OPM reevaluates human capital marks for management score card

Five departments and agencies saw their human capital ratings go from green to yellow on the latest President's Management Agenda score card, but officials say those results are the product of rigorous reevaluations and new initiatives, rather than a decline in quality.

"I was looking back over the past years of the PMA and all the things we asked agencies to do, and it occurred to me it was a good time to step back and assess how well the human capital initiative was doing across agencies," said Kevin Mahoney, associate director for human capital leadership at the Office of Personnel Management. "What I was particularly interested in doing is figuring out if check marks agencies had earned earlier on could be substantiated…. We said we're going to spend the entire year re-validating every check mark on their score card."

That reevaluation process began in July 2007, Mahoney said. Those evaluations confirmed that most agencies had in fact earned their green ratings. But the five that were downgraded this quarter -- the Energy, Health and Human Services, Interior and Justice departments, and the Peace Corps -- had begun human capital initiatives but had not implemented them fully.

"If you're green, it might mean I wanted to hire engineers to fill a critical need, and you look back and say I met my need," Mahoney said. "Agencies that went from green to yellow still can earn back their check marks." Max Stier, president of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, said the red, yellow and green rankings might not fully reflect the complexity of the evaluations, but he praised OPM for re-evaluating its ratings. "There's always a tension between simplicity and completeness," he said. "We need to have as much transparency as possible in the grading process. Some of the data points aren't uniformly available. We don't have information on quality of hires, the true time to hire. But that doesn't take away from the importance of this kind of system." Both Mahoney and Stier agreed that the next administration should continue some kind of rankings system to keep a public focus on human capital and other management issues. Mahoney said government should focus on performance management in particular.

"Whether or not the score card continues to exist, we wanted to set a process where agencies could continue to work on these initiatives," he said. "That was my reason for wanting to start this process now. There's a lot of interest to continue this new way of managing things in the government. Will I brief the [new] president? If he calls me up and asks, sure, but he hasn't done that yet."