Strategic Plans And Performance Assessments example essay topic

Introduction: in 1993, Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) with broad bipartisan support. The law is part of a set of budget-reform measures intended to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of government. Both the General Accounting Office (GAO) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) testified in favor of the bill, and the President's National Performance Review advocated its implementation. Unlike several predecessor systems (program planning and budgeting, management by objectives, and zero-based budgeting), GPRA is not an executive branch initiative but rather a congressional mandate.

It has received a high level of attention in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Goals / Outcomes: of GPRA is to focus agency and oversight attention on the outcomes of government activities -- the results produced for the American public. The approach is to develop measures of outcomes that can be tied to annual budget allocations. To that end, the law requires each agency to produce three documents: a strategic plan, which sets general goals and objectives over a minimal 5-year period; a performance plan, which translates the goals of the strategic plan into annual targets; and a performance report, which demonstrates whether the targets were met. Agencies delivered the first required strategic plans to Congress in September 1997 and the first performance plans in the spring of 1998. Performance reports are due in March 2000.

The law calls for strategic plans to be updated every 3 years and the other documents annually. Activities: The general principles of GPRA have been implemented by many state governments and in other countries (for example, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.K. ), but implementation by the U.S. federal government is the largest scale application of the concept to date and somewhat different. Over the last 5 years, various states have tried to develop performance measures of their investments. With respect to performance measures of science and technology activities, states tend to rely on an economic-development perspective with measures reflecting job creation and commercialization. Managers struggle to define appropriate measures, and level-of-activity measures dominate their assessments.

3 With respect to other countries, our limited review of their experiences showed that most are struggling with the same issues that the United States is concerned with, notably how to measure the results of basic research. Not every aspect of the system worked perfectly the first time around in the United States. Some agencies started the learning process earlier and scaled up faster than others. OMB allowed considerable agency experimentation with different approaches to similar activities, waiting to see what ideas emerged. The expectations of and thus the guidance from the various congressional and executive audiences for strategic and performance plans have not always been the same and that has made it difficult for agencies to develop plans agreeable to all parties. Groups outside government that are likely to be interested in agency implementation of GPRA have not been consulted as extensively as envisioned.

There is general agreement that all relevant parties should be engaged in a continuing learning process, and there are high expectations for improvement in future iterations. Motivating change: The development of plans to implement GPRA has been particularly difficult for agencies responsible for research activities supported by the federal government. A report by GAO (GAO, 1997) indicates that measuring performance and results is particularly challenging for regulatory programs, scientific research programs, and programs that deliver services to taxpayers through third parties, such as state and local governments. From January through June 1998, COSE PUP held a series of workshops to gather information about the implementation of GPRA. The first workshop, cosponsored with the Academy Industry Program, focused on the approaches that industry uses to develop strategic plans and performance assessments. Industry participants emphasized the importance of having a strategic plan that clearly articulates the goals and objectives of the organization.

One of the industry participants said that the objective of their industrial research is "knowledge generation with a purpose". The industry representative indicated that the company must first support world-class research programs that create new ideas; second, relate the new ideas to an important need within the organization or project; and third, build new competence in technologies and people. With respect to performance assessment, many industry participants noted that results of applied research and development programs are more easily quantified than results of basic research. However, even though they might not be able to quantify results of basic research, they nonetheless support it because they believe it important to their business; investments in basic research do pay off over time. Creating a vision: With respect to assessing basic research, industry representatives indicated that they must rely on the judgment of individuals knowledgeable about the content of the research and the objectives of the organization to evaluate the results of such efforts. Some industry participants stressed the importance of giving careful consideration to any metrics one adopts -- whether in industrial or government research.

It is important to choose measures well and use them efficiently to minimize non-productive efforts. The metrics used also will change the behavior of the people being measured. For example, in basic research, if you measure relatively unimportant indicators, such as the number of publications per researcher instead of the quality of those publications, you will foster activities that may not be very productive or useful to the organization. A successful performance assessment program will both encourage positive behavior and discourage negative behavior. Metrics must be simple, not easily manipulated, and drive the right behavior.

Most industry R&D metrics are more applicable to assessing applied research and technology development activities in the mission agencies. The second workshop focused on the strategic and performance plans of 10 federal agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Agriculture, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As might be expected, most of these organizations use different approaches to translate the goals in their strategic plans into performance goals for scientific and engineering research. Some agencies use qualitative, others quantitative, and still others, a combination of qualitative and quantitative measures.

There was a strong consensus among the agencies that the practical outcomes of basic research cannot be captured by quantitative measures alone. Agency representatives generally agreed that progress in program management and facility operation can be assigned quantitative values. Developing political support: In recent years, economists have developed a number of techniques to estimate the economic benefits (such as rate of return) of research. The primary benefit of this method is that it provides a metric of research outcomes.

However, there are a number of difficulties. In particular, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI, 1994) found that existing economic methods and data are sufficient to measure only a subset of important dimensions of the outcomes and impacts of fundamental science. Economic methods are best suited to assessing mission-agency programs and less-well suited to assessing the work of fundamental research agencies, particularly on an annual basis. Furthermore, economists are not able to estimate the benefit-to-cost ratio "at the margin" for fundamental science (that is, the marginal rate of return -- or how much economic benefit is received for an additional dollar investment in research), and it is this information that is needed to make policy decisions.

Finally, the time that separates the research from its ultimate beneficial outcome is often very long -- 50-some years is not usual.