomes would conflict with T-REX officials’ commitment to community, quality, budget, and schedule. Therefore, they selected the innovative design-build delivery method, under which a single contractor team designs and builds an entire project, for a predetermined price, with oversight from a designated authority. The method is entrepreneurial; it decentralizes authority while empowering those who play a direct, vital role in implementation.

CDOT and RTD chose Southeast Corridor Constructors (SECC), a joint venture team consisting of Kiewit Construction and Parsons Transportation Group, as the design-build contractor for T-REX. SECC was chosen through a best-value process in which CDOT and RTD jointly evaluated and weighted the technical and price aspects of the proposal.The experience and prior accomplishments of the team also impressed project officials. The deal was sealed when SECC agreed to finish the project ahead of schedule and $39 million under the $1.23 billion bid price.

Execution

After completing project planning,T-REX officials moved to execution, which not only involved constructing the project, but also managing traffic and maintaining public support. Table 2 depicts the intermodal elements of the project, and Figure 1 depicts the scope.

Given the diverse nature of the project and its stakeholders, the project team knew that success would require transparency and good will as it coordinated the various elements of the megaproject. Collaboration, accountability, and consistency became the guiding principles. Adherence to these principles allowed the project team to overcome challenges, develop and maintain relationships with the public, and reach early completion.

This multimodal project entailed a multiagency partnership.The T-REX project team took a “one team, one project” approach to focus on the best interests of the project and its stakeholders. CDOT and RTD formalized their partnership with an intergovernmental agreement (IGA) in September 1999. This agreement, besides explaining the design-build concept and the financing methods, assigned responsibilities to each agency, establishing a benchmark for accountability. Through this agreement, both agencies agreed to work together to fund and build T-REX through a designbuild, best-value contract. In addition, in October 1999 the FHWA and FTA also formalized an agreement regarding their roles on T-REX.This interagency agreement, similar to the IGA, also outlined the principles of the project and assigned responsibility.

CDOT,RTD, FHWA, and FTA all agreed to work as “one DOT,” coordinating efforts together on T-REX. After signing their own partnership agreements, all four agencies signed a partnering charter emphasizing the importance of community, safety, cost, quality, schedule, and teamwork in the project. Specifically, the four agencies agreed to the following project goals: F Minimize inconvenience to the public F Meet or beat the total program budget of $1.67 billion F Provide for a quality project F Meet or beat the schedule to be fully operational by June 30, 2008.

Retrospective

The modern era of megaprojects differs from eras past. Funding limitations and demands for higher quality public projects require project managers to explore alternative ways to deliver better projects with more stringent budgets. Citizens expect project outcomes to be achieved with minimal harm to neighborhoods and the general environment. Public managers must find ways to make government work better and cost less by reexamining and reengineering work programs and processes. Even in this challenging era, the T-REX project demonstrates that completion of a successful megaproject is possible.

T-REX has shown that it is possible to effectively meet the needs of stakeholders in spite of limited resources, higher public expectations, do-no-harm values, and mitigation strategies. Because of design-build innovation and effective leveraging of federal resources, T-REX will be completed earlier and at lower cost than a project using a traditional approach—a rarity in the history of megaprojects.

The success of design-build and innovative project financing can be attributed to the collaborative partnerships— the backbone of the project. Personal egos and agency politics were set aside. By collaborating, the T-REX team drew upon a multitude of skills, knowledge, and experience, which allowed for innovative, effective execution. Collaboration—and clear lines of accountability—were essential to the design-build environment. The quality and speed of decision-making increased dramatically. Individual accountability among the agencies played a crucial role in meeting the goals of the project. T-REX has focused on the task, remained under budget, and stayed on track.

Neither unanticipated disruption nor taxes plagued the public. This project nears completion unhindered by the controversy and contentiousness that so often characterize megaprojects.

Acknowledgment

The authors thank the following for their contributions to this article: Cal Marsella, general manager of RTD; Larry Warner, former project director of T-REX; Betty McCarty, administrative officer, Denver Regional Council of Governments; Toni Gatzen, T-REX public information manager; and Allison Hodge,T-REX staff.

References

Altshuler, Alan A., and David E. Luberoff. MegaProjects:The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2003).

Johnston,Van R.,Wendy Haynes, George Scheurenstuhl, Bill Vidal, Tom Norton, and Richard Clarke.T-REX Panel for the National American Society for Public Administration (ASPA). ASPA National Conference, Denver, March 31–April 4, 2006.

Johnston,Van R.“Caveat Emptor: Customers vs. Citizens.” The Public Manager,Vol. 24, No. 3 (Fall 1995), pp. 11–14.

Moler, Steve. U. S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration.“Colossal Partnership: Denver’s $1.67 Billion T-REX Project.” Public Roads,Vol. 65, No. 2 (Sep/Oct 2001).

T-REX Project:Transportation Expansion Project. 2006. http://www.trexproject.com/.

T-REX Fact Book. About T-REX. 2003. http://www.trexproject.com/.

Van R. Johnston, PhD, is a professor of management and policy at the Daniels College of Business, University of Denver. He can be reached at vjohnsto@du.edu. 

Wendy Haynes, PhD, is the graduate program coordinator and professor of public administration at Bridgewater State College, Massachusetts, and former first assistant IG for megaprojects for Massachusetts. She can be reached at whaynes@bridgew.edu.

Claire- Lauren Schulz is a graduate student at the Daniels College of Business, University of Denver. She can be reached at cschulz@du.edu.

By following practical guidelines from the new field of resiliency psychology, public managers can navigate through rough periods of change and bounce back from setbacks.

By Al Siebert

In today’s world of nonstop change, public managers need a highly resilient workforce. In the past, government managers ran stable, efficient organizations, which operated for decades without much change. Public-sector workers did what their managers told them to do and were evaluated on how well they followed their job descriptions.

Today’s managers must implement deep reorganization and constant change on reduced budgets while trying to meet required objectives. Every branch of government has shifted from needing cooperative, compliant employees, to needing self-motivated, change-proficient, adaptable workers capable of performing in new ways without up-to-date job descriptions. This demand distresses many managers and workers.

When public-sector employees list their challenges and difficulties, most report that they feel pressured to do more work, of better quality, in less time, with fewer people, in new ways, with a reduced budget—while worrying whether their jobs are safe. Some succumb to this pressure, some don’t.

Public managers can make a difference in how well their workers cope by using simple techniques to strengthen their resiliency. Public managers who dwell on trying to overcome employee resistance to change fail because trying to get people to stop doing something is a negative goal. A positive goal is to develop resiliency strengths in workers who are committed to their work and have positive attitudes toward change.

Public-sector managers who work proactively to strengthen workforce resiliency gain many benefits. Resilient workers hold up well under pressure, adapt quickly to change, get the right things done with fewer mistakes, and are sick less often. Resiliency is not an ability one either has or does not have.

Resiliency strengths can be developed, just as proficiency in any sport or activity can be learned and developed. How can managers strengthen workforce resiliency?

• Learn which resiliency strengths to develop in employees.
• Know the factors that support or impair worker resiliency.
• Be a good role model of resiliency.

Resiliency psychology offers the following practical guidelines for strengthening workforce resiliency.

