With two jobs comes big balancing act for performance chief

By asking chief performance officer nominee Nancy Killefer to double as Office of Management and Budget deputy director for management, President-elect Barack Obama tied her to an agency that has struggled to the point of cliché to "put the M in OMB."

But most observers said Obama made the right decision, noting that the arrangement will bring a new level of authority to OMB's management shop.

In September, when Obama first committed to establishing a CPO, he said the performance czar would operate a management SWAT team out of the White House. Those skeptical of OMB's ability to enact real change were optimistic, while others were concerned the lessons of the Clinton-era National Performance Review -- run by the vice president -- had been forgotten.

"Everybody -- the people who were involved in [NPR] and who had to contend with it -- all agree that that was not the way to organize it, that doing it over again they would have done it all within OMB," said Clay Johnson, current deputy director for management. "The lesson from history, which they responded to, was let's have one place where all this management and improved performance activity emanates."

While the president-elect has not clarified whether Killefer would operate solely out of OMB if confirmed, her deputy director position seems to suggest that is the case. Johnson said the Obama team has expressed "a great appreciation for the ability that OMB has to make good things happen in the federal government."

Neither of Killefer's roles will be easy, and juggling them also will be a challenge. But Jim Flyzik, president of the consulting firm TheFlyzikGroup, who worked with Killefer when he was chief information officer at the Treasury Department, predicted she will find a way to meld the two jobs for better results in each arena.

"You can parlay both those roles in such a way that if you use performance metrics and governance structures around performance as one of your basic principles for how you'll do the deputy director job, the two things sort of go hand in hand," Flyzik said.

In establishing these basic principles, Killefer will have to avoid the temptation to scrap existing performance programs that work or just pile on additional policies, said Adam Hughes, director of federal fiscal policy at the oversight group OMB Watch. "The challenge is to coordinate and highlight good aspects of current systems, not create a new tool or system," he said. Hughes disagreed with other observers about the placement of the performance chief, however, arguing that the position might have been better suited for the White House. "For a variety of reasons agencies don't see OMB as an honest broker," he said.

From a statutory standpoint, the deputy director for management has long had sufficient authority to enact major performance initiatives, such as the Program Assessment Rating Tool established under President Bush, according to good government experts. But the chief performance officer title will give Killefer a direct line to the president and, likely, additional funding, they said.

"She has the tools at OMB and, by virtue of reporting to the president, she now has greater authority to ensure senior leaders at agencies are on track to achieving measurable goals than anyone to date," said Robert Shea, former OMB associate director for administration and government performance, now with the consulting firm Grant Thornton LLP.

With a long list of obstacles and challenges ahead, Killefer has at least one very important thing going for her -- a mandate from the incoming president.

"The most important thing is, does the president want the government to work better? It starts with that," Johnson said.