GovernmentExecutive.com

Elizabeth Newell hunted through the budget summaries yesterday and came up with a whole bunch of management tidbits the administration has planned. What I found most interesting about her article though, was the hints of how the Obama team feels about performance management as a concept:

The summary said Obama will address criticisms of PART by opening up the "insular performance measurement process" to the public, Congress and outside experts. The administration pledged to eliminate "ideological performance goals and replace them with goals Americans care about and that are based on congressional intent and feedback from the people served by government programs."

I guess I find the idea that performance management is perfectly clear to a group of people in government and the process is just being nefariously concealed a little absurd. Performance management is really, really complicated. Setting goals is one thing, but measuring progress towards them is something that everyone involved acknowledges is extremely difficult. And the idea that all the really important goals are ones that can, have been, and will be set by poll numbers seems...well, wrong. Certainly, a whole lot of things agencies were directed to do under the Bush administration were determined by that administration's agenda and ideology. But actual performance management criteria are a lot more procedural than that a lot of the time.