ASPA Center for Accountability & Performance

Biennial Update to GAO’s High-Risk List

U.S. Government Accountability Office

This biennial update describes the status of high-risk areas, outlines actions that are needed to assure further progress, and identifies new high-risk areas needing attention by the executive branch and Congress.  Substantial progress has been made, with 16 of the 34 areas making improvements since 2021. This the most progress in the eight years GAO started rating high-risk areas. Two of the 16 were removed from the list. Three new areas were added.

New Initiative to Measure Agencies’ Organizational Health and Performance

U.S. Office of Management and Budget

This memorandum outlines steps executive departments and agencies will take to ensure that agency decisions regarding work environments continue to improve organizational health and organizational performance. Agencies’ organizational health and organizational performance frameworks and approaches must support delivery of the agency’s statutory missions.

CAP WEBINAR: The Evidence Act and Performance (Tuesday, Apr 25 – 1 p.m. EDT)

American Society for Public Administration

Nick Hart, the policy director of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking and current president of the Data Foundation, and Kathryn Newcomer, George Washington University professor and co-author with Hart of Evidence-building and Evaluation in Government, will discuss current challenges to evidence-building efforts in federal agencies. 

RECORDING: CAP Awards Ceremony and Harry Hatry Tribute

American Society for Public Administration

The Center for Accountability and Performance’s annual recognition award ceremony was held April 12. It was supplemented by a special tribute to the late Harry Hatry, a pioneer in modern performance and program evaluation at the Urban Institute.

Six Steps to Make Your Strategic Plan Really Strategic

Harvard Business Review

Many strategic plans aren’t strategic, or even plans. To fix that, try the six-step process described in this article.

Using Evidence-Based Management to Drive Change

LinkedIn – “Change Management”

Change is inevitable in any organization, but how do you make sure that your change initiatives are based on sound evidence and not just intuition or assumptions? Evidence-based management (EBM) is a systematic approach to using the best available data and research to inform your decisions and actions.

Agencies Report Quarterly Progress on Priority Goals

U.S. Office of Management and Budget

Agencies report progress on a quarterly basis. The two-year (FY22–23) performance period will end on September 30. These quarterly updates across 90 APGs from major agencies provide insight to the public about progress made in the Federal Government and highlight key milestones toward achieving these goals.

Can Performance Pay Helps States & Localities Hang onto the Best & Brightest?

RouteFifty

There has been growing interest in adopting performance pay. Cara Woodson Welch, executive director of the Public Sector HR Association says that anecdotally she has been “hearing more people talking about it recently.”

Federal Agencies to Develop Measures of Organizational Health & Performance

U.S. Office of Management and Budget

OMB released new guidance to agencies, requiring that they identify a set of indicators, which may be adjusted over time, that each agency- identified major operating unit will use for measuring, monitoring, and improving organizational health and organizational performance. These include indicators that support agency assessment of and decision-making related to current and future work environments. 

Resource of the Week:  Inventory of Data-Driven Local Governments

Office of Performance Analytics, City of Alexandria VA 

Here is a map and list of 116 city and county governments that use data, analysis, process improvement, and/or evidence to continuously improve their services. If you know of others, you can have them added to the list!

Improving Transparency of Cross-Agency Priority Goals

US Government Accountability Office

GAO found that the administration’s designated Cross-Agency Priority goals do not address all relevant GPRA Modernization Act requirements, and related guidance and practices. OMB designated CAP goals for three of the five management areas required by GPRAMA.

Negative Audits Can Be Good News

Barrett & Greene

A performance audit of the City of Austin’s strategic direction takes issue with the timeliness and quality of the performance measures used to measure strategic outcomes in the Texas state capital.

White House Progress Report on Advancing Equitable Data

Office of Science & Technology Policy

OSTP released a report on the progress the Biden-Harris administration has made in collecting and analyzing data to help identify disparities in federal policies and programs in order to deliver more equitable outcomes for the American people.

Blend and Braid Funds to Strengthen Data & Evaluation Capacity

Social Science Research Network

The biggest benefit of integrated data systems is its biggest challenge: working with multiple government programs. Each program has different funding rules, timelines, and goals. There are too many for a government data analytics shop to be an expert in all of their administrative minutia. Nonetheless, some state and local governments had built amazing systems with dozens of programs. How had they done it?

Moving Together to Achieve Systems Change

Data for Social Impact Report

Accelerate Aspirations: Moving Together to Achieve Systems Change is a comprehensive report on the key trends and tensions in the emerging field of data for social impact.  

12 Tricks for Getting Things Done

Management Today

Sir Michael Barber, who once led Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, knows how to get things done. Here, he shares with Management Today his most effective advice to achieving ambitious things.

Webinar: Federal Management & Performance Priorities for 2023. Wed., Mar. 29, 1 p.m. Eastern)

ASPA Center for Accountability & Performance

President Biden released his proposed fiscal year 2024 budget in earlier this month. It was accompanied by his management priorities – both government wide and agency specific. This session will be an update on progress over the past year along with a summary of new initiatives for the coming year, with an emphasis on the status of the first-ever set of governmentwide and agency level learning agendas.

Webinar: 21^st Century Budgeting: From Line Items to Priority-Based Budgeting

International City/County Managers Association (ICMA)

This three-part workshop uses interactive sessions to teach the process of implementing PBB and applying the data to budget creation and decision making. April 6-20, 2023.

Opportunity to Expand Smart Budgeting

Governing

An initiative to help policymakers use evidence to inform spending – the Pew-McArthur Results First initiative begun in 2010 — is coming to a close after more than a decade, but it should be just the beginning of state governments’ efforts to bring analytical tools to bear to produce better outcomes.

White House Report on Implementation of Equitable Data Initiatives

National Science and Technology Council

The report highlights progress on making disaggregated data the norm (while protecting privacy). Federal agencies are collecting, generating, and analyzing disaggregated data – reflecting race, veterans status, income level, rural & urban, etc. – and are hiring data practitioners to analyze these data.

How to Spend Your City’s Money

New Yorker

In participatory budgeting, much depends upon the details: how much funding is allocated, what types of projects are eligible, how they are sorted, who actually participates, and so on. But the system, when it’s executed well, promises to do more than simply allocate funds. It can improve the quality of public works and services; by strengthening civil society and increasing transparency and trust in government.

Is Participatory Budgeting Coming to a Community Near You?

RouteFifty

Participatory budgeting has slowly been growing since it was first introduced in the U.S. in Chicago in 2009. Many anticipate it is about to see a boom as billions of federal dollars continue to pour into local communities.