acendre federal human capital strategy guide

Talent Management Solutions

Acendre Federal Human Capital Strategy GuideNavigating OMB’s Workforce Reform

Table of Contents

03 Executive Overview04 Enterprise Human Resources Management to Drive Reform04 Rethinking the Federal Workforce05 Modernizing Human Resources Technology06 Innovation to Drive Change06 The Power of Interoperability06 Leveraging Human Capital Analytics07 Security and the Move to the Cloud08 WorkflowFlexibility09 Optimized Agency Performance 10 A Partnership with Human Capital Management Leadership

Executive Overview

03

The guide summarizes major administration human capital goals and priorities, and provides specific actions and recommendations that can be used now to align your agency with these administrative initiatives and achieve progress addressing them.

Federal agencies need to account for these initiatives as they plan for and implement numerous strategic and tactical changes to their workforces. Beyond these changes that are driven by the administration’s call for a significant makeover of the federal workforce, agencies are also navigating their way through an unrelenting wave of social and technological transformations throughout society.

This guide is designed to assist federal human capital and HR leaders, managers and workforce analysts tasked with planning for and implementing workforce reform under new directives from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Trump administration, while adhering to initiative set forth in the U.S. Office of Personnel’s (OPM’s) strategic plan.

This guide is intended to help federal human capital, HR, IT and security leaders who are responsible for:

> Planning for and implementing workforce reform under new OMB and President’s Management Agenda directives

> Adhering to OPM’s strategic plan> Your agency’s human capital goals and priorities> HR IT modernization> Accountability of your agency’s people and workforce

performance> Improving the overall workforce performance of your agency> Ensuring current and future workforce needs are met> Ensuring your agency has employees with the necessary

skills and competencies> Automating performance appraisals> Helping employees achieve better results> Helping employees and their agencies become more

efficient and productive> Leadership development> Improving engagement and retention rates> Improving workforce efficiencies> Improving workforce and agency results> Workforce transformation> Ensuring current and future workforce needs> Security> Innovation> Cloud technologies.

Acendre Federal Human Capital Strategy Guide

04

Enterprise Human Resources Management to Drive Reform

The Trump administration, through OMB, has a stated goal of ensuring a high-performing, optimally-sized workforce. In addition, OPM sets guidance for federal agencies in enterprise human resources management through policies and services, with the goal being to achieve an effective civilian workforce. Acendre is in continual review and assessment of OPM’s goals to ensure tight alignment between those goals and the technology and solutions Acendre provides.

The government is focused on ensuring that the federal government attracts, hires and retains a highly-skilled workforce. The administration believes that more modern technology will help accomplish these goals. Furthermore, OPM has stated in its strategic plan that to realize a high-performing workforce, agencies should review and ensure they are using taking advantage of modern, secure, cloud-based technology that can quickly adapt to the rapidly changing landscape of the federal workforce.

With modern software in place of older, legacy systems, agencies can more easily build and maintain the desired high-performing workforce, thereby aligning with the workforce reform the administration is driving.

Acendre’s secure, modern, cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) talent management solutions help federal agencies optimize workforce performance. These solutions have been designed in partnership with federal agencies with the goal of helping them attract, hire, retain and develop a high-performing workforce in line with OMB’s directives.

Rethinking the Federal Workforce

The administration seeks to revamp the federal workforce. Jeff Pon, the OPM director, has indicated he wants a more strategic method of doing this, and wants to reform how agencies recruit, reward and manage employees. In a message to all federal employees, Pon stated “it’s not just about time to hire, it’s not about how much they get paid, it’s the whole entire thing. It’s make sure we have the whole entire system to help them do what they need to do.”

