Obama performance agenda takes shape

Identifying and tackling some of the most urgent performance goals are at the top of the Obama administration's management agenda, a senior official with the Office of Management and Budget said on Monday.

Dustin Brown, OMB deputy assistant director for management, said the full management and performance agenda will come together during the next few months, but the administration already has begun identifying performance goals and working on various initiatives, including hiring reform, employee satisfaction and wellness, transparency, and contracting reform. OMB is working with agencies now on these issues, Brown said. He spoke at Government Executive's Excellence in Government conference in Washington.

OMB Director Peter R. Orszag directed agency heads in a June 11 memo to identify a limited number of high-priority goals and begin developing strategies to address them.

The administration likely will face many challenges in carrying out its management and performance agenda, said panel participants at Monday's conference. Nancy Killefer, who runs the global public sector practice at McKinsey & Co., and the former Obama nominee to be chief performance officer, said the administration must have a clear idea of the environment in which it's operating. Killefer said OMB and agencies should take stock of how they are performing currently, and define their challenges and goals.

"You've got to start with those in place before you can even set out to have a set of priorities that make sense and resonate with your organization," she said.

Robert Shea, director of Grant Thornton LLP's global public sector and a former senior OMB official for performance, said the systems now used to gain a fact-based understanding of the performance landscape are not mature enough.

"We will never get to an ideal state; what we do is very complicated," Shea said. "We'll never be able to measure reduction in processing of [Veterans Affairs] claims the same way you do curing cancer, which is really the diversity of things we're trying to track."

Brown agreed that having data is important to performance, but said measuring alone doesn't improve programs.

"Just weighing the pig doesn't make it fatter," Brown said. "I think we've done a lot of measuring and reporting up until now and we'll continue to do that and it's important, but just doing that in and of itself, and that process, is not going to change the dial. We need to take that next step going forward." Shea said one of OMB's primary challenges will be ensuring that it is genuinely focused on helping agencies achieve their performance goals, rather than imposing goals on them from above.

"You've got a hurdle to overcome as far as gaining trust that this isn't a political exercise," Shea told Brown.

OMB already has met with at least a dozen agencies to discuss the development of their performance priorities, Brown said. They are most excited about advancing interagency performance goals, he said.

In addition to prioritizing goals, the administration wants to ensure that top leadership is invested in performance improvement initiatives, and that agencies employ best practices and evidence-based strategies, Brown said. After those three elements are in place, "it's the relentless attention … that's really going to make those things happen."