| Comment Number: | OL-10502141 |
| Received: | 3/1/2005 9:24:24 AM |
| Subject: | Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Request for Comment |
| Title: | National Security Personnel System |
| CFR Citation: | 5 CFR Chapter XCIX and Part 9901 |
| No Attachments |
Comments:
I think NSPS sells great but will be executed with great difficulty. The culture of our civil servants in DoD and DHS has not been fully examined. This fact alone will make NSPS difficult at best to implement. This approach is far from a “crawl-walk-run” approach in my eyes. I only see more subjectivity being introduced into the rating process. Funding will also be a challenge long-term. More thought needs to be placed into how personnel are equitably rewarded for their contributions and how we get away from the “Peter Principle” in many areas of government today. I trust that extensive research has been performed on past “pay demo” systems like the Navy’s China Lake demo in the late 1980’s. My gut feel is that such plans were examined at only a high level. The devil is truly in the details with any type of “demo” pay system. I would offer three items of note from my personal experience managing and being managed in a 5000-person system years ago: 1) Training and understanding of all demo facets is critical to success. Skimping on training will only create distrust and animosity among employees. 2) Managers must be frank and honest with employees and maintain quarterly counseling diligence. Too often, I witnessed managers failing to “pull their weight” in demos. Finally, 3) employ NSPS uniformly across an organization. While participating in a demonstration project in the Navy during the mid-1990’s, I witnessed one system employed 6-8 different ways across an organization. Mary Lacey should be quite familiar with this paradigm as she worked at the agency where the demo was instituted (NSWC, Dahlgren). Pay points, standards, review cycles, etc., were all conducted differently across one organization. This was a major complaint of those enveloped under the program. In summary, history teaches us not to repeat the transgressions of the past. I agree that the current Government personnel system is in need of repair. However, I do no believe NSPS is the elixir that cures all PARS ills.