Notes

Chapter 1

1. For further information, see the Office of Management and Budget’s website on this subject: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/mgmt-gpra_gplaw2m/, accessed July 31, 2009.

2. “GPRA,” by Strategisy, LLC, http://www.john-mercer.com/gpra.htm, accessed August 3, 2009.

3. GPRA, Section (b).

4. The backlog exceeded a million cases if you count pending ratings, nonrating work, appeals, etc.

5. The federal government defines an adverse action as a removal, suspension of more than fourteen days, or a change to lower grade. A disciplinary action would refer to a suspension of fourteen days or less or a less punitive action such as an admonishment or reprimand.

6. See “Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, Final Report to the President,” September 8, 2005, http://www.brac.gov/docs/final/Volume1BRACReport.pdf.

7. There are many different unions that represent government employees. They range from the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) to the National Treasury Employees Unions (NTEU) to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Depending upon the circumstances, more than one union can represent the employees of a specific government organization.

8. For one perspective, see “Pay for Performance Shares Problems Between Federal Employees and Contractors,” July 6, 2009, by Mark Gibson, Labor Relations Specialist, Washington, D.C., Unionblog.com, http://www.afge.org/Index.cfm?Page = UnionBlog&FuseAction = View&BlogID = 663, accessed July 31, 2009.

9. This refers to the government employees who came on around the end of the Vietnam War.

10. For a more detailed description of how to manage government employees, see Managing Government Employees: How to Motivate Them, Deal with Difficult Issues and Produce Tangible Results, by Stewart Liff (AMACOM Books, 2007).

11. The one exception being Chapter 7, which addresses both the rewards and recognition and renewal systems.

Chapter 2

1. Shelley E. Phipps, “The System Design Approach to Organizational Development: The University of Arizona Model,” Library Trends, Summer, 2004.

2. Much of this chapter and the next are based on my years of discussions with Paul, on his Organizational Systems Design Guidebook (OPD, Inc. 1996), and on the Five Smooth Stones: Guidebook (San Jose, CA), and Organization Planning and Design, by Gustavson and Alyson S. Von Feldt (2009).

3. Office of Management and Budget, “Primer on Performance Measurement” (revised February 28, 1995), http://govinfo.li brary.unt.edu/npr/library/resource/gpraprmr.html, accessed September 29, 2009.

4. I will discuss both of these approaches in more detail under the chapter that deals with the decision-making and information systems.

5. Social Security Online, www.socialsecurity.gov, http://www.ssa.gov/aboutus/, accessed October 1, 2009.

6. Official website of the Los Angeles Police Department, http:// www.lapdonline.org/inside_the_lapd/content_basic_view/844, accessed October 1, 2009.

7. United States Environmental Protection Agency, http://www.epa.gov/progress/#b, accessed October 1, 2009.

8. For more detailed information on visual management, read Seeing Is Believing: How the New Art of Visual Management Can Boost Performance Throughout Your Organization, by Stewart Liff and Pamela A. Posey, D.B.A. (AMACOM Books, 2004).

9. Gustavson and Von Feldt, Five Smooth Stones: Guidebook.

Chapter 3

1. Gustavson and Von Feldt, Five Smooth Stones: Guidebook.

2. The Requirements Solutions Group, LLC, “How to Model, Analyze and Improve Business Processes,” http://www.require mentssolutions.com/How_to_Model_Analyze_Improve_Business_Processes.html#, accessed October 4, 2009.

3. Business Dictionary.com, http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/business-process-reengineering-BPR.html#, accessed October 5, 2009.

4. A large portion of the history of the reinventing government initiative was gleaned from the document, “National Partnership for Reinventing Government (Formerly the National Performance Review), A Brief History,” by John Kamensky, January 1999.

5. David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector (The Penguin Group, 1993).

6. Al Gore, “Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less, Report of the National Performance Review,” Office of the Vice President, September 1994.

7. In writing this history of the New York Regional Office’s reengineering efforts, I relied both on my own memory and on James Thompson’s excellent article, “Joe versus the Bureaucracy,” Government Executive Magazine, October 1, 1995.

8. See Gustavson, Organizational Systems Design Guidebook (OPD, Inc. 1996) and Five Smooth Stones: Guidebook.

9. A PMC is responsible for reviewing requests to fill vacant positions and determining whether it is in the best interests of the organization to fill that position.

10. For more information on people’s learning preferences, see The Whole Brain Business Book, by Ned Hermann (McGraw-Hill, 1996).

11. For example, GSA’s “First Impressions Program” strives to improve major lobby and plaza spaces in and around federal buildings. U.S. General Services Administration, “Improve Your Space,” http://www.gsa.gov/Portal/gsa/ep/contentView.do?contentType = GSA_BASIC&contentId = 24585&noc = T, accessed October 21, 2009.

12. The dress code banned jeans, tee shirts, sneakers, baseball caps, etc., which were commonly worn by our employees up to then.

Chapter 4

1. Minnesota Department of Health, “Organization Design Principles,” http://www.health.state.mn.us/about/strategic/orgprinciples.html, dated September 12, 2006.

