The Bounce Effect

Learn how to improve your E-Gov PMA score and keep it green.

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Alan Joch has been an independent business and technology writer for more than a decade. His expertise includes server and desktop virtualization, cloud computing, emerging mobile applications, and cybersecurity.

Photo: Gary Landsman

At SBA, CIO Christine Liu held a series of strategy sessions with folks across the agency to develop an IT road map that ultimately morphed into an EA.

Five years into the President’s Management Agenda, a new phenomenon is hitting more agencies — call it the PMA bounce. Agencies attain green one quarter only to drop to yellow or red in the next round and then pop back to green in a subsequent quarter. This bounce effect is particularly apparent in the E-Gov scores.

The Small Business Administration has a history of volatile scores in the E-Gov category. In December 2005, SBA was riding high as one of only six agencies that had achieved E-Gov green. But by the second quarter of 2006, its ranking fell to yellow and then to red in the third quarter. The latest reports show SBA rallying back to green.

Christine Liu, a former acting deputy CIO at the State Department, became SBA’s CIO last April, but she understands the bounce. Getting to green is hard, she says, “but maintaining green is even harder.” But it’s not impossible; there are ways to help keep the green momentum going. These management approaches essentially turn on inculcating the skills that helped an agency first achieve a high rating.

Tip 1: Focus on Mission First

Bar raisings and other challenges have brought volatility to the Transportation Department’s E-Gov scores, too. It bounced from yellow to red and finally to green for the last quarter. Daniel G. Mintz, who became CIO last May, says his plan for future PMA consistency is to encourage everyone on his staff to stop thinking of the mandates as just another round of paper exercises disconnected from the agency’s core mission.

Fact

8 – 10 – 8: In the most recent PMA E-Gov rankings — where 10 scores shifted — eight agencies rated green, 10 yellow and eight red.

Mintz took the unusual step of creating an internal PMA-like evaluation program to help people internalize goals. “The problem I saw when I came here was people who were too focused on just looking outside — at how to fulfill the Office of Management and Budget’s requirements,” he says.

Mintz’s new stoplight charts don’t map directly to PMA initiatives, but target agency touch points, such as meeting software certification milestones and fostering closer collaboration among operating administrators. Ultimately, success in these areas will translate into improved PMA scores, he says.

The internal charts track security initiatives and other important projects at each of Transportation’s operating administrations, such as the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Highway Administration. Each month, the administrations’ CIOs and their staffs gather to evaluate quantitative and subjective results and then distribute rankings in quarterly, departmentwide summaries. “Rather than hoping by the end of the year we’d get to some goal, we meet monthly to make sure we were hitting our targets” incrementally, Mintz says.

Tip 2: Get Everyone on the Same Page

A few weeks after Liu arrived at SBA, she initiated a series of strategic sessions around IT that included members of her staff and representatives of the agency’s business functions. “We held sessions over eight weeks to let program managers explain their business functions to everyone,” Liu says. “Then we worked together to align IT solutions to their business needs.”

The upshot was a strategic IT road map that addresses one of OMB’s central E-Gov mandates: “SBA’s business and IT staff worked together to outline the business enterprise architecture blueprint,” Liu says.

In an effort to stay green, she also works closely with her OMB examiner when new E-Gov milestones appear overly ambitious. “We’re a small agency with a small budget, and yet we still have all of the PMA issues and objectives that everyone else has to comply with,” Liu says. Sometimes her OMB examiner accepts a compromise, sometimes not, she concedes.

Tip 3: Convince Employees to Apply Self-Management

For E-Gov, Mintz says he will continue to hammer home to his staff the payoffs that meeting internal and OMB objectives bring to Transportation. It’s easier to get OMB budget approvals for programs and funding. But more important, meeting these goals can improve the quality of their own work, their ability to access data more easily or more quickly or to provide better services to taxpayers.

Mintz says he will know when he’s successful because “people will follow the initiative even when their managers aren’t in the room. They want to do it because it has value to them, and they understand that the value of what they are doing will be applicable to the department.”

It's Not Easy Staying Green

“With expanded electronic government, there’s been more of an up-and-down pattern, or bounce,” says Austin Russ, chief enterprise architect of Robbins-Gioia, a management consulting firm that issues quarterly analyses of President’s Management Agenda trends.

The Office of Management and Budget’s evaluation criteria for the PMA E-Gov initiative are broad, so a slip in one area, such as security, may drop an agency score even though scores on other criteria, such as enterprise architecture or business cases, are strong or improving. “One of the criticisms from some agencies that have struggled with this is there’s a different set of criteria for staying green versus just achieving green one time,” Russ says.

For example, agencies need 90 percent of their systems to be properly certified and accredited for security to attain E-Gov green. But then to maintain that status in subsequent scoring rounds, all of the agency’s systems must be accredited, Russ says.

Agencies point to four main reasons for volatility on E-Gov scores:

1 OMB revises evaluation criteria to reflect new priorities for governmentwide objectives, such as enterprise architectures and business-case validations.

2 Success requirements become more challenging in an OMB attempt to raise the bar on agency performance.

3 Political battles may delay funding for a PMA initiative while Congress hammers out questions with federal budget officials.

4 Competing priorities may force cash-strapped agencies to focus on a mission-critical internal project at the expense of meeting a PMA milestone.

The best strategy for overcoming these obstacles is to recognize that the PMA criteria promote good management practices — not paper, Russ says. Agencies should seek to understand how the criteria relate and can be leveraged to improve performance and then communicate those insights to project managers so they can understand how to benefit from the requirements. When effective management practices are in place, better scores will follow, he says.

Don’t Bounce Back

• Communicate how PMA objectives benefit the agency’s core mission

• Launch monthly internal evaluations to track incremental progress

• Gather business and IT managers to develop enterprise road maps

• Encourage OMB examiners to compromise on overly ambitious milestones