Support Optimum Health and Well-Being

At the most basic level, the people who hold up well under constant pressure live in ways that sustain their health and well-being. Wellness is a way of life. Actively encourage employees to follow widely known practices for living a healthy lifestyle.

Increase Positive Feelings

Laughing, pleasant relationships, enjoyable moments, and feelings of job satisfaction expand a person’s cognitive skills and strengthen resiliency. Negative emotions such as fear, anger, anxiety, and worry constrict a person’s cognitive skills and weaken resiliency. Award-winning research by psychologist Barbara Frederickson has documented a direct connection between positive feelings, resiliency, good health, flourishing, good relationships, and effective work teams.Work teams observed to have a high ratio of positive to negative emotions flourish while work teams with little positive feeling tend to languish.The lowest positive-negative ratio needed for flourishing is 3 to 1, a ratio of 5 to 1 is best.

Managers who threaten workers and intentionally keep them fearful are acting irrationally because negative emotions increase the probability of mistakes, accidents, employee sickness, and having good people quit. Managers who create a positive, appreciative atmosphere that promotes job satisfaction strengthen resilience, increase mental alertness and accuracy, and keep the best employees strongly committed to the organization.

Provide an Emotional Paycheck

Workers become more engaged and committed when they experience emotional satisfaction.Your governmental organization renders a monetary paycheck for each worker, but your job is to provide them with an emotional paycheck. You do this by purposefully arranging for the people under your direct control to experience the following feelings each week:

• My work is important and meaningful.
• I am responsible.
• I am recognized for achievements.
• I have the opportunity for professional growth.
• I am valued and appreciated.
• I have accomplished something.

To impart these feelings requires good emotional intelligence in a manager—an important area of professional growth.

Forest Service

In recent years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service has undergone a massive national reorganization. For the first hundred years of its existence, it had a network of regions, forests, and ranger districts that operated autonomously. This structure, created by Gifford Pinchot in 1905, had been designed so that it would not take a district ranger more than one day riding on horseback to reach his forest supervisor’s office.

As the USDA Forest Service entered its second century, the national executive leadership team saw that the old structure was inefficient. The reorganization of the Forest Service established a central service center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which led to layoffs and relocations that disrupted the lives and families of thousands of employees.

The director of the new human capital management division, Roy Roosevelt, understood that a positive outlook within his unit was essential. “I knew it was important for all of us in human resources to respond with positive coping energy to every new challenge,” Roy says. “Whenever a new demand hits us, my response is, ‘The fun never stops!’ I kept stirring up enthusiasm for handling the reorganization really well, urged everyone to support people in the field, and gave them constant praise and appreciation. I want everyone to know that as the Forest Service strives to meet the competitive challenges of today and the future, human resources will play a major role.”

Emphasize Problem-Solving Responses

Resilient people, when faced with difficulty, focus on solving the challenge. The least resilient people become overly emotional, portray themselves as victims, blame others, and dwell on their misfortune.

You increase workforce resiliency by arranging for workshops on effective problem-solving methods. Content should include logical “left brain” methods, creative “right brain” methods, group brainstorming, and how to find simple, practical solutions.

Encourage Self-Motivated Learning

Highly resilient people continuously learn new ways of doing things, seek new experiences, and frequently change how they interact with their circumstances. The least resilient people drift into a “calcified” condition where they try to avoid change and new experiences. Childlike curiosity, playfulness, and self-motivated, self-managed learning lead to advanced resilience skills. We are marvelously blessed with the ability to replace old behaviors by learning new ones at any age.

A problem with traditional training is that it conditions employees to be passive learners who wait to be instructed. In contrast, self-motivated, self-managed learning leads to becoming more skillful, change-proficient, and resilient year after year.This means that traditional training methods are self-defeating when used to try to increase workforce resiliency.

Resilient people are like children who never grow up.They are curious and get excited about learning better ways of doing things. Encourage workers to ask questions. Asking good questions is a far more useful skill in today’s world than knowing answers that someone taught. Habitual curiosity leads quick orientation to new realities and playful curiosity can lead to practical problem-solving—one of the most basic resiliency skills.

A professional growth area for budding managers is learning how to manage with questions. Keep in mind, if you want resilient employees, you can’t continue to manage workers like they were managed in the past.

Adapt to Circumstances

Adapting to new circumstances is the key to survival in all of nature. If you always respond one way and never in the opposite way, you sometimes will be helpless to stop yourself from automatically reacting in a self-defeating manner.

The flexibility found in highly resilient people comes from their complex inner nature. Here is a partial list of counterbalanced personality qualities typically found in people who overcome setbacks to achieve solid career success:

• Creative and analytical
• Serious and playful
• Hard-working and lazy
• Sensitive and tough
• Cautious and trusting
• Unselfish and selfish
• Self-appreciating and self-critical
• Impulsive and thorough
• Optimistic and pessimistic.

Metropolitan Bus System

The new operations manager for a metropolitan bus system studied the budget expenditures and saw that the annual cost for paper towels in the operations budget was over $25,000. “Why is this cost so high?” he wondered.

He spent many days in the bus barns observing the drivers and bus cleaning crews. When the drivers came on duty, he saw each one pick up a new package of paper towels from the supply room on the way to their assigned bus. During their shifts, the drivers would break open a package of towels and clean up messes left by passengers on the handrails and seats. At the end of their shifts, the drivers would leave the partially used packages of towels on the bus. The bus cleaning crews would then remove them and throw them out. When he looked in the dumpsters, the manager saw large stacks of unused paper towels thrown into the trash.

Here was the problem. One package of towels for each driver, every shift, every day, added up to a major expense. He talked about what he’d observed with his boss, the drivers, and the cleaning crews. The solution they decided to implement was to install towel dispensers on each bus and give the cleaning crews responsibility for keeping the dispensers filled. The cost of paper towels dropped immediately, saving the transit system over $6,000 a year.

This manager followed all the steps for rational problem-solving. He identified the problem, was clear about the desired goal, collected information, discussed several solutions with people who had to make a solution work, and measured the results.

By using a problem-solving response to any challenge or difficulty, it becomes a valuable habit. But more than that, when you invite people to put their minds to work and solve problems, they feel more job satisfactions and make sure that their solutions work.

How many of these pairs of counterbalanced qualities describe you? Can you add more?

Counterbalanced personality qualities are signs of advanced emotional intelligence.Your resilience in rapidly changing circumstances comes from having many such pairs of traits, whatever they may be. The longer the list of pairs of counterbalanced, paradoxical traits you recognize in yourself, the more emotionally complex you are, which can increase your chances of successfully handling any situation that develops.

Balance Positivity with Negativity

Managers with positive attitudes typically handicap themselves by having a negative attitude about negative thinking. When managers suppress disagreement and negative thinking during meetings, they create a condition called “groupthink,” in which groups make bad decisions.

Power is derived from being at the choice point between counterbalanced forces. A sign that managers have developed advanced emotional intelligence is that they feel comfortable with and can counterbalance positive thinking with negative thinking. Barbara Clark, former City Treasurer in Portland, Oregon, says, “A negativity specialist will make you think through your plans better, point out flaws, and warn you about what could go wrong. I would thank the Lord when I had a negative thinker in my department!”

