Improving Performance: Layers of Reform

Shelley Metzenbaum, associate director for performance and personnel management at OMB, was our guest this morning at a Leadership Briefing on the Obama administration's performance management agenda. I tweeted some of her remarks over the course of the event, including the following:

• On whether agencies would be graded on progress toward meeting their high priority performance goals: "We are not going to give agencies A's, B's, C's and D's."
• On existing requirements that agencies produce voluminous reports on performance relative to goals under the Government Performance and Results Act: "Everyone was producing them, no one was using them."
• On the administration's goal-setting process: "We asked agencies to set ambitious targets. We don't expect to meet all of them."
• On what she called the "claim game" as impediment to collaboration: "People want to claim credit that it was their money that accomplished that goal, so they can get more money in the future."

Overall, I was struck by how big the challenge is in the federal context of trying to launch a management improvment effort in a field already crowded with existing requirements -- some of them clearly outdated. Administration officials want to develop a straightforward, data-driven process for focusing on key goals and holding people accountable for achieving them. But they have to spend a huge amount of time figuring out how to do so within an existing framework that is already layered with previous reform efforts -- some of them, like GPRA, enshrined in law, and others, like the Performance Assessment Rating Tool, the work of previous administrations.