May 13, 2008

The Lectern: Now THAT's procurement reform

A participant attending the executive education course I'm teaching at Harvard is a senior official responsible for a procurement reform effort in Nigeria, initiated by the previous president and (hopefully) supported by the new one. Nigeria loses billions of dollars a year in inflated prices and non-performance in procurement deals in which bribes and other corrupted measures determine the winner. The reform effort involves establishing some basic competition principles, and it requires — at least until some reasonably honest system is established — that procurements over a certain value be vetted by a central board in the Office of the President. (The participant is a senior official on this board.)

There are, as one might imagine, a considerable number of wealthy and powerful people who liked the procurement system the way it was before these efforts. The participant explained that his office is not only located in the Office of the President on an organizational chart but also physically, so it can have access to the same security forces that protect the president. Officials in the office who go out to the field to check whether work under a contract has been performed — the equivalent of contract managers in the United States — often travel with armed guards.

One thing this story reminds us of is how lucky we are in the United States to have a procurement system in which honesty can almost always be taken for granted. It gives us a chance to focus on what, in a Nigerian context, would be seen as further refinements — but of course refinements that make the difference between "just OK" and excellent.

I asked this official how the office can have any chance to succeed and what made him willing to take this job in the first place. He thinks the office has a chance to succeed if it continues to have the support of the Office of the President, as well as the the Nigerian media, nongovernmental organizations and international organizations such as the World Bank. He took the job, he said, because he cares about the future of his country.

Steve Kelman
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May 8, 2008

The Lectern: Great discussion on performance measurement

I am currently teaching in the Kennedy School's executive education program for U.S. federal GS-15s and colonels (with a few participants from local government, and from China, New Zealand, Malaysia, and the Philippines to keep us Americans on our toes). I teach a three-class unit on using performance measures to improve government agency performance, and we had the first class of the three-unit sequence on Wednesday.

It was a very lively discussion, and participants brought up a number of examples of experiences they have had using performance measures in their organizations. A senior police manager discussed how his county started measuring (using video technology) inappropriate use of force by police officers. Comparing the numbers in different precincts in the county gave them an idea of where the problems were worst and thus where management attention needed to be concentrated. They used the feedback to devise policy changes and training priorities. They could then track the effects of these changes on performance by looking at the incidence of inappropriate use of force after the changes were made. Performance measurement, by providing feedback, was crucial to being able to learn how to perform better and to see what changes worked and didn't. As I often say to my classes, "Imagine trying to learn to throw darts better if you didn't get any feedback on where the last darts you threw had landed."

Two participants also talked about how, when employees were involved in setting targets or goals on their performance measures, they had actually suggested more aggressive goals that raised the performance bar over time. In one case, employees proposed committing themselves, for example, to more aggressive goals for how quickly they provided help to customers in other government organizations than management had originally suggested. In one agency, each major goal is assigned to an individual owner in charge of tracking it and seeing how important the goal is to the organization's customers.

It was impressive to see how engaged these senior public managers are in using performance measures to drive improved organizational performance -- and, by extension, how engaged they are in delivering on their organizations' missions. I think any outside observer would be impressed by these managers.

Steve Kelman
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May 6, 2008

The Lectern: VA takes on the contracting workforce challenge

A number of agencies, recognizing the need to repopulate the contracting workforce, have begun various kinds of hiring and internship programs. I spoke recently with Efrain Fernandez, Ken Buck, and Ford Heard, senior contracting officials at VA -- Efrain and Ken being old friends, while Ford is a new recruit to my 60s rock trivia team to challenge our Kennedy School students -- about the new program that VA will be launching with a class of 30 new recruits in September out of the agency's new Center for Acquisition Innovation. (The Center itself has a great name that sends all sorts of good signals.)

The VA program takes on two of the challenges in developing and retaining a new generation of contracting professionals -- connection with the mission and good job assignments. During the year that new interns spend at the Center for Acquisition Innovation, they will spend time visiting VA hospitals and cemeteries to gain a better appreciation for the veterans they are serving. And the center itself has been given actual contracting responsibility, buying some of the agency's strategic sourcing commodities, purchasing for national emergencies, and undertaking research studies for VA. So the interns will be on teams that are actually purchasing these products and services -- all interesting stuff that gives the interns assignments other than small purchases.

Sounds like the right approach to me.

The application deadline is May 19. The internships are GS-9 positions (which means, unfortunately, that graduating college seniors won't qualify without some relevant work experience. Graduating master's students from the Kennedy School will qualify, but we know from experience it is really, really hard to get them to accept GS-9 positions.)