Employ a Flexible Style

Do you expect that everyone will respond well to the way that you want to manage, or do you manage people in a way that gets the best responses from each individual? In today’s workplace, a flexible management style gets the best results.

Two of the most well researched personality factors are “external locus of control” and “internal locus of control.” Hundreds of research studies show that people who cope best in difficult situations score high on measures of “internal control” beliefs.They feel personally responsible for how well their lives go, and know that they have some control over events and their responses to events. People who feel helpless and victimized, and blame others, score high on measures of “external control” beliefs.They do not believe that their personal efforts could make anything better. They believe that solutions to their unhappy condition are under the control of other people and external forces.

A fascinating truth about the human mind is that whatever you believe, you will find evidence that supports your belief. Thus it is that “external” and “internal” belief systems are both self-validating.

As a manager, it is nonproductive to try to get employees to change from their way of thinking to your way of thinking. If you adapt how you interact with each worker to get the best results from them, everything will flow much easier for all.

Figure 1 is a visual guideline on how to use a flexible management style that gets the best results from a diverse workforce.You start by observing where each person is on the external- internal dimension. Use the appropriate management mode with them, and then follow up with appreciation.

This management strategy lets you avoid a typical failing in managers: spending most of your time trying to improve the performance of your least productive workers. A much smarter strategy is to tell people who need to be told what to do exactly what you want them to do. Leave your best workers alone to do what they know has to be done.Then devote most of your management time to the middle group who want to learn how to be more effective. It’s a much better experience for all.

Bounce Back Stronger

Resilience means being able to bounce back from setbacks that may seem overwhelming at first. When resilient people have their lives disrupted, they handle their feelings in healthy ways.They allow themselves to feel grief, anger, loss, and confusion when hurt and distressed, but they don’t let it become a permanent state. An unexpected outcome is that they not only heal, but often bounce back stronger than before.

Public-sector managers and employees who function at the highest resilience level are best suited for a world of nonstop change. They adjust quickly to new circumstances and move confidently through chaotic turmoil to reach good outcomes.

Resilient people handle major difficulties more easily than others. They expect to overcome workplace disruptions in ways that work out well, and the struggle to overcome difficulties can develop new strengths. Resilient organizations have stories of how adversities in their past turned out to be valuable experiences.

We live in a constantly changing world. Some people make their lives difficult by resisting or fighting the ongoing changes. Others adapt and flow with them— it’s each person’s choice. Managers who understand the importance of workforce resiliency can help employees (and themselves) navigate through rough periods of change skillfully and easily.

Al Siebert, PhD, is director of The Resiliency Center in Portland, Oregon. He has extensive experience conducting workshops for public-sector groups and is director of the resiliency camp at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s Eastern Management Development Center. His book, The Resiliency Advantage, won the Independent Publishers 2006 Best Self- Help Book Award. It includes many stories of public-sector employees as outstanding examples of resiliency. He can be contacted at http://www.resiliencycenter.com.This article is based on his workforce resiliency session at the 2006 Excellence in Government conference. 

References

Frederickson, B. L., and M. Losada.“Positive affect and the complex dynamics of human flourishing.” American Psychologist, Vol. 60, No. 7 (2005), pp. 678–686.

Siebert,A. The Resiliency Advantage: Master Change,Thrive under Pressure, and Bounce Back from Setbacks (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005).

Government executives and human capital professionals offer a road map for designing and implementing effective performance management systems. 

By Bill Trahant

What’s the best way for government executives to create high-performance cultures in federal agencies? In March 2007 testimony before the House Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Bob Tobias, Director of Public Sector Executive Education at American University (AU), said it will never happen until you “change the behavior of every employee in government.” And that won’t happen, he said, until you “build robust performance management systems that can objectively evaluate different levels of job performance and guarantee a fully funded reward system.”

Creating such systems is difficult, Tobias told lawmakers.They must be very robust and able to synthesize large amounts of data relating to work standards, job requirements, and other performance specifications. What’s more, designing them is a “time-consuming process that requires the close collaboration of government employees and their managers,” he added.

Government Focus on Performance Management

The design and implementation of performance management systems have become a frequent topic of recent government executive conversation. Agencies are striving to comply with The President’s Management Agenda (PMA) and the Human Capital Assessment and Accountability Framework (HCAAF), the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) road map for transforming government human capital management.

For these reasons, “How to Build Effective Performance Management Systems” was the topic of a briefing for government executives at the National Press Club in Washington,DC, on May 29, 2007.Held under the auspices of AU’s Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation and sponsored by Watson Wyatt Worldwide, the forum brought together government executives from a range of agencies. It dealt with everything from the effective design of performance management systems to the management concerns and organizational and political obstacles that often stand in the way of their deployment in agencies (see box).

Featured speakers included AU’s Tobias;Marta Perez, chief human capital officer at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security; and Bill Leidinger, former assistant secretary for management and former chief human capital officer and chief information officer at the U.S. Department of Education (ED).

Cultural Challenges

Tobias noted that cultural impediments have prevented these systems from being easily implemented in government agencies in the past. “Since 1993, when Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act, agencies have struggled to identify outcome versus output goals,” he said.

One reason is that agencies and government executives find it hard to reduce achievement of their public mission to clear and measurable objectives.“At the program level,managers find it tough to define measurable program outcomes.And at the supervisory level, supervisors have trouble translating organizational goals into individual employee job requirements and performance expectations.”

At the same time,Tobias said, supervisors and employees have struggled to redefine their working relationships— to put more focus on measurable job results and less on pro forma job evaluations. Still,Tobias asserted that if managers and employees can come together to collaboratively design and implement performance management systems, they have the potential to “totally transform” their long standing traditional relationships in the federal government.

Performance management can also energize employees to perform at higher levels and assume greater job ownership,Tobias noted, because they see how their everyday jobs are connected to the strategic goals and priorities of their organization. He added, “When employees understand the linkage between their efforts and desired agency outcomes, their engagement in their work and productivity increases.” Involving employees in defining job requirements also “enables managers to leverage the natural desire of employees to improve agency goal achievement,” said Tobias.

Today, however, he said most federal agencies don’t do a very good job of identifying output and outcome goals, so “employees feel uncertain about how their individual job efforts (and performance) impact overall organizational goals and performance.” Manager-Employee Dialogue Like Tobias, Perez, a principal architect of HCAAF while at OPM,noted that the key to making performance management work is getting supervisors and employees to work together to define critical job requirements and articulate performance metrics to which both sides can agree.“It’s all about good communication,” she said.

Perez noted that the public sector has traditionally emphasized performance appraisal and not performance planning, coaching, and development. Conversations between managers and employees “traditionally have been about activities—not outcomes,” she said. By contrast, she added,“Performance management involves continuous dialogue between managers that is focused on achieving specific, concrete results. There is shared responsibility and involvement by managers and employees alike.Thus, it becomes a workplace partnership.” Perez is striving to align the work of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) twenty-two component agencies with the overarching strategic goals of DHS as a department. One way is by holding focus groups with managers and employees in all DHS components to articulate work standards and evolving job requirements in key DHS positions and operating areas.

