On a Wing and a Prayer

hen asked to address the onslaught of media criticism her agency has received in the past year, Federal Aviation Administration chief Jane Garvey feigns a blank stare. "Criticism, what criticism?" she jokes.

All kidding aside, the agency's 1999 press, though prolific, was anything but rosy.

FAA weathered countless reports of summer flight delays, lax airport security, and doubt over whether the agency would be ready for the Y2K date rollover.

But many other stories went untold, Garvey says, describing her agency's accomplishments of last year, which included milestones in modernization, financial management and personnel reform.

Two critical events came late in the year. In December, Garvey presided over the dedication of a new radar computer and color workstation in El Paso, Texas. The Standard Terminal Automated Radar System (STARS) was the first of thousands at terminal radar approach facilities nationwide to help make the skies safer.

"Really setting a timeline and getting that done and working very hard to have the right kind of union involvement was very important to us. It was a wonderful day when it went operational," Garvey says.

The FAA stumbled in its first attempt at launching STARS in Washington and Boston last year. As a result, the agency decided to deploy an initial version of STARS at less busy airports. "Oftentimes an organization is defined by one or two major projects," Garvey says. "If that's the case, then STARS has been one for us."

As promised, less than two weeks later Garvey took to the skies on New Year's Eve and was able to report that the Y2K bug did not affect the nation's aviation transportation system. "There may have been some skeptics out there who thought we couldn't do it," she says of the enormous Y2K effort. But, as she told her employees, Y2K was simply "another illustration of the professionalism of the FAA workforce."

Acquiring Youth

Every day, the agency is getting younger, top FAA officials like to say. "We've made tremendous progress in modernization, in terms of getting new systems deployed," Garvey says.

Free Flight Phase I, a management system comprised mostly of predictive tools that help air traffic controllers make decisions, began to take shape in 1999. With Free Flight Phase I, "we've had a pretty simple and straightforward contract with industry, and that is [that] we'll deploy the systems if they help us measure [their effectiveness]," Garvey says.

The Transportation Department inspector general praised FAA for completing the initial phase of the host replacement modernization program. On schedule and on budget as of late 1999, the program replaces the central computers that process flight plan and radar data. A program to replace air traffic controllers' aging display equipment is also on schedule this year. Both projects are years behind their original schedules.

The FAA's 3-year-old acquisition program also continues to improve, according to a July 1999 report by consulting firm Booz Allen & Hamilton. In 1995, Congress freed FAA from federal acquisition and personnel rules. As a result, the agency has awarded more contracts competitively, based them on best value and reduced the time frame for awards by 50 percent, according to the report.

Still, FAA assumes too much risk in its contracts for software-intensive projects like Free Flight Phase I, according to the Transportation IG. In a report listing the top 12 management issues at the department, the IG found that FAA contractors need financial incentives to control costs and that the agency needs more flexibility to manage contracts.

Fixing Finances

One of the FAA's biggest achievements in 1999 was in financial management, the area which garnered the agency its lowest Government Performance Project grade for 1998. Improper accounting for property and equipment inventory played a large role in the poor rating. But in the last year, FAA has made "light years of progress" in rectifying property management records, an IG insider says. "FAA, through its regions and through the financial office, has worked an amazing number of hours to get our property documented. It looks pretty hopeful that for 1999 we will get a clean audit opinion," FAA Chief Financial Officer Donna R. McLean says. Meanwhile, the agency is making a reasonable amount of progress with its cost accounting system, according to the latest IG report. But more reliable cost estimates and data are needed-and, according to Garvey, a bigger budget. "We're very encouraged by the work to date, but a little bit discouraged about the budget constraints and whether [cost accounting] can continue to go as aggressively as we would like," she says.

In addition to a reliable cost accounting system, the FAA still needs a better means of controlling costs, the IG says. Several programs suffered severe spending cuts in 1999, in part because of a $284 million shortfall in the agency's operations budget. Garvey was forced to impose strict hiring and spending restrictions. The rising costs of operations continue to present problems as the agency juggles expensive modernization programs.

Revamping Rules

The agency scored well on professionalism and air traffic safety in the first-ever governmentwide survey on customer satisfaction, sponsored by the University of Michigan Business School, the American Society for Quality and consulting firm Arthur Andersen. FAA officials earned respect by surveying their toughest customers-commercial pilots. But the pilots seized the chance to make their message heard when it came to FAA rules and regulations. They gave the agency a low score on the clarity of its rules and regulations, calling them "obtuse, Byzantine and obsolete," among other things. As a result, Garvey has requested that all future rules be issued in plain language.

Clarifying new rules also is a challenge for the FAA human resources department, which recently completed a pilot test of a new pay-banding system. The National Academy of Public Administration evaluated the per- sonnel reform and concluded that the system was well-designed. But a sense of distrust still pervades the FAA workforce. The FAA has its work cut out convincing employees of the new system's benefits, says HR director Glenda Tate.

To help employees understand the system, FAA introduced an automated spreadsheet that allows employees to compare their current salaries with those they would earn under the new compensation system. "I don't think we can overstate what a tremendous change this has been," Garvey says. "We are asking people to move from a tenured system to a pay-for-performance system. There's a great deal of uncertainty in people's minds about that." FAA plans to roll the rest of the agency's non-bargaining unit employees into the new system later this year.

Getting Results

The Government Performance Project gave the FAA average grades in 1998. Since then, "I think the whole focus on metrics and measurement is really helping us shape our agenda," Garvey says. One example, FAA's Safer Skies initiative, a program aimed at reducing the most prevalent causes of airplane crashes, has brought industry and government together to focus on safety.

The whole approach of Safer Skies is working out, Garvey says, because the aviation community focused its resources. "We identified together where we could put our major emphasis and really focused on those areas," she says. And in another instance, when summer flight delays reached an intolerable level in 1999, top-level industry and FAA officials holed up together for two days to generate a list of recommendations to alleviate the problem. While the actions were short-term, "it really was a benchmark moment in the number of facilities we reviewed, the comprehensive nature of the reviews and the fact that we invited industry to review it with us," Garvey says.

Garvey admits there are no limits to the number of challenges the FAA faces in the coming years, but the agency is chipping away at its management stumbling blocks. "I think we are meeting the major challenges in management reform head on, but they are awesome challenges and are not to be un- derestimated," she says.GPP report card

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