OPM Director John Berry gave an interesting speech this afternoon to the Human Capital Management Federal conference in Vienna, Va., part of which focused on performance accountability. Berry said he’s starting to look at what “sticking points” are keeping the government from disciplining and firing poor performers. But while Berry made it clear slackers must be held to account, he also said he doesn’t want the government to go overboard: I am not an advocate of the GE model where you’ve got to fire 10 percent of the workforce a year. I wouldn’t want to work in a company like…
Browsing: performance management
Shelley Metzenbaum, OMB’s associate director for performance and personnel management, issued a memo on performance management today that didn’t seem to say much beyond previously announced plans to meet with agencies on their high-priority goals and set up a website to track agencies’ performance. One interesting line, though, was this one: “Agencies should consider this year a transition year during which OMB and the [Performance Improvement Council] will move to a more dynamic performance planning, management, improvement, and reporting framework that is useful, streamlined and coherent.” This seems to indicate that OMB is going to establish some kind of performance-management…
I reported yesterday on the Office of Management and Budget’s plan to review agencies’ progress toward their high-priority performance goals and post that information on the Web. I spoke with Peter Grace at HUD this morning and he said the site will be called USAperformance.gov and he expects it to be live by July. Shelley Metzenbaum of OMB would only say yesterday that it would be up this summer or this fall, so perhaps July is the goal, but they’re hedging their bets on when it will actually go live. Right now, the USAperformance.gov URL exists but is password protected.
A request for our readers: I know OMB’s new performance management guidelines are still pretty new, and I’m sure many agencies haven’t had a chance to discuss them yet. But if your agency is planning to apply for the extra program evaluation funding that’s available in 2010, send me an e-mail — I want to hear from you.
OMB director Peter Orszag sent an 8-page memo to agencies today outlining new performance management guidelines. Here it is (pdf). Thoughts to come later this morning once I’ve actually had a chance to read it…
Everybody’s heard the urban legend that it’s impossible to fire a government worker, but Federal Times wants to take a closer look at the federal firing process and find out what’s really going on. And to do that, we’d like to hear from you. Are you a manager who has found it impossible to get rid of the one bad apple in your office who can’t — or won’t — improve? Or has your agency backed you up when you needed to terminate someone for disciplinary reasons or poor performance? On the other hand, are you an employee who lost your…
10:50 a.m. EST: Killefer just gave a short statement, talking about the need to work across agency boundaries to improve services. She also said a few words about federal employees: Government employees themselves will be central to this effort. I am convinced that the success of every policy of this administration will be influenced by the people engaged in it. 10:43 a.m. EST: Obama on that rapidly-growing budget deficit: My own economic and budget team projects that unless we take decisive action, even after our economy pulls out of its slide, trillion-dollar deficits will be a reality for years to…