Groups warn against reinventing the wheel on management reform

The Obama administration should modify, but not scrap, existing performance measurement systems, according to a report released on Monday by good government and watchdog groups.

While the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act and the Bush administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool have increased the focus on performance and accountability, the report said, the tools are limited in their effectiveness because of a lack of high-level leadership, insufficient involvement from Congress and other stakeholders, and uncoordinated mandates.

"This suggests that PART should be revised and updated to address problems evident in both its design and its implementation," stated the report, released by Accenture's Institute for Public Service Value, the Georgetown Public Policy Institute and OMB Watch, a Washington-based watchdog group.

Other management observers have reached similar conclusions.

The report -- based on a series of workshops, advisory group meetings and panel discussions over nearly two years -- recommended developing a strategy to better align the goals of GPRA with a revised version of PART and a 2007 Bush administration executive order creating the agency performance officer position and a governmentwide performance improvement council.

Political appointees, career staff, lawmakers, private sector experts and members of the general public all should be involved in creating a more linked and dynamic system, the report said.

"The reform and enhancement of current performance systems will be integral to the Obama administration's effort to enact major changes in the federal government and throughout the country," the study concluded.

Watchdog groups, most notably OMB Watch, have long criticized PART for encouraging federal managers to focus on achieving positive ratings rather than real-world outcomes. Clay Johnson, Bush's deputy director of management at the Office of Management and Budget, often said agencies that did not perform well on PART faced "public shame and humiliation and the opportunity to be questioned about it by the president."

The result, according to the report, was that managers would spend their time on mandatory compliance exercises to avoid ratings of "results not demonstrated" or "ineffective" rather than on actually improving programs or analyzing performance data.

When developing a future performance management system, the Obama administration should focus more on encouraging managers to meet established program goals and pay less attention to managerial structures, program formats and design criteria, the report stated.

Obama administration leaders have said that PART should be overhauled.

OMB Director Peter R. Orszag has pledged to "create a better set of performance metrics that are outcome oriented and in line with public expectations." Meanwhile, new Chief Performance Officer Jeffrey Zients said during his confirmation hearing in June that PART "did not significantly increase the use of performance information in decision-making."

Achieving that goal, however, will be difficult without top-level leadership and employee buy-in to changes at the programmatic level, the report concluded.

"The long-term success in using performance data to improve programs will depend greatly on how much priority the highest levels of government give the collection, analysis, and use of performance data," the paper said. "From the president on down through agency heads, government leaders need to repeatedly emphasize the goal of improving results and the use of evidence to inform decisions toward that end."

Other suggestions outlined in the report included:

• Dedicating more tools, training and resources to performance analysis.
• Refining the role of OMB in the evaluation process to allow agencies more freedom in setting goals and measuring specific objectives.
• Creating a more open and transparent process for judging the progress of federal programs by revealing additional information about the basis for ratings.
• Providing more timely and detailed performance information to Congress so results can be more efficiently integrated into the budgetary process.