Performance Plans: Progress, Not Perfection

ith 10 different administrations, each with its own structure and management, the Transportation Department has a unifying purpose-transportation oversight and management-that barely straddles its diverse portfolio. The broad mission made setting strategic goals challenging, and performance planning difficult. But Transportation has won plaudits from Congress and the White House for its Results Act efforts.

To practice for fiscal 1999 performance planning, each division and bureau included performance goals and measures in its fiscal 1998 budget request to the department. Here are some of the lessons the agency learned:

• The most effective plans summarized program purpose, set target levels of performance against a baseline, and described program activities, outputs and intermediate outcomes.
• Where only output measures were available, a logical description linking them to outcomes helped reviewers.
• Performance information made its major impact not at the level of department budgeteers, but on how organizations and programs allocated their own resources.
• Performance goals are a compromise between possibility and challenge. For example, part of the reason for increasing highway fatalities is increased highway use. Transportation could have chosen a goal of keeping the fatality rate steady, despite rising road use, but the actual number of deaths would have continued to rise dramatically. Instead, the agency chose a goal of reducing the number of fatalities. "We knew we were setting the bar higher, [but] safety is the most important goal," says Mary Lou Batt, a special assistant for management reform.
• The more and earlier stakeholders are involved, the better the performance plan. Transportation won points on Capitol Hill for intense, ongoing meetings with its overseers throughout strategic planning. The department has continued seeking congressional input on what to measure and how in its performance plan. These discussions gave department staffers insight on the best ways to present performance information and let them educate Hill staffers about the cost of producing performance data. In addition, Transportation administrations have met extensively with those they regulate and serve.