Can the right kind of data predict mission success?

Terry Gerton You’ve recently published a new management tool, the Operational Readiness and Resiliency Index, or ORRI. My read of it says it kind of starts with the idea that government leaders don’t have a good way to assess whether they have the talent and the capabilities they need to achieve their mission objectives. As you started to think about this, what do you think is missing from the tools they have today?

John Mullins That’s an interesting question, Terry. I think historically what we’ve done in planning is we’ve looked at goals and objectives, and we looked at budget and FTE and ceilings, and not necessarily looking at capabilities, capacity against targeted performance goals. So this is a new way of looking at your organization in terms of talent, and we use the expression talent regardless of source. Now, going back to this, I think we had a previous conversation in the past where I told you that ORRI really is the outgrowth of a tool that we developed from the Management Advisory Group in support of a larger concept called New Federalism 2.0. And 2.0 is essentially a domestic equivalent of Goldwater Nichols to look at government performance domestically organized around regional organizations rather than functional organizations. Once we realize that, we realize we also need a different way of thinking about resourcing. So, ORRI, think of it best as kind of an financial investment index, where you look at talent in terms of three groups, human talent, technological talent, and leverage talent. So, we want people to start thinking differently about the tools they have within a larger ecosystem around program delivery.

Terry Gerton You mentioned ORRI in the writings as the domestic equivalent of military readiness. So walk us through that comparison. What does it mean in practice?

John Mullins Well, ORRI, think of it as, first of all, I said an index, but if you look at it holistically, it’s looking at organizations in terms of its health, its culture, and its performance. So it’s not just looking at talent in your workforce in terms what it’s assigned to do, but what it can do. Years ago, I remember I had a conversation with Pat Tamburino, you probably remember Pat. I was in his office on the E-Ring, and he says, Mullins, why are you here? I said, well, I’m here to talk to you a little bit about personnel and readiness. He says, I have all these people here who work for me. What can you tell me that they can’t? I said, that’s a fair question. I said I can tell you what your workforce can do, not what they’re assigned to do. And that can make the difference between success or failure. And why do I say that? Because historically, data systems and personnel systems are measuring talent in terms of assigned work, not in terms of the capabilities of the workforce. Secondly, we also talk about, for example, when I was meeting with Scott Kupor at OPM with FEVS. FEVS is a tool that looks historically backwards once a year. You need to know about your organization’s health today, not six months ago. And you need it in terms of objective performance, not emotional performance. So, ORRI is looking at things holistically in terms talent, performance, culture, and health. And that is the equivalent of the Defense Readiness Index for us.

Terry Gerton When you talk about talent, you mentioned onboard talent, technological talent and leveraged talent. You’re including contractors in that sort of total workforce. How do you get a handle on capacity and capability?

John Mullins Let’s go back one step. Some time ago, our team was briefing Karen Evans while she was still at FEMA. Now, if you look at FEMA, FEMA has their essential, they have their core, they have the expansion, but they don’t get their work done necessarily with feds alone, and they don’t do it just with contractors. They do it in partnership with state, local governments, NGOs, et cetera. That’s what we call the larger ecosystem of talent. If you were looking at Amazon today, they have a lot of investments in robotics, AI applications. They also have their contractor workforce. They have their current workforce. If you look at the federal government today, what’s those allocations look like? How much is federal employment? How much is technological employment? How much has leveraged? And do you have the right allocations today as well? What will that allocation look like tomorrow? For FEMA, it looks at the ecosystem of program delivery because it’s concentrating on performance. You have to leverage all those assets. You remember your time with NAPA to talk about enterprise risk management. Essentially, that has always been a budget exercise, but really it’s a skill exercise as well. And so this is dealing with looking at things holistically and looking at things in terms of relationships around performance.

Terry Gerton John Mullins is the founder of Mullins Consulting. John, I don’t disagree with you conceptually. I am right there with you. My question, though, is for leaders in government today, how do they measure those kinds of factors to get that holistic assessment? Because one of the things we hear all the time is we don’t have a way to measure outcomes, and we don’t have a measure capability. How does ORRI help them today actually measure that?