Perez said doing so is critical to building employee engagement with DHS’s strategic mission goals. In an agency like DHS, which is concerned with evolving mission requirements related to national security, Perez said “the need for continuous dialogue” about job requirements, work standards, and results is especially acute, and an activity to which she and other DHS executives give constant attention.

To foster good communication between supervisors and employees,DHS intensively trains managers in goal setting and interpersonal communication—in the classroom and through webcasts and teleconferences. Such training is critical because “managers must be trained on how to do performance evaluations with employees, how to communicate job expectations, and how to effectively engage with employees to define work requirements,” she said.

To be fully operational, performance management must be integrated with “operational planning, goal setting, and decision making,” Perez emphasized.

How, Perez was asked, do organizational discussions about performance at DHS actually get translated into specific job activities and performance metrics? Moreover, how does the department take the work tasks of individual employees and guarantee that they “roll up” to serve the overarching goals of DHS as the guardian of our nation’s security?

Job Linkage to Mission Goals

“Today, we’re trying to have as much dialogue about work expectations and job tasks as we can, to help people understand the linkage of their work with the overall mission goals of DHS,” Perez said. She showed how this works in the department by describing how one strategic DHS priority—safety and terrorism prevention at the nation’s airports—is broken down into specific component objectives, unit and program objectives, and individual and team objectives.

To ensure airport safety, Perez said a key objective of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the DHS component agency charged with protecting the nation’s transportation systems, including airports, is “to deploy layers of security to protect the traveling public and the nation’s transportation system.”To accomplish this objective,TSA has developed specific airport priorities and goals, which include improving the efficiency and effectiveness of airport screening and maintaining an excellent safety record.

These priorities and goals are advanced by airport managers’ taking specific actions such as improving efficiency and quality of airport screening, she said. These actions are then made operational through the daily work tasks that individual airport screeners and security personnel perform at the nation’s airports.

“You can see, from this simple example, a framework of performance management goals and measures that aligns the work of people at all levels of TSA around the strategic organizational goals of DHS,”said Perez. It serves to create a strong organizational line of sight on key departmental priorities and focuses on results. (Frontline TSA personnel, and their immediate supervisors, get evaluated, according to Perez, on metrics such as “wait time” for passengers going through airport security, and the goal is to ensure that“wait time for 80 percent of people going through airport security is 10 minutes or less.”) .

Constant Dialogue

At DHS, Perez emphasized,defining critical work and the standards by which it is evaluated is an ongoing process because ensuring airport security requires constant review and vigilance.“We spend a lot of time in DHS and TSA talking about how to improve the security of airports while, at the same time, creating more efficiency in the way we do business,”said Perez,noting that this is the subject of regular conversations she has with TSA Administrator Kip Hawley and other DHS executives.

Perez said DHS could make airports so secure that nobody would be able to move through them. But “we don’t want to do that.We want people to be able to travel, and to move through our airports as quickly and safely as possible.” Perez told attendees that when agencies clearly define critical work requirements and align them with strategic goals, it supports a strong employee line of sight and focuses jobs on performance. “When you articulate metrics so they reflect program priorities, organizational conversations about performance become clear, and judging individual employee performance becomes easier,” she said.That’s because employees know what is expected of them and on what they will be judged.

Perez noted that for performance management systems to take firm root in agencies, they can’t be seen as a function run by the human resources department. Instead,“agency line managers and executives must clearly own the performance management system” they design and build, so that employees will accept it as a fair and credible tool to objectively evaluate people’s job performance.

Senior Leadership Commitment

Even that, however, isn’t enough to ensure complete success with performance management, said Perez.Top government executives and political appointees must be enthusiastic backers of performance management, she added, and must promote its importance to agency success at every opportunity. “Leaders from the top of the organization down to…first-level supervisors must have continuous conversations about performance with employees. They must communicate a vision to employees of where the organization is going, and the critical role that employees have to play in making completion of that mission a reality.”

Bill Leidinger agreed that an agency’s top leaders must be vigorous champions of performance management, if it is to get real traction inside federal agencies today.But he worried that such top-level leadership support often isn’t there.“That’s one of the biggest concerns I have about performance management in the federal government today. I don’t know where the leadership is to make it work. I mean,‘Where is it?’”

Leidinger noted that for performance management to take hold in federal government culture, leadership support of performance management must be consistent at all levels of government.“The president, cabinet secretaries, and all political appointees have to be involved in driving change right along with employees.They need to roll up their sleeves, and also give employees the tools they need to make it work,” he said.

When it comes to agency transformation, and the importance of top leadership in driving change, Leidinger knows what he’s talking about. As a top ED executive in the early 2000s, he was intimately involved in massively reengineering the talent recruitment process at the department. “That initiative required a lot of hands-on effort by everybody, including top execs,” says Leidinger.“It wasn’t something we did through a few memos and town hall meetings.”

Leidinger said the same kind of commitment is required today to design and implement performance management systems in federal agencies.“To play a leadership role in agency transformation today—and specifically to implement performance management—top government executives and political appointees need to spend time with the people they supervise.They need to manage their organizations by walking around, and by intimately understanding the nature of people’s jobs.”

Four Openers

What does Leidinger suggest to managers and political appointees who want to create strong performance- based cultures in their agencies?

For starters, he said, managers and supervisors must deeply understand the nature of the daily work their subordinates do. “You don’t get that understanding by sitting in an office.You need to walk around and talk to people.You need to ask them what they’re doing, how they do it, and why they do it.You also need to understand the constraints they face, and figure out how you can help them do their jobs better.”

Second, managers need to look for inefficiencies in the organization and for skill gaps in people, Leidinger said.“Again, unless you spend time walking around and talking to people, you won’t know where these weaknesses exist.And you won’t have any idea of how to align people’s work with your agency’s strategic or mission goals.”

Third, government executives must take action when they find impediments to people doing their work effectively, said Leidinger. For example, he says, “If you find skills gaps in employees, you must give people training and coaching to remedy those gaps. If you find people’s work isn’t clearly related to the agency’s goals, you need to look at that, and create better alignment. You can do this in focus groups and through small, intense team meetings. Otherwise, you won’t improve efficiency or productivity.”

Finally, Leidinger said, federal agencies today need to spend more time on careful and systematic workforce analysis.“You need to understand the current demographics of your workforce and the current state of people’s skills in your agency,” he said. “You also need to carefully project your agency requirements and skill needs into the near-term future in order to get a strategic handle on how to align people around critical agency or mission priorities going forward.”

Doing the aforementioned is critical, said Leidinger, if an agency wants to create a performance-based culture and a line of sight to strategic mission goals.

Patience in Process

Under the best circumstances, Leidinger cautioned, aligning employees with mission goals and connecting everyone’s job to specific organizational outcomes doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. “In my opinion, any agency that wants to implement an effective performance management system must commit two to three years to develop,modify, and tweak that system to make it work,” he asserted.

Part of the reason is that agencies need time to delineate job tasks and performance criteria for every employee and to logically link daily employee job tasks to the overarching strategic needs and mission requirements of the agency for which they work. In some cases,making those connections isn’t that hard,he said. In others,he says,“It’s tough to determine how someone who’s processing transactions deep inside the organization personally impacts the outcomes of their agency.You need time [therefore] to make those connections, and to create mutual understandings (between a supervisor and an employee) around job tasks and performance expectations.”

