Appointed less than one month ago on April 15, Acting Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Elaine Kaplan left the gate faster than the Kentucky Derby’s Palace Malice when she entered well-respected OPM Director John Berry’s office. She published her memorandum challenging Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCOs) just 11 days later.
SUBJECT: Revising the Human Capital Planning, Reviews, and Reporting Framework.
An OPM spokesperson said, “This is not a new initiative – it had the full support of former Director Berry and now Acting Director Kaplan continues to support it.” John Berry may be going down under to Canberra as Obama’s U.S. Ambassador to Australia, according to the Washington Post.
A glance at Kaplan’s resume makes clear that Kaplan’s heart and soul are with the Federal employee, and so we can read her memorandum, in part, as Kaplan’s insider response to – and vision for overcoming – long-term human resources obstacles, many of which likely produced the very clients Kaplan has represented in her former life as federal employee advocate.
Kaplan’s home base is with the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), where she served for nearly fourteen years early in her career. She returned to the NTEU in 2004, before establishing herself as OPM’s General Counsel in 2009, a position she retained the next four years, advising then-Director Berry through the legal maze of Federal personnel management.
The memorandum outlining the initiative is, at first glance, appropriately confusing, par for the proverbial bureaucratic (and legal) writing course: Kaplan is a Georgetown lawyer. But untangle the sometimes perplexing language and one finds a common-sense vision for human resource management: shape the workforce to managers’ mission objectives.
What Kaplan describes here is a triumvirate effort – that is, the OPM with Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) – to “develop and implement workforce strategies that advance progress on . . . mission performance goals and objectives.” In operational military-speak, that is task organization. In strategic military-speak, that is the over-three-decades-old ELIM-COMPLIP concept, best explained in Holtz and Wroth’s December 1980 Interfaces article “Improving Strength Forecasts: Support for Army Manpower Management.” (Which, for the sake of keeping readers awake, we won’t unpack here).
Threatening these best intentions (which pave the road to hell), however, is an accumulation of some 17 redundant or apparently irrelevant regulatory human capital reporting requirements that Kaplan intends to eliminate or consolidate and some invincible Federal regulation language that she intends to revise.
In regard to regulation, Kaplan writes that “OPM is currently crafting a proposal to amend the regulatory language at 5 CFR part 250 [Personnel Management in Agencies] to integrate . . . strategic human capital plans within . . . strategic and annual performance plans.” Kaplan explains further that “OPM intends to propose elimination of the requirement for agencies to submit separate Strategic Human Capital Plans in time for the preparation of the next agency strategic plans that will be released with the FY 2015 budget.”
Reporting requirements on Kaplan’s cutting board include 10 annual reports and 2 quarterly reports for elimination and 5 annual reports for consolidation. The reports include Category Rating, Experts and Consultants, Critical Pay, Physicians Comparability Allowances, Extension of Locality Pay to Non-GS Employees, Dual Comp Waivers, Child Care Subsidies, Recruitment Relocation and Retention Incentives, Retention Incentives to go to Different Federal Position, Human Capital Management Report, Voluntary Separation Incentive Payments, Voluntary Early Retirement, Federal Equal Opportunity Recruitment Program, Hispanic Employment, Leadership/Management Succession Plan, Veterans Employment Operations Plan, and Strategic Human Capital Plan.
Understand, however, that these reporting requirements are rooted in everything from Executive Orders to the United States Code to the Code of Federal Regulations to OPM’s own policies. Achieving these regulatory revisions and changes to law at the pace necessary for the triumvirate to meet Kaplan’s acknowledged and perhaps understated “aggressive timeline” rests on her self-described assumption that “the regulations are actually amended in the manner proposed.” Even Palace Malice became exhausted at the size of his task.
An OPM spokesperson, however, indicated that “OPM has a concerted effort in place to revise the Human Capital Framework and to reduce the reporting requirements on the agencies.” With her impressive legal experience, Kaplan is well-aware of both the great difficulty of changing law, particularly as the 113th Congress keeps busy doing nothing on sequestration, gun control, Benghazi, Syria, and Dennis Rodman.
“While the majority of the outlined changes will happen outside of the legislative process,” the OPM spokesperson said, “Acting Director Kaplan always welcomes Congressional oversight and feedback and is optimistic that Congress will be receptive to the proposed changes.”
In short, Kaplan’s objectives are twofold, pursued simultaneously, and impressive: “develop and implement workforce strategies that advance . . . mission performance goals and objectives” (language that implicitly indicts workforce strategies currently in place), and “streamline core human resource (HR) policies, procedures, and technology” to support managers and employees in their efforts at an accelerated, more cost-efficient pace. These two objectives are not co-dependent: less than perfect accomplishment of one does not undermine the potential value of the other, though each gains strength from the other’s successes.
Smart.
The question is whether the initiative is too ambitious for an acting director on such a short schedule. If Kaplan is successful in this effort – and it is in the interest of agency managers, Federal employees, and taxpayers that she is – then President Obama should re-vision Kaplan as his next Director of OPM.
Elaine Kaplan has the vision for 21st Century Human Capital management and the nerve to make significant changes, and she’s been preparing for it, unwittingly or not, for the last thirty years.