John Mullins Well, when I get that question, I always say you already have all the information, at least 95% of it. You already have it. It’s not in a single data set. When we break down the index, we actually have an exercise where we break the index and we say, what are the data sets? Because remember what I said, it has to be objective truth. So many times federal agencies have aspirational goals, but they don’t have quantifiable goals. It’s hard to measure aspirations. But when you start talking about things quantifiably, then you do have a measure. We have more capabilities today than we’ve ever had before in terms of measuring workforce, productivity, cycle time. We also have international benchmarks that we can compare and contrast around performance. We also have data system. For example … on the health, we break things down. We give our clients suggested performance measures and we tell them what the data source is. For almost all these aspects, there is a registered objective authoritative source of information to put these things. But no function owns it all. You have to get the finest data from the finest people. You get the personnel from the personnel data. You get these tracking systems from other systems and you bring them together. And by the way, as Mark Foreman would say on our team, you’re gonna have to use some additional graph technologies to build up the relationships and the correlations. So some of it is objective, some of is correlated, but the combinations is very powerful.

Terry Gerton And so is this something that is done by the HR team? Is it something that’s done by a project manager? Is it’s something that done by an agency head? Whose responsibility is it to pull all of that together?

John Mullins Well, in my old days working in government, I would say it was the chief management officer because they have the functional responsibilities for bringing it all together. That perhaps is one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome, is who has the authority to bring this together, and that’s a legitimate question. But quite honestly, as I’ve spoken with some of the agency heads who are new to government, they say, don’t we do this already, and the answer is, of course, we don’t. But we should and we must. But I recall for those of us who have also worked in the private sector, we do measure this way. We measure capabilities. We measure capacity. We measure return on investment. We look at risk, and we build that into our calculations when we bid on work. So this is not a new concept or phenomena for many of us in the privacy sector, but government increasingly needs to look at these things in terms of new eyes. This is a new way of approaching it. And by the way, you’ll notice on the performance side, as I used to tease Robert shay, is we’ve had PART, remember PART? This [Program] Assessment Rating Tool. We haven’t gotten rid of category management. Category management looks at a lot of these things. GPRA looks at a lots of these. Increasingly, we need to start re-examining what we’ve already thrown away and bring some of those stuff back because we had it. If we had the technology we had today, PART would have been a much more viable tool.

Terry Gerton So John, PART and GPRA, important tools, sort of also have a history of becoming just one more report card, as opposed to a real live management tool. How would you keep ORRI from falling into the same pattern?

John Mullins Ah Well, I always say if performance matters, it’s not a unnecessary tool. If performance is a report card, it’s just a waste of time. So this is how you need to manage, and this is you operate. This is how think through things. For example, if you had a ORI index, you’d be able to do comparative performance regarding about where, if I have an extra $2.5 million to invest this year, who do I give it to? Who has the highest cycle time, who has the lowest cycle time? Who has a highest return on investment? Who are the people who are currently configured and capable of doing this? Frequently we go out and say, I need these new skill sets, and I don’t know who has them because the personnel system doesn’t tell you what people can do, they just tell you what they’re assigned to do. We need a different way of looking at things. By the way, you and I remember David Walker, right, at GAO. This would not be a foreign concept to David, because remember what he did to his personnel system. He based it on a skills-based capability and utilization and performance. Again. For everything in ORRI, there is a historical precedent where we’ve actually done some of this. This is just bringing it all together. There’s nothing magical about ORRI other than the fact that we’re now saying, let’s put it together because we’ve done parts of this all over already.

Terry Gerton And so if we’ve piqued a listeners’ interest out there and they want to know more about this model and the sources of data for it, where can they find out more information?

John Mullins Well, please write to me on my LinkedIn. And again, the management advisory group is larger than me. It’s Mark Foreman, it’s Stephen Gavin, it’ Casey Coleman. The four of us put this thing together. And we’d be happy to share more of this with you. And there’s much deeper publications and information regarding the matrix and how to get the data.