The President’s Management Agenda (PMA) states that:

“ To achieve a 21st century workforce, the government needs to do a better job of end-to-end strategic workforce management. It needs to look at work in a different way – assessing what our key missions and outcomes are and understanding how we can best align the workforce to meet those needs, particularly through the administration’s lens of using IT modernization to drive increasing efficiency, effectiveness and transparency. “

People — Workforceof the Future

Data,Accountability and

Transparency

IT Modernization

Image Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/management/pma

To accomplish this, the administration wants to focus on three key areas of transformation to drive the change it seeks:

> Modern information technology (IT) The administration sees this as the pillar of how government serves the public, and critical to serving the needs of citizens while maintaining privacy. The administration believes that technology should be not only effective and follow best commercial practices, but also be economical, secure and efficient.

> Data, accountability and transparency The administration wants to ensure the federal government will provide the tools to deliver visibly better results to the public and hold agencies accountable.

> A modern workforce The administration believes the federal workforce should build on the administration’s proposed civil service reforms to empower senior leaders and front-line managers to align staff skills with evolving mission needs.

Acendre believes that these key administrative initiatives can and should be driven through enterprise HR technology in collaboration with agency leadership, HR teams and agency change agents. To date, Acendre has partnered with leading federal agencies to achieve many of these goals and priorities.

Modernizing Human Resources Technology

It is widely recognized that much of the federal government is dragged down by costly, inflexible and insecure legacy systems. These outdated systems prevent agencies from improving their workflow processes, consolidating systems and data and implementing true workforce and organizational reform. Modernization provides numerous benefits, beginning with basic automation of repetitive tasks and culminating with organizational transformation. This transformation can include previously unobtainable insight that leads to increased productivity, elimination of bottlenecks and agency-wide enhanced talent management, including hiring, retention and development. Modernization also results in more secure and more interoperable applications.

At the same time, the administration seeks to streamline the processes of firing poor performers, rewarding top performers and speeding up the hiring process for all federal workers, including senior executives. The administration is urging federal leaders to improve performance management and engagement, and reskill and redeploy employees when and where possible.

Similarly, OPM has expressed concern that the federal government has difficulty managing the end-to-end employee data lifecycle due to duplicative HR IT systems across agencies that are unable to interface and exchange data, and cites legacy HR IT data exchange capabilities as a root cause. Data security and privacy concerns are also called out by OPM as inhibitors to HR advances.

Acendre continues to take a holistic view of the vision, goals and priorities of the administration, OMB and OPM, in conjunction with OPM’s stated strategic HR plan for agencies. This view aligns with Acendre’s unique offerings and capabilities to deliver strategic solutions for federal agencies, regardless of where they stand in their workforce reform journey, from basic automation to organizational transformation.

The desired modernization efforts are in complete alignment with OPM’s goal to “modernize human capital IT and leverage human capital analytics and research.” The administration recognizes that numerous agencies utilize wasteful, inefficient, disparate, siloed HR IT systems for various HR functions. OPM agrees that agencies should embrace seamless integration and interoperability between systems. Benefits of interoperability are numerous, including cost savings, elimination of redundancies, reduced bottlenecks and more.

05

06

Innovation to Drive Change

Innovation across the federal government is critical to moving agencies forward and beyond the old ways of thinking and operating. Acendre is a leading innovator in human capital management and HR technology, and is pleased that OPM now embraces innovation and a desire for federal HR leaders to find new ways to accomplish their work and lead their agencies to help them fulfill their missions.

Innovation is not just an abstract concept. Many agencies have started innovation-based programs to encourage fresh thinking and foster creative problem solving in the U.S. government. In addition, a move to the cloud often provides impetus for innovation.

Innovation is also tied to mobility, which is a vital component of modernization across the federal government, along with cloud solutions and analytics. Beyond these components, agencies are taking a hard look at their business and workflow processes to see how they can be improved and optimized. Other areas include Dev Ops, machine learning, artificial intelligence, digital assistants, blockchain and chat bots.

Acendre, a leading innovator in the human capital and HR fields, is working alongside numerous agencies today to help them in their ambitious efforts and initiatives. In so doing, we are helping agencies transform their workforces to become high-performing, digital enterprises.

The Power of Interoperability

Interoperability is an important element of IT modernization. OPM has stated that modernizing the federal HR IT infrastructure through the adoption of a SaaS model and linking federal human capital networks is an important goal. Through this linkage, agencies will have more secure, interoperable technology applications for improved management of the entire talent management lifecycle.

