Management agenda gets face-lift with new Web site, message

The Office of Management and Budget is reshaping its management agenda message with a new focus on signs of change and a new look for its Web site.

The new public face is timed to coincide with Thursday's release of the quarterly President's Management Agenda score card for the first quarter of fiscal 2007. The changes reflect a shift from concentrating on the metrics used for the traffic-light-style grading to looking more at what good marks mean in terms of the effectiveness of government programs, OMB officials told Government Executive on Wednesday.

The redesign of Results.gov, home to information on the management agenda and the quarterly score cards, will go live Thursday. The new site will be geared more clearly toward federal employees -- the main target audience -- and will highlight individual successes over general program information.

Clay Johnson, OMB's deputy director for management, described the five key management initiatives -- human capital management, competitive sourcing, financial performance, e-government and budget-performance integration -- as tools that allow agencies to become more efficient, rather than goals in and of themselves. The theme of emphasizing actual improvements rather than the scores, is one that aligns more closely with President Bush's perspective on federal management, Johnson has said.

He said Wednesday that the changes on the score card, which has gone from a sea of red to a mosaic of red, yellow and green, do not translate directly to better management. "This doesn't mean that government is that much more effective than five years ago," he said. "We need to be sure [agencies] are taking this ability to be more effective, and being more effective."

The redesigned Web site reflects this with anecdotal evidence of better management. During a tour of the site, OMB officials highlighted sections devoted to success stories (titled "Making a Bigger Difference"), effective management practices ("Don't You Agree? Apply to You?"), and obstacles to effectiveness ("If Only…").

Johnson said the section on management practices can be particularly helpful to federal employees who want to improve performance. Discussions on transparency and accountability, for example, can help employees broach those subjects to managers and raise questions about how their office functions.

OMB officials are open to suggestions for items to post on the Web site, Johnson said, but items in the obstacles section reflected familiar OMB complaints, including a Capitol Hill staffer described as blocking an administration management initiative, and identical pay raises for poor and satisfactory employees.

In the new OMB score card, the greatest change is in the volatile e-government category. This area has experienced roller-coaster movement over the last year, attributed by officials in part to meeting and missing hard deadlines on major projects. Five agencies -- the Agriculture, Defense and Justice departments, the Office of Personnel Management and the Smithsonian Institution -- earned rising scores on the latest round, while the Education and Transportation departments and Social Security Administration lost ground.

The administration's human capital initiative changed minimally, with just the Commerce Department moving up to a top green rating. In competitive sourcing, the controversial program to evaluate government activities for possible performance by private sector companies, the Homeland Security Department moved down to the lowest rating -- red for "unsatisfactory" -- while Justice went up from yellow, for "mixed results," to green.

Agriculture and the Army Corps of Engineers both boosted their scores in the area of linking budget and performance information, while the Housing and Urban Development Department moved up to yellow in financial performance and the General Services Administration jumped two levels from red to green in that area.

Under the administration's other major program initiatives, listed in a separate section of the score card, the Small Business Administration moved up a notch to wipe all red off the listings for the faith-based and community initiative, while Agriculture did the same for a program to improve management of federal real property.