The need to create organization-wide buy-in and train large numbers of managers in performance-based job evaluations are other reasons that implementing successful performance management systems takes time, according to Leidinger. That’s okay, he said, emphasizing that the process of implementing performance management is best thought of as a long term organizational initiative that will have multiple phases, each building on the best practices, successes, and organizational learning of the previous phases.

“You’re not going to create the perfect performance-driven organization overnight,” Leidinger said.“In fact, most studies show that real, sustainable culture change and organizational transformation take five to seven years to achieve.”

Road Map

As part of his presentation, Leidinger laid out a series of recommendations—a road map of sorts—for government executives and political appointees who are designing and building performance management systems for their agencies.

“Think of these things as guidelines in implementing performance management in your organization, and in designing and building a performance management system to support your agency’s strategic mission goals,” he said.

Step 1. Align individual performance expectations with organizational goals.

Agencies must spend time articulating outcome goals that are consistent with the agency mission and set at a level that encourages innovation and improves individual job performance.

Step 2. Clarify roles, responsibilities, and expectations for all employees.

Agencies must involve employees in defining work expectations and delineating different levels of job performance. By doing so,“you create employee buy-in for specific performance standards and build trust that people’s job performance will be evaluated fairly and accurately during annual job reviews.”

Step 3. Create a clear line of sight so that employees at all levels understand how their individual jobs and objectives support achievement of the agency’s overall strategic or departmental objectives.

This not only provides people with a clear view of how their work supports the organization as a whole, noted Leidinger, but improves employee engagement and motivation (as Watson Wyatt human capital research has shown).

Step 4. Use core competencies as the basis for defining the skills and behaviors required of people in specific jobs.

To identify required competencies, an agency must first profile the workforce in detail and analyze skill gaps to discover its in-house competencies and those it must bring into the organization or develop in employees to meet future mission goals. “Top executives have a key role to play in driving such workforce analysis,” he said.

Step 5. Link pay to individual and agency performance.

Doing this right means linking pay, incentive, and reward systems to demonstrated employee performance on the job, Leidinger noted.

Step 6. Make meaningful distinctions in job performance.

Leidinger noted that effective performance management systems are designed partly on the basis of market pricing research. Performance management systems should be able to supply managers with credible pay and reward guidelines that can be used to make objective decisions on employee compensation and rewards.

Step 7. Include safeguards to enhance the credibility and transparency of employee performance reviews.

When such safeguards are built into a system, Leidinger said, agency leaders can assure employees that performance will be evaluated objectively and won’t be influenced by favoritism, office politics, or longevity in a job.

People Factors

Building effective performance management systems is one thing, but using them to drive agency work performance is another, said Leidinger. And that’s where critical people factors come into play. For example, he said, performance management systems can be used to formalize work expectations with employees, but they require that managers monitor employee job performance closely and link individual performance plans to agency goals. At the same time, employees must meet formal work standards that may not have been required before, but which are key to having their work evaluated fairly at review time and to ensuring it supports agency goals.

DHS’s Perez agreed with Leidinger that performance management requires fundamentally new work behaviors and attitudes on the part of managers and employees alike. “Managers must be able to define job and performance expectations with employees,” she said, “and be willing to listen to employees to understand their job challenges, concerns, and point of view.”At the same time, she added,“Employees must understand that their job performance will be based on specific criteria, and that while they’ll have input in shaping those criteria, their job performance will ultimately be judged on a range of factors and measures.”

Conclusions

Performance management can increase the organizational effectiveness of federal agencies by fostering tighter employee alignment with mission goals and by creating a framework for the effective and equitable evaluation of employee job performance. Some cultural issues have prevented such systems from being readily embraced by agencies and government executives in the past, but government executives can,with top-level leadership support and organizational focus, effectively design and implement such systems. Engaging employees in the effective design of performance management systems following the road map above will help government executives and federal human capital professionals in the design and implementation of such systems.

Establishing a strong culture of performance in the federal government is imperative for many reasons, including compliance with PMA and HCAAF and taxpayer expectations of improved government performance. In addition, as Bob Tobias noted in his March 2007 congressional testimony,“When employees understand how their own work impacts agency outcomes, their engagement in their work increases, as does their productivity, satisfaction, and morale on the job.” Clearly, this organizational outcome is as important as improved agency performance or compliance with PMA or HCAAF requirements.

Bill Trahant (William.trahant@watsonwyatt.com) is national leader of Watson Wyatt’s government consulting services practice in Arlington,VA.

by Dan Bevarly and Jeffery G. Ulma

The Digital Age is here.The way we communicate, share, and connect with others has changed drastically in the past decade. Although you may not know some of your neighbors, you might encounter them online in social networks, forums, and— through one or two degrees of separation—a professional network. The private sector has been the bellwether of things to come in the public sector, but municipalities throughout the country are taking action to connect a new generation of citizens—always attached to a mobile phone, Internet connection, or an amalgam of the two—to their government, to spur participation in a way that is more feasible in an overscheduled, digital life style.

The function of a democratic government has not changed much since its inception.The voice of the people is as important as ever in the creation of law and the establishment of policy.However, capturing that voice has become the new challenge.The public forum—in an offline world—doesn’t have the draw of even ten years ago. Society at large has shifted to an online world, and public chief information officers and managers are beginning to use this societal trend to their advantage.


The Groundswell Begins
No longer is a single community meeting in the neighborhood with an “open microphone” enough, and a mandatory public hearing at the end of a process is often viewed with skepticism. Some residents are intimidated by the crowd and don’t express their true opinion or,worse yet, don’t participate at all.

Citizens want—even demand—early, extensive, and convenient access to local government so they can play a part in planning decisions.As the recipients of the feedback, the government staff must decipher hundreds of paper forms, find the best way to sort these numerous comments, and quickly respond to citizen concerns. For these reasons, local governments need modern ways to manage public input.

Community thought leaders at all levels can now seize more opportunities to connect with everyday citizens by leveraging social networking as a tool to foster virtual “town meetings.”Across the nation, governments are opening lines of communication between their offices and the people of their respective states, counties, and municipalities. Using theWeb to empower citizens and publish open calls for civic engagement and public comment, local governments are warming to true constituent engagement, but more can be done to harness the true power of the citizen’s voice. Social networking is no longer an area that the government can ignore.Visionary state and local leaders are adopting these consumer- adopted behaviors at a fast pace, but in ways that make sense at a government or enterprise level.

Many state and local governments are looking at the massive popularity of social networking as a way to encourage citizen involvement. By integrating enterprise social networking into their latest initiatives and implementing media-rich applications designed to meet the structured requirements of government, municipalities are striving to connect with citizens concerning crucial government functions like zoning, issues management, and tourist development.

Two uses of online engagement in the public sector come from the Carolinas. In each, the idea of community remains,while the way in which people convene— and share valuable ideas—shifts to theWeb.

Spartanburg County
Home to more than 250,000 people, Spartanburg County, South Carolina, is no stranger to connecting with its populace concerning important community issues. Although experienced in traditional citizen engagement, the county is faced with key economic development goals to help modernize this segment of rural America and has responded with an innovative digital community.

