OPM

February’s “snowmaggeddon” storm that trapped commuters in their cars for hours during evening rush hour, has prompted a new set of dismissal and closure notifications for federal employees aimed at preventing a repeat of such problems. Keep reading →

In a March 16, 2011 keynote address, Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry said, “Our formal performance reviews are infrequent and rote…the formal review process seems to take place in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, where everyone is above average. If that doesn’t make our performance ratings suspect, I don’t know what would.” In short, it is widely recognized in both public and private sectors that performance management (PM) is “broken” and must be reformed.

Improving performance management has been a long sought-after goal for many organizations, and has recently been targeted by OPM as an area for reform. Many agree that PM is broken, but given that it has been the subject of numerous reform efforts over many years, a critical question becomes: Can performance management actually be fixed? Keep reading →

Government Executive magazine’s cover story, “A Thousand Cuts,” by Joseph Marks, paints a graphic picture of what it is like to be in government today. Here’s a list of the various directives that direct many of these cuts.

President Obama’s Campaign to Cut Waste was launched in June 2011, but it started earlier than that. It was presaged in his 2011 State of the Union address, when he said the government needed to be reorganized. While that hasn’t happened yet, there are a number of initiatives federal managers have been inundated with to develop plans and implement. Keep reading →

Not long after Sheila Bair was appointed to chair the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 2006, senior officials at the FDIC sat down in a series of meetings to discuss what to do about a disturbing statistic.

“We couldn’t figure out why our agency was 25th in the rankings” of employee satisfaction, recalled Ira Kitmacher, manager for culture change and senior adviser at FDIC. Keep reading →

A lack of institutional knowledge in developing IT systems was believed to be a leading cause behind the Office of Personnel Management’s troubled launch of its new government jobs search site, OPM’s inspector general testified at a House subcommittee hearing yesterday.

“I cannot stress how important it is to have the correct processes in place at the beginning of any project,” said Patrick McFarland at an Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee hearing that looked into whether OPM is meeting its mission. Keep reading →

As Federal Computer Week‘s Alice Lipowicz notes in her ongoing coverage of the troubled relaunch of USAJobs.gov, “It is unusual to see a federal IT story that generates the kind of strong emotions that the USAJobs 3.0 launch has done in the past several weeks.”

Officials at the Office of Personnel Management have come under withering attack for failing to anticipate the initial surge in user demand or the need for greater system and help desk capacity that followed. Keep reading →

The General Services Administration instituted a new governmentwide telework policy Monday that essentially flips the managerial presumption that employees cannot telecommute to one that presumes they can. It also sets a new benchmark in detailing the government’s mobility and telework guidelines for federal employees and supervisors.

“Work is what we do, not where we are,” the GSA policy states, and a phrase that GSA Administrator Martha Johnson often repeats in her public remarks. Keep reading →

Updated: Efforts by the Office of Personnel Management to rectify technical problems with its new USAJobs site may have made matters worse, according to a Federal Computer Week report, as agency officials continue to work around the clock to remedy the customer complaints.

Users trying to apply for jobs on the USAJobs search website have continued to encounter extended timeouts, lost data and incorrect results since the site was relaunched last week. Keep reading →

Much of what the federal government spends each year are benefit payments to individuals. As a recent inspector general report showed, many times those payments go to the wrong people, or are made in the wrong amounts, and in some cases to people who are no longer alive. Keep reading →

Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) predicted the chances that Congress will put together anything longer lasting that a string of continuing resolutions after the current continuing funding resolution runs out Nov. 18 are “fairly remote.”

Speaking at a conference on federal technology and innovation in Washington today, Connolly expressed concern about the intractable state of the federal budget debate. Keep reading →

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