Competitive Sourcing at National Park Service Benefits Citizens

By FRAN MAINELLA

Over the past several months, a number of media reports have mischaracterized the scope, purpose and effects of the National Park Service’s competitive sourcing efforts. I would like to set the record straight.
Among the hallmarks of this administration is its focus on management excellence. Pursuit of management excellence requires vigilance. Competitive sourcing, a key element of the President’s Management Agenda, helps federal agencies maintain vigilance. It forces agency leaders to ask: “Are we structured in the best possible way to fulfill our mission and serve the American public?”

The National Park Service is the guardian of national parks, provider of outdoor recreation opportunities, and manager of some of the nation’s greatest cultural, historical and natural resources. How well we do our jobs at the National Park Service affects whether our children and grandchildren will continue to enjoy grand vistas and historic places. How well we do our jobs affects whether Americans will enjoy healthy landscapes with thriving flora and fauna.

Some 20,000 federal employees at 388 national parks translate the Interior Department’s mission into tangible benefits for Americans. These employees fulfill their complex mission through their own diligence, through community partnerships and by working with private companies.

Our competitive-sourcing initiative challenges us to put our fingers on our own pulse. It provides a framework by which we examine whether we have the right skill sets, technologies and organization structures to provide Americans the best possible service — service that is effective and efficient.

Through our competitive sourcing initiative, we review certain tasks and activities, evaluating whether we can re-engineer the work to improve service. We contrast the status quo and the re-engineered option with what a private firm or a state or local government might require to do the same work.

Consider a simple example. Some of our parks on the eastern seaboard used temporary employees during the summer as lifeguards. Through competitive sourcing, we decided to contract this work to private lifeguard companies. These companies hired our former employees and gave them full-time, year-round jobs. The local community benefits through enhanced opportunities for local businesses. Our former employees benefit by getting better pay and more work.

Tasking our managers to undertake competitive-sourcing evaluations helps them focus on finding these kinds of opportunities. Competitive sourcing provides that constant vigilance that lies at the heart of management excellence.

Through our competitive-sourcing efforts, in many instances we have reaffirmed that our current way of doing business is efficient and effective. By early June 2003, the Interior Department had completed competitive-sourcing studies on about 1,700 full-time equivalent positions. In more than half of these competitions, we concluded that our current in-house service provided the best value to Americans.

Savings generated by competitive sourcing are being reinvested in improving our service to park visitors. This means more dollars available for high-priority services to the public.

Some media reports have mischaracterized our efforts as targeting a broad sweep of federal jobs for outsourcing. Instead, we are studying a subset of this work (15 percent in 2003 and 25 percent by the end of 2004) for competitive review to make sure we are best structured to fulfill our mission to the American public. In each instance, we expect to develop transition strategies for any employee affected by the re-engineering or outsourcing decision.

As manager of one in every five acres of the United States, Interior faces many challenges. These include aging infrastructure, outdated technologies, many soon-to-retire employees and complex tasks that require diverse skills. The National Park Service shares these challenges. As good managers, we seek innovative ways to access the technologies and skills that we need in order to manage our responsibilities wisely. Competitive-sourcing evaluations help us better understand our management options. In short, these evaluations are helping us to be the best that we can be as we strive to serve the American public.

Fran Mainella is director of the National Park Service.