Since 1987, the Spartanburg County Foundation, a public-private partnership, has published community indicator reports, effectively using citizen comment to raise awareness about the many issues impacting the growth, health, and quality of life of county residents.Traditionally updated every three years, the report has proven a valuable resource to the community: assisting organizations in their planning and encouraging conversation and dialogue among citizens to bring about community change. In fact, the most recent data collected and reviewed— concerning family, health, education, public safety, economics, and environmental issues—have led to the establishment of ten community goals, strategies to achieve them, and sixty indicators to benchmark progress toward each of them.

What began with focus group discussions grew to an imperative to find a better way to inform, connect, and update even larger audiences throughout the county. For this one-stop communication resource, the foundation adopted Neighborhood America’s enterprise social networking solution for its latest Community Indicators project to help foster citizen engagement. By implementing digital communities through a platform rich in features and functionality, coupled with experienced support, Spartanburg was able to avoid a large capital investment, all the while effectively collecting and managing scores of responses from its people.

The foundation has been able to scale its audience, engage citizens, and update them on progress toward achieving the long-term goals set forth in the Community Indicators project. In addition to offering citizens a convenient way to stay informed more frequently, the site encompasses all community members, including the county’s visually impaired. Spartanburg’s achievement in citizen engagement is a model for other counties, attracting community leaders from across the country to learn from its example.This initiative has received national recognition for its community-wide effort to develop a better future for the citizens of Spartanburg County.

Town of Cary
Cary, North Carolina, with a population of 121,000, is located in the heart of the world-famous ResearchTriangle region. Recognized by publications like Money magazine as one of the best places to live inAmerica, the community has a long history of cutting-edge planning and zoning approaches.The citizens in this high-tech location are not afraid of computers:more than 94 percent of the households have access to the Internet.Collecting data, studies, plans, reports, and ordinances from other places, they e-mail officials and staff members regularly to ask questions and express their opinions. Some have even created their ownWeb sites about new development proposals to communicate with each other.

Technology Town
As a result, town government has had to keep pace with digital methods for communicating and offering additional involvement opportunities, includingWebbased public participation. For example, agendas and detailed staff reports for rezoning cases for the town council and planning and zoning board meetings have been available on theWeb for a decade.These include maps, photos, and color renderings of the proposed development. The town also providesWeb pages for special planning projects and publishes monthly reports listing all approved and pending development plans.

Further reflecting its unofficial nickname,Technology Town, Cary has moved to the next stage—“going interactive”—providing online surveys and threaded discussion boards for some of its planning efforts.Although the results have been mixed (and limitations like the selfselection of participants are recognized), the town council is still committed to offering an ever-expanding array of involvement methods for Cary residents.

Neighborhood America
To extend its repertoire, Cary recently acquired Neighborhood America’s Public Comment system.Although thisWeb-based approach was designed for longterm projects, like the preparation of transportation plans, Cary is going to use it in a new way: applying the system to short-term processes like rezoning.

For complex rezoning cases that last about six months, handling the intense flurry of input directed to different people or arriving scattershot at town hall is difficult. Concerns are shared with the staff, council members, and planning and zoning board members. They arrive in a variety of formats (phone calls, letters,walk-in visits, and e-mails). Cary sought a mechanism where it could funnel comments through a single portal on the Web, and Public Comment fit the bill.

This focused social network (or online community) serves as a one-stop communication tool with the planning department for Cary citizens concerned with town zoning.Through citizen feedback to one portal, town officials are able to manage and respond quickly and effectively. These responses are then published on theWeb site to serve as a reference for residents, preventing the repetition of questions that planning department officials have already answered.This streamlined communication results in an increased response rate and enables officials to devote more time to constituents.

As it now readies to test this emerging technology on the first few cases,Cary hopes to use it to better manage information and feedback.The town should also gain insight into participants by asking them questions like where they live in relation to the project or which specific aspect of a development proposal generates the most concern. In the end, Public Comment will give Cary a tool to share information, collect citizen input, provide timely and consistent responses, and facilitate improved decision making.

Web-Based Engagement
Cary is just one example of technology’s facilitating engagement in local communities.Town hall meetings have been enhanced, even replaced, by boundary-spanning, interactive online forums, and press releases and posting campaigns with limited reach have given way to bidirectional,Web-based engagement sessions—all in a concerted push to include the voice of the populace.

The traditional media have latched onto this trend, as well. ABC, CBS, Fox, and other networks have stepped up their user-generated content campaigns to enable viewers to participate in political discussion by submitting video—via mobile phones if they so choose—directly to the news agency.ABC has used this effective avenue to elicit citizen comment for on-air interviews with President Bush and other high-ranking political officials.

Public managers have the tools that reflect timehonored standards of public comment—standards designed to support constructive public dialogue.Yet, at the same time, new technologies now enable governments to collect and manage multiple forms of public feedback, through any type of device, and to organize that feedback in a way that makes it useful and reportable. If these innovations transcend geographical and socioeconomic boundaries, allowing for instant engagement and bidirectional communication in a secure, structuredWebbased environment, then why aren’t these new interactive technologies ubiquitous across the public landscape?

Enterprise Social Networking
The technology that makes citizen engagement possible represents the next wave in data organization and information delivery. Known as enterprise social networking (ESN), this Internet-native software as a service (SaaS) solution is designed to enable governments to manage structured public involvement.The solution provides a complete enterprise content management system that incorporates state-of-the-art management of usergenerated content, that is, all forms of multimedia content created and submitted by citizens. System capabilities are comparable to or exceed those of largescale technology development projects in major corporations and are comparatively affordable for even smaller government offices.

Most important, because the system is delivered in a Web-based SaaS model without the need to install hardware or software, ESN can be quickly launched to meet all project needs.TheWeb delivery makes the ESN easy to use—particularly beneficial to municipal governments since the staffs tend to be small and nontechnical. Small teams can manage large outreach initiatives in real time.These systems can also be very affordable.Many planning offices are able to redirect budgets for traditional community outreach items—mailings, meetings, etc.—and gain efficiency and citizen responsiveness at the same time.

ESN systems enable the public manager to effectively manage all work processes related to community projects—such as press releases, census lists, and other forms of documents and collaboration—all while considering organized feedback from the municipality’s many constituents.These next-generation technologies will enable campaigns to “turn on a dime” with hypersensitive listening to those in touch with public zoning policy and statute issues.

Conclusion
Interactive technology that offers traditional rules of structure is the future. It allows governments to better understand their constituents and invites reasoning. After all, public dialogue helps to build relationships, expectations, and policy over time, rather than at a point in time. Most important, it enables governments to establish long-term relationships with citizens on the basis of clear, accurate, and structured communication. Indeed, this is the future of citizen participation.

How pay for performance has emerged as the new model for federal human resources pay practice and how executives and managers will be challenged to solve its complexities.

 A. C. Hyde

This year’s public Management Fad of the Year proves that a past record of futility does not preclude ultimate triumph. Pay for performance has been proposed, debated, and dismissed for over fifty years in public personnel management. And now, although legal challenges have been filed, pay for performance emerges as the new model for federal human resources pay practice and the cornerstone of federal public management strategy.

