President George W. Bush: Resources for the President's Team The White House
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THE PRESIDENT'S MANAGEMENT AGENDA THE PRESIDENT & HIS LEADERSHIP TEAM TOOLS FOR SUCCESS
President George W. Bush meets with Dan Bartlett, center, and Josh Bolten in the Oval Office Jan. 9, 2003.  White House photo by Eric Draper.
The Deputy Director for Mgmt
PMA updates, best practices, and general information.
Scorecard
Grading Implementation of the PMA.
Human Capital
Initiative updates, best practices, and general information.
Commercial Services Management
Initiative updates, best practices, and general information.
Improving Financial Performance
Initiative updates, best practices, and general information.
E-Gov
Initiative updates, best practices, and general information.
Performance Improvement
Initiative updates, best practices, and general information.
Sharing Best Practices
Stories of achieving breaktrough results in government.
Department Updates

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

The President's Management Agenda Goes To War
Much has occurred in America since the President released his Management Agenda last summer - to say the past year was eventful is an understatement.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Perhaps no other Department has been more directly affected by the events of September 11th, than Defense. In these past months we have responded to and continue to prosecute a war against our enemies half a world away.

Concurrently, we are undergoing transformational changes on a scale unprecedented in the history of this Department. Separate from rebuilding the Pentagon after the devastation of the 11th, the building is also undergoing a multi-year infrastructure renovation project that would challenge any organization - public or private.

Given the seriousness and sensitivity of our overriding mission, this alone could stand as testament to our capabilities and dedication to duty.

Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld meets with soldiers.Commitment
Secretary Rumsfeld and the entire defense establishment have embraced the President's management objectives. We are committed to implementing these five initiatives without, of course, losing sight of our primary mission: the defense and security of America.

To facilitate the implementation of the PMA, we have established a Senior Steering Group (SSG), comprised of SES and General/Flag officer representatives from the Services and DoD components. The main goal of the SSG is to coordinate actions among the principals and ensure compliance to the PMA. The SSG meets monthly.

DoD believes the scoring process to be collaborative. As such, the SSG performed its own internal assessment of the Department against the initiatives and forwarded its findings to OMB for comment and discussion.

Human Capital: Civilian and Military
With 2.7 million active and reserve men and women under arms and a civilian workforce of nearly 800,000, clearly people are most important asset, and their qualities and skills essential to our success. Toward these ends we have formulated a comprehensive strategic human capital plan. Parenthetically, this plan goes beyond that envisioned in the PMA in that we are also transforming our military forces.

Commercial Services Management
With respect to competitive sourcing, we have agreed with our colleagues at OMB to review 226,000 positions following traditional or revised A-76 processes and by following a “core competency approach.” We will meet our target of 15% of those positions in FY03.

Thus far we have identified 10 pioneer projects for consideration. This is critical in our efforts not only to become more efficient, but also to return military slots to the business of war fighting.

Financial Performance and Budget & Performance Integration
Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel & Readiness David Chu meets with soldiers. We are actively pursuing a comprehensive financial modernization project in order to consolidate approximately 1,700 (at current count) disparate systems and practices DoD-wide and have awarded a major contract to IBM to this end.

Within the federal government, our Program Planning and Budgeting System (PPBS) - developed nearly 40 years ago is the stuff of legend for it actually matches performance to budget. We are working with our OMB colleagues to improve further our performance-to-budget metrics.

E-Government
In the age of rapidly changing technologies, we are all very sensitive to the importance of electronic government as one of the most efficient tools in our arsenal. We are working to build well-defined, manageable objectives.

Indeed, setting such goals can have a high payoff: our experience in deploying our DoD-wide HR data system is that for a combined project cost of $420 million our system will yield savings of $200 million per year over a 15-year life cycle.

Vision
David Chu, Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel & Readiness. Thus, our pledge to achieve the goals and objectives of the PMA is based not only on our commitment and loyalty to the President, but also our obligation to our incomparable military, our superb civilian workforce, and of course, our citizens.

Sincerely,

David Chu



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