The challenge agencies face:
Once an agency’s goals and strategies have been defined, a real challenge is to ensure that the activities of everyone support fulfillment of the plan. No planning activities or program functions at any level of the organization should be considered as unrelated to the agency-wide GPRA effort. For this reason, a crucial requirement of effective Performance Management is that organizational subunits have business operating plans explicitly linked to the agency’s goals. This ensures that everyone is contributing to the agency’s definition of success. A major existing weakness is that few agency-wide plans are clearly supported by such explicit linkages all the way out to the field offices and down to the program staff activity level.
The experience available:
Use the expertise of the “Father of GPRA” to guide the development of business plans throughout your organization. He will help you establish clear linkages between your organizational and agency goals and the day-to-day activities of program and support staff, at headquarters and in the field. OMB has stated that the approach John Mercer has used is successful because “every program manager uses the system to plan, manage, and assess progress on a day-to-day basis.” This is the very essence of “managing for results.”