But first, a brief aside is in order to restate the premise for this award. For our first issue in the millennium, The Public Manager inaugurated the idea of bestowing a Management Fad of the Year (like Time’s Woman or Man of the Year) on whatever management concept, idea, process, technique, and strategy most dominated the federal public management landscape. Choosing the title “Fad of the Year” was, we explained back then, “…deliberate, hopefully provocative, and not intended as derogatory.”

And with each year’s award, we’ve respectfully repeated the caveat that fads have an impact and are important. As we explained then, “Looking back over the last two decades, one can see a number of ‘dominant’ management concepts—from total quality management and re-engineering to reinvention and downsizing that once commanded the public management headlines. None of these has been relegated to the trash heap. While some have been recycled, modularized, or even redefined, they have become part of our basic management tool kit and our vocabulary.”

And the Nominees Are…

Perhaps it’s the timing or coincidence, but this annual article has come to be more and more influenced by the Academy Awards in making the final selection and bestowing the award. Instead of just launching into the discussion of the merits and prospects for the Management Fad of the Year, it’s become customary to note and say a few words about the other nominees. And since we’ve been at this for five years now, we’re even tempted to suggest that there should be a “lifetime achievement award” to contenders that perennially come up short.

Anyway, this year’s nominees are an interesting group. Supply chain management (SCM) was a new nominee that made quite a splash on the public management landscape, aided by a three-issue double article forum in the Harvard Business Review lauding “truly revolutionary changes” to a core process that is…“accomplished by means of mind-boggling technological innovations, clever new applications of old ideas, seemingly magical mathematics, powerful software, and old-fashioned concrete, steel, and muscle.” SCM also got its own special issue in the California Management Review. Surely SCM will be a contender to deal with in 2005.

Another nominee was network governance. That may not be the right name to give to this rising issue area loosely centered around migrating from hierarchical bureaucratic organizations to more collaborative alliances of public, nonprofit, and private organizations. Much of this growing movement is driven by public policy advocates who have been arguing for a decade that government is out, governance is in. A recent work (reviewed in the last issue of The Public Manager), Goldsmith and Eggers’ Government by Network, uses the subtitle—The New Shape of the Public Sector—to describe the significance of what’s involved here.

The last nominee was one that has come up every year; 2004 was an interesting year for the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) and results management. It saw a first wave (well, maybe a wavelet) of public management textbooks and academic journal articles that viewed results management as core management as opposed to a legislated reporting requirement or the usual executive mandate. These works and others promise a more serious discussion of what high performance is and what different models exist for performance results measurement. With a little rebranding, one can see results management being recast as “high-performance management.” At a minimum, it should be given our first aforementioned lifetime achievement award to public management.

And the winner is pay for performance—a rather different kind of choice among the nominees. For one thing, pay for performance is only a part of a larger management reform: civil service modernization or pay modernization. However, it’s the most controversial and significant part.

Furthermore, while viewed as a radical change, it is not described as a reform. Indeed the word “reform” seems to have somehow disappeared from the public management vocabulary, as if it had become politically incorrect. Both the influential U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) White Paper on Federal Pay (2002) and the Volcker II Commission Report (2003) omit the word reform in their advocacy of change. OPM’s White Paper is entitled “A Fresh Start for Federal Pay: The Case for Modernization.” Volcker II’s report is entitled Urgent Business for America: Revitalizing the Federal Government for the 21st Century. The word reform does not appear in any of the fourteen recommendations and the recommendation on pay (number eleven) states simply: “More flexible personnel management systems should be developed by operating agencies to meet their special needs.” One would think from these inferences that all that’s involved here is a little loosening up and getting a new wardrobe. Obviously, public managers know that’s not the case.

The Merits of Pay for Performance in Historical Context

Personnel textbooks have ranted about the terrible effects of public-sector pay systems for years. The compensation chapter of the first edition of Personnel Management in Government in 1978 states, “It is very difficult to convince employees that their pay is fairly arrived at when they have before them on a daily basis other more highly paid employees, who serve not as role models that one should strive to emulate, but rather as glaring examples of the inequities of the pay program.”

That was fairly typical of the “personnel bashing” style of many of the behavorialists critiquing public personnel. What we lacked in data to validate our observations, we made up for verbally. But even that assessment was primarily aimed at the dysfunctionality of the classification system and an evaluation system that made grade inflation at Harvard looked tame. For most of the twentieth century, federal agencies evaluated individuals in terms of merit based on a list of behavioral traits. They developed performance appraisal systems tied to behaviorally anchored rating scales that defined basic levels of service from unsatisfactory to outstanding. Almost inevitably, the result was rating inflation in which 90 percent of employees rated were assessed at above satisfactory ratings, drawing the ire of critics who contended that this facet alone invalidated the entire performance appraisal system.

Performance-based pay was touted as the solution. As Table 1, taken from a recent U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) presentation shows, it began with efforts to provide small annual bonuses (incentive awards and quality step increases). The first big reform steps were taken as key parts of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978— establishing larger cash awards and managerial bonuses and later limiting the percentage of employees who could get awards. But within a decade, the pay-for-performance movement had basically faltered. In its 1991 assessment Pay for Performance, the National Research Council concluded that there were fundamental underlying difficulties to resolving tensions “between the potential benefits of pay for performance and the reality of federal personnel and compensation systems.”

Balkanization

But the 1990s saw a major shift in federal management strategy. With the advent of performance results budgeting through GPRA and other new public management approaches being advocated—like performance-based organizations—management strategists were arguing that organizations had to relate organizational outcomes or results measures to individual performance objectives. Rather than try to force through a system-wide reform, the management strategy shifted to individual agencies. When the Federal Aviation Administration and the Internal Revenue Service were beset by management crises, part of the solution was to give each agency authority to create its own pay system. As the “Balkanization” of the General Schedule continued into the Bush administration, the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense were given authority to create their own personnel and pay systems. Both made pay for performance centerpieces for “modernization.”

Table 1.

Source: Office of Policy Evaluation, U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.

Pay-for-performance systems based on results make several key assumptions. First, the organization has readily measurable results that can be transferred from organizational levels to managerial levels and ultimately work groups and individuals. Second, managers can and will make both fair and candid assessments of their subordinates. Third, individuals will be motivated by pay levels that differentiate between those who carry the true workload of the organization and those—recently identified by The Wall Street Journal—as employees who are “actively disengaged” at work. The latter concept is perhaps a new way of looking at the attitudes of those who once might be called “poor performers” but are in fact individuals who see a job as time spent on the job as opposed to time spent doing significant work. Here lies the true test of pay for performance: ensuring sufficient variability in pay so outstanding performers get large rewards, average performers get smaller raises (to “maintain buying power”), and poor performers get no increase.

Not every public-sector manager or employee is going to like the new brand of pay-for-performance management. Indeed, the most recent (2000) MSPB survey of federal employees showed the desire for a good performance rating as a distant ninth on the list of fifteen top motivators for performance—being important to only 10 percent of those surveyed. Of course, the survey can’t separate employee disrespect for current inflated appraisal systems from disinterest. More interesting is the third-place rating given to monetary awards, which appealed to 27 percent of those surveyed. There may be more interest in variable pay levels among public-sector employees than suspected. Of course, pay-for-performance advocates will be quick to point out that the system is supposed to be fair but should not please all employees.

