John Kamensky

The President’s fiscal year 2014 budget was released last week and emphasizes the creation of “a culture of performance improvement.”  This is also the theme of a new  IBM Center report, by University of Wisconsin professor Donald Moynihan who is a close observer of the international performance movement.

The big news for many was the announcement last week that Shelley Metzenbaum, who is the Office of Management and Budget official spearheading the Obama Administration’s performance management initiatives on a day-to-day basis, will be leaving to return home to Boston.  “She arrived with a plan and gave us a set of priorities,” notes Jeff Zients, who serves as President Obama’s chief performance officer.

Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen was superb at handling big, complex challenges that reach across agency boundaries.  He led the evacuation of lower Manhattan during 9/11.  He took over the Katrina rescue operations after they floundered.  He led the U.S. response to the Haiti earthquake, and the Gulf Coast BP Oil Spill.

Before Allen retired, I asked him “Where does the government find the next one hundred Thad Allens?”  He didn’t have a good answer.  But answering that question becomes more critical as the government finds itself increasingly facing cross-agency challenges.

Sometimes we get caught up in buzzwords of the day:  Total Quality Management, Lean Six Sigma, Agile, Business Process Reengineering, or Reinventing Government.  But the bottom line in each of these types of management improvement initiatives is:  how do we create a culture of innovation?

What is “innovation?”  There are plenty of different definitions, but one I’ve found to be practical is: “New ideas, or current thinking applied in fundamentally different ways, resulting in significant change in operating models, business processes, or products and services.” 

Last week, President Obama signed a memo directing agencies to modernize their construction permitting and review processes in order to: “advance the goal of cutting aggregate timelines for major infrastructure projects in half, while also improving outcomes for communities and the environment.”  Based on pilots and best practices developed over the past y

The GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 requires agencies to annually “identify low-priority program activities based on an analysis of their contribution to the mission and goals of the agency and include an evidence-based justification for designating a program activity as low priority.”  This requirement became effective for the first time with the preparation

Recent legislation imposes new accountability requirements in the form of more reporting, for example, on spending on conferences; and pending legislation would require even more details about spending, across the board.

Defining Federal Programs Isn’t Simple

There is more than one way to define what constitutes a federal “program,” and it is not unlike trying to define molecules, atoms, and sub-atomic particles.