The Office of Personnel Management is making incremental progress in reshaping its annual performance plan, the General Accounting Office observed in a recent report.
OPM has addressed many of the problem areas identified in its 1999 performance plan, but still has a lot of work to do, GAO said in its report, "Results Act: Observations on the Office of Personnel Management's Fiscal Year 2000 Annual Performance Plan" (GGD-99-125).
The fiscal 2000 plan, mandated by the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, is more specific than 1999's because it includes many more action-oriented goals with measurable outcomes, GAO said.
In the new plan, goals are designed to address upcoming agency-wide challenges such as the aging of the federal workforce, talent shortages and skill imbalances.
For example, OPM is developing a workforce forecasting model and will help agencies fill jobs by providing a talent bank of well-qualified applicants. The agency also has a long-term goal of decreasing the number of General Schedule job classification standards from more than 400 to fewer than 100. The performance plan includes year-by-year projections to meet the goal.
GAO praised OPM for using baseline and trend data to set targeted performance goals, for acknowledging internal financial management weaknesses and for including a general discussion of how agency goals mesh with program services.
Problems remain, however. GAO noted that OPM's performance information cannot be easily verified. OPM's section on verification and validation in the 2000 plan contains too many vague references, the report said. Statistical data that is used as a baseline to establish goals must be reliable and valid, GAO said, but in many cases, the reliability of OPM's data could not be proven.
"Overall, OPM's fiscal year 2000 plan provides limited confidence that the data used to measure performance would reflect actual performance," the report said. GAO suggested that periodic data reliability tests and supervisory or independent reviews of data be used to further refine performance measures.
Other areas for improvement, GAO said, include using cost-based performance goals and measures and considering how external factors, such as changes in the labor market, might affect goals.
In a response to the report, OPM noted that it has been a pioneer in helping agencies craft results-oriented measures and that timely and reliable measures of outputs and outcomes are hard to come by.
"Until managers have such measures readily available for assessing and managing employee performance at the organizational, team and individual levels, they will remain reliant on less meaningful measures that are more vulnerable to inexorable inflationary pressures and that fail to support making robust distinctions among levels of performance," said OPM Director Janice R. Lachance in the agency's response.