2. By an overall structure, I am referring to an entire government institution that is national, statewide, or local in scope.

3. For example, a contractor took over the VA’s property management program and did such a bad job that their contract was quickly cancelled.

4. As recommended by the National Performance Review.

5. National Partnership for Reinventing Government, “Transforming Organizational Structure,” http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/reports/tosexe.html, accessed November 9, 2009.

6. It is important to understand that the government has many dedicated and excellent clerks. I am simply stating that based on my experience, they tend to both have and cause more problems than higher-graded and skilled workers.

7. Everyone can’t do direct labor because you need some degree of supervisory and support overhead. The key is to have the right amount, and not too much. Moreover, you should not have poor employees sitting around in “make work” jobs because management simply does not want to deal with them.

Chapter 5

1. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

2. The Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002.

3. Wayne Eckerson, “What Are Performance Dashboards?” Information Management Magazine, November 2005.

4. The Balanced Scorecard Institute, http://www.balancedscore card.org, accessed November 23, 2009.

5. By Robert S. Kaplan and David, P. Norton, Harvard Business Press, 1996.

Chapter 6

1. Obviously, you can’t plan for every contingency and unanticipated vacancies will most surely occur. However, the wider the number of possible openings that you plan for, the less frequent will be your ad hoc recruitment efforts.

2. More veterans were likely to qualify at the GS-12 level than at the GS-13 level.

3. If filled at the GS-12 level, the veteran could then be promoted after a year to the GS-13 level if her performance was satisfactory.

4. Although currently there are plenty of applicants for virtually every government job due to the economy that will change when the economy improves.

5. In low-cost areas, where housing is cheaper, taxes are lower and commutes are shorter, government jobs tend to be far more desirable because they more than pay the bills and provide a great deal of stability. Conversely, in high-cost areas, most top-notch candidates do not apply for government jobs because the private sector offers them a much more competitive salary.

Chapter 7

1. I’m not going to spend much time on managing employee behavior as that is covered extensively in my books Managing Government Employees: How to Motivate Them, Deal with Difficult Issues and Produce Tangible Results (AMACOM Books, 2007) and The Complete Guide to Hiring and Firing Government Employees (AMACOM Books, 2009).

2. Title 5—Administrative Personnel, Chapter I—Office of Personnel Management, Part 430 Perfromance Management—Table of Contents, Subpart B Performance Appraisal for General Schedule, Prevailing Rate, and Certain Other Employees, Sec. 430.203 Definitions.

3. Conceived by George Lucas, the first film was originally released on May 25, 1977, by 20th Century Fox.

4. In computing productivity, you usually divide an employee’s standard output by a denominator, which often represents the number of hours the employee is available on the job. For example, if an employee completed forty standard hours of work in a given week, you might divide that total by forty hours if the employee was at work for the entire week. Thus 40/40 = 100%, which would represent the employee’s productivity. However, if the employee is on leave for part of the week, attending training or meetings, and/or working on a special project, you might want to consider excluding some or all of this time from their individual productivity calculation.

5. Three hundred and sixty degree feedback comes from all around an employee. The number “360” stems from the 360 degrees of a circle, with the person appraised being within the circle. Three hundred and sixty feedback is typically provided by peers, supervisors, stakeholders, and subordinates if the person being appraised is a supervisor.

Chapter 8

1. There are other ways of rating people such as “exceptional,” “very good,” and “satisfactory.” The actual terminology depends upon the organization’s system.

2. Technically, giving an employee a fully satisfactory rating and/or not giving her an award is not a negative action. However, over the years, supervisors have given out so many high ratings and awards that many employees tend to view the absence of a high rating and/or an award as being an adverse event. The best way to change this mindset is to have reliable consequences for all levels of performance so that employees recognize that they are not “owed” a high rating and/or an award for average performance; they truly have to earn it.

3. I have also used television monitors to track performance within each team. The upside of this approach is that it is jazzier, more modern, and attractive to the eye. The downside is that it can be expensive to install, may take more time to maintain, and can create computer security issues if it is tied directly into the organization’s computer system.

4. Managing Government Employees: How to Motivate Them, Deal with Difficult Issues and Produce Tangible Results (AMACOM Books, 2007) and The Complete Guide to Hiring and Firing Government Employees (AMACOM Books, 2009).

5. In this circumstance, I decided that I needed coaches, not a series of traditional supervisors. As a result, we abolished all of the first- and second-level supervisory positions, established coach positions with new position descriptions, and let the former supervisors and all other interested candidates apply. Those former supervisors who were not selected were reassigned to direct labor positions at the same grade level.

Chapter 9

1. Under this approach, a deserving employee receives a lottery card that is then placed in a locked box along with the cards of other recipients. At the end of a fixed period of time, several cards are drawn from the box and some form of rewards (dinner for two, movie tickets, etc.) is then given to the “lottery winners.”

2. For example, see Brian Friel, “Seeing Is Believing,” Government Executive Magazine, July 1, 2002, http://www.govexec.com/features/0702/0702s1s1.htm.

Chapter 10

1. In our organization at that time, every director was also the station’s EEO Officer.