Surveys show federal managers face major hurdles trying to do their jobs

Program managers and federal executives cited poor policy design, lack of training and ineffective political leadership among the major challenges they faced at work, according to two new surveys.

One survey of senior federal executives, conducted by Bill Eggers, global public sector director for Deloitte Research, showed half the respondents believed the government was less capable of successfully executing large projects now than it was a decade ago. That number ballooned when comparing federal effectiveness today to 30 years ago, with more than 60 percent of respondents saying the government was less capable now than it was then.

Eggers highlighted some of the results of his survey, conducted as research for a spring 2009 book, at Tuesday's Excellence in Government Conference, produced by Government Executive.

The respondents identified a number of projects they considered unsuccessful or moderately unsuccessful, including modern ones like the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act and Iraq reconstruction. They listed increased administrative and political constraints and a lack of effective political leadership as two of the problems most likely to affect program execution adversely.

Senior executives also expressed concern about the federal government's ability to craft public policy, with less than one-third of respondents saying it did so effectively. The respondents, all federal employees, actually gave state and local governments higher marks for policy design.

"When we surveyed members of the Senior Executive Service as well as fellows of the National Academy of Public Administration, they told us… that the policy design process is largely broken," Eggers wrote by e-mail on Tuesday.

He said the "total disconnect" between policy designers and implementers partially accounted for the broken process. Nearly half of SES respondents said policy was "rarely" designed by those with relevant experience.

A separate survey of 123 program managers, which the Council for Excellence in Government and Management Concepts conducted, was presented at Tuesday's conference by Selena Rezvani, an assessment consultant for Management Concepts. That survey showed that program managers did not feel they were receiving sufficient training, even in key areas.

Between 35 percent and 50 percent of respondents said they had not received training in areas such as requirements development, risk management, budget and financial management, working with stakeholders and Congress, or dealing with the media.

They also lamented the difficulty of daily tasks such as developing measures and assessing program results, responding to special inquiries from the Office of Management and Budget, and preparing or negotiating budget requests.

"I'm spending more time feeding measurement systems than focusing on strategic decisions and investments that will produce future result," one respondent said.

Not surprisingly, managers mentioned money, people and technology as three resources that would help them achieve their program objectives. They also said a network of program managers, or some other kind of forum to exchange best practices, would be beneficial.

"All of us are smarter than one of us..." one respondent said. "Discussion of challenges, success, lessons learned, can help all of us become more successful."