You can find more information about the internship here.

Steve Kelman
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May 5, 2008

The Lectern: Student 'spring exercise' is done!

As I've mentioned in a previous blog post, at the end of our master's students' first year, the entire class does a two-week project called "Spring Exercise." This gives them a chance to use the material they have learned in their first-year curriculum about economics, statistics, politics, management and ethics to address a big real-world problem in a setting as close as we can make it to the real world while still being in school.

During the first week, students individually prepared l,000-word memos on an assigned topic related to the theme of each year's spring exercise. During the second week, they divided into teams of five and prepare a briefing book and a 30-minute briefing for a role-playing senior official. After practice briefings on Wednesday, they presented their final briefings Friday morning. So now the students are done.

This year's topic, as I mentioned, was international negotiations for a climate change treaty, and students briefed someone playing the role of Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the United Nations (for my four student groups, the role was played by my colleague professor Christine Letts, who teaches nonprofit management and runs our executive education programs).

The students really got into this. One student sent me an e-mail message: "I hope you [faculty] have all been getting the positive feedback about the assignment that has been going around MPPs. Everyone was so engaged and excited about the topic. We feel really lucky." My four groups all had some pretty significant problems in the Wednesday dry-run briefings, and three of the four groups staged a significant recovery in today's final briefings. I think they got minimal sleep (at least for them) the last two nights. But generally the students were self-confident, good presenters and had good team dynamics in terms of hand-offs and division of labor.

The groups made relatively similar proposals, setting international targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a point that the average global temperature would rise only 5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, which would fall short of a catastrophic increase. They believed that was the maximum goal that was economically and politically feasible. All the groups, in one way or another, put obligations on the developing countries as well as the developed world, which has been a key issue inhibiting U.S. participation in the 1997 Kyoto accord. (About a quarter of our first-year students are non-Americans, most from developing countries.)

The students sometimes were not sensitive to the extent to which the U.N., politically, can and cannot get involved in the domestic politics of member nations, or of the maxim that one should never put on paper something one is not willing to see on the front page of The Washington Post. (An extreme example was one student whose first-week memo suggested that the U.N. get involved in congressional races for members of Congress who opposed American participation in a climate change agreement.) And they tended to overuse economics jargon that Ban Ki-moon would likely not understand.

But in all the students did a great job. They certainly gave it their all.

Government employers, do what you can to get these kids!

The end of spring exercise means for me that after an intensive bout of paper grading mid-month, I move into summer mode. That means few meetings and a lot of time for research and writing, blue jeans and T-shirts, and a lot of travel.

Steve Kelman
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April 29, 2008

The Lectern: (Nicely) earnest kids working to save the world

The first-year master's students at the Kennedy School at Harvard are now going into the home stretch of their first-year capstone project, what we call "spring exercise."

Pretty much the entire class -- almost 250 students -- works together in teams of five for two weeks on some "big" world problem, culminating in a briefing for a stand-in for some very senior government leader on the problem. In the past, spring exercise assignments have included AIDS in Africa, reconstructing Afghanistan and preserving the all-volunteer Army.

This year the assignment is to "help" United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (by coincidence, Ban has a degree from the Kennedy School from the 1980s) develop a U.N. position for the upcoming international negotiations on climate change. I get to play Secretary-General Ban for four student practice briefings on Wednesday (and, along with a Kennedy School economist colleague, critique the students' performance). The final briefings will be on Friday. The Secretary-General himself has actually agreed to be briefed by the student team that wins the award for the best briefing.

The assignment seems to be preoccupying the students. I have very few current students as Facebook friends -- if I may be permitted another Facebook reference -- but even with my limited sample, I've been noticing that current-student Facebook friends have been putting references to the spring exercise into their "status updates," the what-am-I-doing-right-now space on Facebook that is open and available for all manner of frivolous, often self-absorbed, reports from the Facebook world.

One student, whose life includes such diversions as actually playing in the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra as well as being a Kennedy School student (!), last night wrote a status update informing her friends that she was "recovering from 3 concerts and chaperoning an 80s-theme dance. But ready to reverse climate change."

Another student had written a few days earlier that she had "suddenly realized that climate change is not a rich bored white people’s problem, but a global catastrophe disproportionately affecting the poorest."

I asked another student with a far-wider group of current-student Facebook friends than I do, and he told me that spring exercise is right now all over the status updates of first-year Kennedy School students.

So even in their own Facebook world -- which is theirs, (mostly) separated from the older generation's -- there are kids who are nicely earnest, not just in the presence of adults but among one another.

Steve Kelman
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