Issues for Today and the Future

Clearly, federal agencies will enter into this brave new world of pay for performance/results with some trepidation. To begin with—as a study by the MSPB has noted—past trends in performance appraisal systems (with the active and strong encouragement of federal unions) have been exactly in the opposite direction. From 1995 to 2000, the number of performance appraisal systems that have only two levels (essentially pass-fail) increased from less than 5 percent to nearly 25 percent. Clearly, increased training budgets to prepare managers and the long lead time to implement pay for performance will be needed.

Another complicating factor will be the pressures of “competitive government.” Managers taking charge of agencies or enterprises, who must compete with contractors or even other governmental competitors, are going to push hard for pay-for-performance flexibilities to reward successful results, pay for new innovations, and possibly most important of all, lower compensation levels when failure occurs.

Another issue will be all the intangibles that go into federal public-service work. Beth Asch’s recent review of “The Economic Complexities of Incentive Reforms” (High-Performance Government, Rand, 2005) reminds public managers that if pay for performance is going to work, gains in productivity have to exceed costs of performance measurement. And performance measurement in federal work is not exactly simple. Much of the work activity performed by federal workers is multidimensional, done in teams, subject to multiple employers and multiple objectives, and longer term. Any number of studies by research psychologists testify that linking pay to individual results has negative consequences—undermining teamwork, levels of cooperation, and even relationships among teams within an organization.

Asch looks at one other critical issue that has to be factored in—promotion rates. One aspect is simply the separate impact on promotions in raising pay and attracting and retaining talent. Equally important, however, is the fact that measurement costs for promotion are lower than pay for performance. As she concludes, “What is required in a promotion system is that the supervisor determine who has the best performance, not the exact level of performance of each employee. It may be considerably easier to determine ranking than to determine the precise level of performance.” One shouldn’t forget, of course, that ranking is usually not allowed in pay-for-performance systems.

Perhaps the most important issue for the future will be making the system fair and transparent. What that really means is another issue. Consider Steve Barr’s October 2004 article in The Washington Post:

Fairness counts, especially when it comes to bonuses. An inspector general review found that the Transportation Security Administration [TSA] handed out bonuses last year to 76 percent of its executives but to only 3 percent of its rank-and-file employees. The TSA also gave time off from work as a reward to an additional 7 percent of the “rank-and-file.” The inspector general’s report called the pronounced tilt toward management “a substantial inequity” and recommended that the TSA “provide more equitable treatment for lower graded employees when making performance award decisions.”

Essentially, an inspector general concludes, 75 percent plus for managers and 10 percent for employees is unfair. Would TSA have been criticized if it had given cash awards to 50 percent of its rank-and-file employees? What kind of management team could TSA hope to retain if it awarded only 50 percent of its managers bonuses? What should the percentages be? In discussing this issue with some union leaders, their perspective on fair and transparent emerges something like this. Transparent means a system you can see right through in order to determine how the decisions were made. Employees need to be able to see if they were treated fairly, and shouldn’t we want employees to be able to see what they need to do better to get a reward next time?

Going beyond that focus on the individual, unions also want to be able to see how various classes of employees did. This is not only a concern for the “protected classes” of various civil rights laws, but also the nonprotected classes. For example, did all the money go to a few occupations or grades at the expense of lower-graded minorities? Did a disproportionate share go to political appointees? The new system should be run in a way that there is nothing to hide. If someone is trying to hide any portion of it, the obvious message is that they are embarrassed by it or can’t explain to others what did happen.

Philosophical Challenge

Beyond these issues lies a final, more philosophical challenge to pay for performance. As public management strategists celebrate the final acceptance of the concept, they will devote more time to working the details and detailing the working parts of the new systems. Certainly, public-sector pay can be reshaped as a powerful tool in pushing public management into a new era. But two costs should be kept in mind. Beth Asch would remind us that public-sector work is more complicated and that the cost of performance measurement must be clearly outweighed by some measurable increase in organizational productivity. The second is a simple reminder of the first tension between the potential of pay for performance and the reality of federal personnel systems noted by the National Research Council in its 1991 report—that of the potential impact on the neutral competence of the public service. As political factions in this country become increasingly partisan, “the centrality of the principle of neutral competence in the public service” may be something we regret subjecting to the economic complexities of compensation incentive reforms. They never had a conversation about the expected outcomes of their joint efforts.

Input from stakeholders is essential for quality outcomes and evaluations. Their experiences and expertise can raise issues that should be addressed when developing outcomes. Their input ensures that relevant information is collected to measure outcomes and complete evaluations. In addition, collaboration supports a cycle of continuous learning because stakeholders are encouraged to use feedback from results measurement to guide their work.

Integrate Results Measurement into Program Planning

It is unfortunate that most evaluation planning occurs toward the end of a funding cycle. This adds to the perception that conducting evaluations is an extra burden for the organization. This perception is accurate because by waiting until the end to plan for an evaluation, the staff must now find time to create evaluation questions, review documents, find program participants to interview, analyze data, and write a report. This burden diminishes when evaluation is integrated into the process of program development and review. If outcomes and evaluation questions are identified when a program begins, it is easier to create useful data collection tools that can be modified throughout the life of the program. There should be a priority on reviewing reporting requirements to see how they can be used to support current evaluation needs. What staff members resent most is an onerous process that asks them to fill out too many forms. When evaluation activities are incorporated into the normal work day, employees understand why information is being collected and how it will be used.

Tell Your Story, Communicate Your Findings

Evaluation helps an organization share its successes and failures. I encourage organizations to develop a dissemination plan that will help them create and take advantage of opportunities to share conclusions from their results management activities. This information should not be left in the form of a final report. Instead, the report content should be “cut and pasted” to inform different audiences about the findings they will find most interesting. Every stakeholder is a different audience. They should review the array of written materials produced in their organizations. Results information can be integrated into newsletters, press releases, Web sites, mailings, solicitations, grant proposals, brochures, and annual reports. Don’t rely upon written materials. Consider presentations at workshops and conferences. If an organization is included in an evaluation with other organizations, ask whether each can have a separate report summarizing its relevant findings. To encourage participation in a multiyear evaluation of two pilot projects, I was asked to prepare shorter and separate evaluation reports for each project. Though everyone was interested in the overall success of the initiative, the executive directors for the pilot organizations saw how they could use the evaluation findings to support their program.

A. C. Hyde is a senior staff consultant with Brookings Executive Education, formerly the Center for Public Policy Education. Special thanks to John Crum of the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) Office of Policy Evaluation for his recent superb presentation at the 4th annual San Francisco U.S. Government Accountability Office–American Society for Public Administration spring forum on performance and having shaped the issues, but of course not the content, of this article.

References

Innovation Network. “Evaluation in Nonprofit Organizations.” Presentation by Monica Heuer and Veena Pankaj. April 2004.

Patton, Michael Quinn. Utilization-Focused Evaluation. 3rd ed. (SAGE Publications, 1996).

United Way of America. Agency Experiences with Outcome Measurement: Survey Findings 2000, http://national.unitedway.org/ outcomes/files/agencyom.pdf.

———. United Way Outcome Measurement Resource Network, Frequently Asked Questions, http://national.unitedway.org/outcomes/. 2005