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Ensuring Collaboration and Coordination
The three guiding principles described above all have to do with the
substance of a 21st Century civil service system, its core principles
and overarching architecture. However, if modernizing this storied institution
depends on successfully balancing the inevitable tension between agency
flexibilities on one hand, and common values and economies on the other,
process becomes just as important as content. Thus, our fourth
and final guiding principle: the modernization process must be collaborative,
and the implementation and operation of the agency-specific systems that
emerge from it must be managed by OPM, carefully coordinated so as to
avoid adverse externalities.
No institution can transform itself successfully without the
“buy-in” of its most critical stakeholders; in the case of
the Federal civil service, that means everybody from senior agency executives
and managers to front-line employees and the organizations that represent
them. It also means OPM. That buy-in becomes even more important
in a future that features agency-specific HR systems. If those systems
are to be credible, they must be designed in a way that is as open and
transparent, as inclusive and collaborative as possible. Congress has
recognized the importance of collaboration in this regard, requiring it
of both DHS and DoD, not only with their employee organizations, but also
with OPM…the latter clearly in its stewardship capacity.
One need only look to the still-pending development of the Department
of Homeland Security’s HR system for our model. First, by statute,
that system must be “jointly prescribed” by the Secretary
and the OPM Director, and as a result, OPM has been a full partner in
its design from the beginning. So too were DHS managers, employees, and
unions…on the joint OPM/DHS design team, through focus groups and
town hall meetings across the country, and finally, in the “meet
and confer” process that, by law, serves as the terminal step in
the system’s design. And the regulations that will actually establish
the system have been published in proposed form for full public review
and comment. The entire process has been characterized by its openness
and inclusion, and while it has added time, we believe that the end result
will be far better for it. That lesson has not been lost on DoD, and with
OPM, it has embarked on a similar path in the design of the new NSPS.
However, collaboration in design and development is not enough. Even
as individual agencies, jointly with OPM, design their own HR systems,
the implementation and operation of those separate systems must be carefully
managed so as to preclude (or at least minimize) any adverse impact on
other agencies. This responsibility too must rest with OPM. In the proposed
DHS regulations, it is described as “coordination,” a deliberately
bland, bureaucratic term that is nonetheless pivotal to modernizing merit.
As we have defined it, coordination affords agencies wide latitude in
administering their own HR systems, but it reserves to OPM the ultimate
authority -- indeed, the obligation -- to intervene when the exercise
of one agency’s flexibility has the potential for adversely affecting
others across Government…and if necessary, to veto that flexibility.
OPM plays this coordinating role today (such as in setting special salary
rates), and that concept has been expressly incorporated into the proposed
DHS regulations at several vital points…points where DHS actions
may potentially “spillover” to other agencies. For example,
OPM coordination is required as the Department establishes its occupational
clusters and paybands, including their minimum and maximum rates of pay,
especially with respect to job families that are common to other agencies;
OPM coordination is also required as the Department sets nationwide and
locality-based pay adjustments each year. In keeping with this fourth
principle of modernization, the Defense Department’s NSPS will include
similar OPM coordination points, so as to assure that cross-agency effects
are taken into account and mitigated.
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