Mea Culpa

Jeffrey Zients, the government's chief performance officer and acting Office of Management and Budget director, seems to be taking a cue from Domino's Pizza. For months, the pizza giant has been running ads saying, "We're sorry, we know we weren't very good before, but we're doing better." The commercials air brutal focus group footage of customers complaining of cardboard taste, overprocessed ingredients, even pies smooshed up against the boxes. Domino's executives then 'fess up to their shortcomings, swearing up and down their new signature pizza is much improved and taking personal responsibility for so much as a botched delivery.

It's a "lay it all out on the table" approach that doubled the company's earnings. But will airing the government's shortcomings work as well for Zients and the Obama administration? Officials say it's a chance they'll have to take.

At Government Executive's recent Excellence in Government conference, Zients and his management team cataloged progress during the past year in addressing the administration's top management priorities -- reducing waste, reforming contracting, closing the IT gap, recruiting and retaining top talent, and making government more transparent.

Since taking the reins of federal management, Zients has stayed laser-focused on accountability and transparency as the driving forces for reform. Agencies developed dashboards for tracking and publicizing their performance on major programs. OMB even developed its own version of the renowned "stat" programs -- TechStat -- to evaluate ongoing technology projects and, if necessary, to end them.

According to Zients, this focus is paying off. Of 35 TechStat reviews, five IT projects were kept on track, 19 were accelerated, eight were reduced in scope and three were terminated. The IT Dashboard, which publicizes performance information on 7,000 federal IT investments, provides much of the data used in the TechStat reviews.

But Zients and his team face a catch-22. In order to show progress, they must admit where agencies were falling short. That was much easier in the first year of President Obama's term, when previous failings were more likely to be attributed to the Bush administration. Now, the Obama administration has faced a serious electoral rebuke, in large part due to anger and frustration about the size and role of the federal government.

Where does that leave a management team trying to show progress without further disillusioning an angry citizenry?

"There's a trade-off, but the trade-off is well worth it," said Danny Werfel, controller of OMB's Office of Federal Financial Management. "It's our duty and obligation to get the information out there."

Werfel said unequivocally that "transparency breeds accountability, which leads to results." Whatever the risks at the accountability stage, it's necessary to move forward and create the necessary culture in federal agencies. For example, an agency with a high rate of improper payments, he said, is more likely to acknowledge the error rate and work to drive it down if that data is made public. As Werfel pointed out, this is more effective than simply issuing mandates from OMB or Congress to improve.

Some managers and employees might take the administration's transparency effort as a criticism of their professionalism. Perhaps OMB's most difficult challenge is balancing the sentiments of citizens and federal workers.

"When we talk about making changes and spending our IT dollars better, there are structural changes that create barriers or impediments for senior managers and leaders to do their job even better," Zients said. "There shouldn't be any confusion about criticism of federal management ranks or employees when we talk about productivity gains."

But the administration is taking a risk in counting on the voting public to make that distinction.

Elizabeth Newell covered management, human resources and contracting at Government Executive for three years.