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Government Leader home > November 2005 issue
November 2005; Vol. 1 No. 4
PERFORMANCE: 'How are we doing now?': Better performance analysis helps agencies meet goals
By John L. Guerra
Federal agencies can better meet mission aims when they collect and analyze performance data and use the information for key management decisions and practices, the Government Accountability Office said in a recent report.
Sound simple? It’s not. But in the report (GAO-05-927), GAO identified several agencies that are doing a good job of it.
At the National Weather Service, for example, performance data comes from several sources: satellite and other weather-recording equipment as well as human assets in the form of volunteers nationwide who collect data on such deadly events as flash floods, tornadoes and hurricanes.
When the NWS issues tornado warnings in Kansas, for instance, volunteers record the time and place the funnel cloud sets down—if one occurs at all.
“We have a volunteer spotter network—made up of individuals who receive weather training that call the local NWS office with that kind of information,” said John Potts, chief financial officer at NWS.
“Staff from local weather forecast offices also talks to emergency management folks with whom they worked during the storm and talk about their performance,” he said.
NWS then enters the information in a database that compares the prediction lead time with the time the tornado hits. The goal is to expand the length of time between issuing the tornado or flood warning and the occurrence of the event to give residents enough lead time to prepare or flee.
“We’ll look at our performance trends and see an area where we’re not making progress and see what the underlying problems are and make improvements,” Potts said.
The Labor Department, which consists of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Mine Safety and Health Administration and nearly a dozen other departments, streamlined its myriad performance-management systems to get all 17,000 employees in synch with the department’s strategic plan.
It created a platform on which the many subdepartments, each generating its own brand of performance information, could seek to achieve their singular goals.
“We had a variety of at least nine performance management and employee rating systems,” said Patrick Pizzella, Labor’s assistant secretary for administration and management. “Some were hooked to the fiscal year, others to the program year. The best thing to do was to put everyone on one performance cycle.”
Not only that, but the beginning and end of each program year varied by each department within Labor. Performance data on an Oct. 1-Sept. 30 schedule was difficult to overlay and compare with data from a Jan. 1-Dec. 31 performance cycle—making comparison difficult, not to mention conclusions that can lead to performance improvements.
Department heads and employees at Labor now link their performance cycles to the fiscal year. “That’s how the government captures its data anyway; all projects are budget driven,” Pizzella said.
Overhauling its performance management system took about 18 months and leaves Labor in a good position to understand at a glance how well each of its departments is doing.
Perhaps the biggest improvement from Labor’s streamlining was the removal of time-wasting and redundant work that slowed reaching goals. “We eliminated any element that wasn’t mission-critical; if someone labeled something as noncritical, we said, ‘Don’t bother an employee with it.’ ”
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| STORM CHASERS: The National Weather Service extracts performance trends from data gathered about potentially deadly events, such as tornadoes. |
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