Workforce

The Obama Administration’s favorite think tank, the Center for American Progress, launched a “Doing What Works” initiative earlier this year.  The staff pulled together a 16-point plan, which was recently the focus of an opinion poll survey.  The highest rated item: “Require every federal agency to set clear goals

The benefits of the space are flexibility, no need to sign a long-term lease, collaboration – people can share ideas with other officemates who may be in a completely different field -- and productivity – being around dynamic and committed workers motivates performance.  Coworking spaces are all over the world.  Picture working in a colorful office with designers and architects at “Patchwork” in Paris or a former Wonder Bread factory with tech startups at “WeWork” locations in the US.  The concept is the same from location to location, but the actual design changes according to the footprin

Just in time for the national Public Service Recognition Week, Saturday Night Live aired a biting satire: “The 2010 Public Employee of the Year Award.” In the skit, several finalists for the award strut their stuff. For example, a fictitious Markeesha Odom says she helped lead her DMV team to ensure no one received a drivers license over the course of a full day!

Collaboration is one of the key elements of President Obama’s signature Open Government Initiative. However, federal agencies’ Open Government Plans don’t seem to address it very well. But collaboration expert Russ Linden says “collaboration is vital, difficult, and learnable.” And he’s written a book that makes all three of these points.

While Jonathan Breul is attending the IRMCO Conference in Cambridge, Maryland, I’m attending the annual conference of the American Society for Public Administration in San Jose, California. I understand it’s sunny in Cambridge. . . it’s rainy in San Jose!

This week the General Services Administration (GSA) is hosting its 49th annual Interagency Resources Management Conference. An estimated 300 Chief Acquisition Officers, Chief Financial Officers, Chief Information Officers, Chief Human Capital Officers, Inspectors General, program managers and other senior executive leaders are attending. It is the most well known government-wide, government-only conference where leaders delve into emerging management issues and how they are being confronted.

I received a GovLoop tweet alerting me to a new report, optimistically titled: “Ahead of the Game: Blueprint for the Reform of the Australian Government Administration.” Australia has long served as a source of innovation and inspiration in government reforms, so I eagerly downloaded and read it.

Eliminating middle managers was the vogue in 1990s-style reforms. Flatten the organization! After all, it was the middle managers who “sucked the life out of an organization” by filtering information, gatekeeping decisions, and smothering innovation.

But today, we’re beginning to hear praise for middle managers as being the connecting glue and the nodes of cross-organizational networks.

What’s going on here??

Another Harvard Business Review article in the March 2010 issue is worth highlighting. A piece by Richard McDermott and Douglas Archibald examines informal and formal networks in companies, such as Fluor and ConocoPhillips, but their insights are relevant to public agencies as well. And they may be helpful to the Obama Administration’s efforts to create its proposed set of “problem solving networks.”

Over the past two decades, a series of trends have resulted in a chorus of voices in Congress, the media and the public concluding that the current federal contracting system is broken. Between 1989 and 2000, Congress mandated deep cuts in the Defense acquisition workforce. During the 1990s, the federal government shifted its contracting approach from one focused on buying supplies to one buying services, using new flexible contracting vehicles. Beginning in 2000, federal contracting increased from $220 billion to over $530 billion in 2008, with no increase in contracting staff.