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The head of a major pay and personnel transformation at the Defense Department will become a deputy program director at the Missile Defense Agency, Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England has announced.

Mary Lacey, program executive officer for the National Security Personnel System, will become deputy program director of aegis ballistic missile defense at MDA on May 11. Brad Bunn, deputy program executive officer for NSPS and director of the Defense Civilian Personnel Management Service, will replace Lacey.

"Brad Bunn has been an integral leader for NSPS over the last four years," England said. "He has been there since this program's inception, and I'm confident that under his continued leadership, this will be a seamless transition as we move forward with program implementation."

NSPS is the department's effort to create a modern, flexible, performance-based human resources management system. By spring of 2008, more than 180,000 will have converted to NSPS. Eventually, the system is slated to cover 700,000 employees.

"I asked Mary Lacey to take on what was a very challenging and rigorous assignment," England said. "She has spent the last four years working in civilian human resources, away from her primary career track, and she has been outstanding."

Lacey said on Tuesday that she had always planned to return to a job in the department that fit her engineering and technical background. She said she came to NSPS in 2004 to provide strong leadership for the transition, but felt her leadership was no longer necessary, since "NSPS has now gotten into the DNA of the department.

"The focused, concentrated effort that was needed at the highest level has taken hold; the leadership attention has been caught," she said. "It's a good time for me to hand it off to Brad. I'm comfortable with where the program is, and I think Brad will do a wonderful job bringing it home."

Lacey's connections to NSPS will not disappear, however. In her new position at MDA, Lacey said she would be managing civilian employees under NSPS. "This is my opportunity to eat the meal I cooked," she said.

COMMENTS

• NSPS is a joke. We paid over 50K in overtime for the additional workload by supervisors. There was over a million dollars of delays for projects because we were told to focus on accomplishing NSPS. Next year we are told we cannot give our employees the scores they deserve because of lack of funds. Training was poor and the NSPS database was down several weeks last year and several weeks this year, I call for assistance and it take over a week for the contractor to fix the problem. Let's get rid of NSPS before millions of more dollars are wasted. Cindy Posted May 14, 2008 10:13 PM
• There's been talk of vast improvements, NSPS is better than GS, and now we can put money in the pockets of those who are deserving. I would like to see the devises that are in place to measure the success of NSPS! What was the overaching objectives of implementing the new system and what are the key end results/outcomes? I'm sure a lot of money was spent and I'm sure a lot of money will be saved. So who kissed who's ring, who gained the rewards, and with how meny employee sacrafices?? RWB Posted May 5, 2008 4:54 PM
• When will the senior leaders wake up? NSPS is like the elephant in the room, with a bunch of general officers nodding "great system, let's implement it, hurrah, hurrah!" Someone needs to do a Defense-wide Lean Six Sigma project on NSPS so THE LEADERS can all see, in THEIR language, how time-consuming and wasteful it really it (those of us who work the process and train the managers already know how ugly it is). I can't imagine why so many senior managers are just laying down and accepting this, now that they need to know how to use two HR systems (GS and NSPS), have to to plan Thanksgiving and Christmas leave around pay pool time, and having their peers at the pay pool decide their salaries. Performance management? Yeah right. The "good old boy network" will simply by centrally controlled by each Pay Pool Manager, who has override authority. I hope the unions haven't quit yet, their employees aren't safe either, according to DoD's plans. Make your vote count this year- Kill NSPS and make sure it never comes back! Joel Strinbeck Posted May 5, 2008 12:43 PM