Interoperability is the key to system and database consolidation. The USDA provides an example, where the agency consolidated 29 agencies, each with their own mission and business requirements, fragmented technology and without a unified Human Resource Information Technology (HRIT) strategy, making an effective HR service delivery model and fruitful integration between offices nearly impossible.

This consolidation would not have been possible without modern technology that provides seamless interoperability between systems. Through technology that allows for this integration with minimal investment, agencies can streamline operations, create efficiencies, save money and drastically improve HR services.

In addition, interoperability provides automation and delivers complete visibility to federal agencies.

The Acendre Partner Cloud provides federal agencies and HR technology integrators with access to a robust set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This ability to simplify the interoperability between Acendre solutions and other systems used by federal agencies helps Acendre customers in their modernization efforts through consolidation and integration of their HR infrastructure.

Leveraging Human Capital Analytics

People analytics continues to gain importance and prominence as part of the federal HR ecosystem. Data provides actionable insight and gives agencies the information they need to understand what makes people join, stay and succeed in their agencies.

The administration has stated that data is key to its workforce transformation goals and wants to use data to “track progress on our work so that America can hold us accountable.”

OPM is also pushing toward improved digitization and use of analytics. It plans to “create a government-wide employee digital record by 2022 that will make government-wide HR data accessible in a secure, cloud-based environment, available to agencies and individual employees.” This will assist agencies in producing more robust analytics and reports, which OPM recognizes is a significant component of the future of HR and human capital management.

OPM wants to “improve the capabilities of data analysts and researchers throughout OPM, and eventually government, to advance evidence-based human capital management policy, as well as grow government-wide and agency-specific workforce planning and forecasting abilities.”

Acendre applauds OPM’s recognition of the importance and benefits of analytics. Acendre has been a leader and long-time proponent in analytics, with demonstrable benefits to some of the world’s largest federal agencies.

A pioneer in people analytics, Acendre has long recognized the importance of making data available to everyone within an organization with a need to access it. This understanding has led to organizational transformation within the federal government, such as at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). In addition, Acendre’s People Analytics Center of Excellence provides federal agencies with standard reports, customized reports, services, training, workshops and executive presentations through a cadre of people analytics experts, data scientists and consultants.


07

Acendre People Analytics, data scientists and the Acendre People Analytics Center of Excellence have combined to help organizations save millions of dollars, reduce time to hire and gain insight into employee performance and engagement.

OPM Director Pon has called OPM’s personnel data systems “clunky, not very efficient and not very streamlined, not very data-driven,” and has called out OPM’s “paper-driven” systems.

This expertise in people analytics aligns Acendre with the administration’s goals as well as OPM’s stated strategic directives, making Acendre the perfect partner for agencies adapting to the changing federal workforce.

Security and the Move to the Cloud

More federal government agencies continue to move to the cloud. Not only does this move provide cost and security benefits, but cloud computing can also lay the foundation for innovation. Cloud computing architectures and solutions are helping agencies improve their services and better serve their constituents. Software as a Service (SaaS) provides government agencies with applications via the cloud.

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) provides standardized security services and streamlines assessments so that each cloud service considered by federal agencies is evaluated once, at the federal level. FedRAMP saves individual agencies time not

only by supporting initial security evaluation but also by continuously monitoring the security of each cloud. Federal agencies will save time and money by evaluating only FedRAMP-compliant solutions for implementation. These solutions have passed stringent security assessments by authorized organizations.

FedRAMP-compliant systems are also required to map to low- or moderate-impact Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) baselines, as defined in National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-53.

While agencies do have security concerns about moving to the cloud, there are clear security benefits. In a Netwrix cloud security survey, “almost 50% of government agencies said that that cloud has improved the security of their systems and data.” The survey also revealed that federal agencies have improved availability, risk management, delivered more timely services and significantly reduced burdens on internal IT resources by moving to the cloud.

Acendre has achieved the In Process milestone towards FedRAMP authorization, ensuring our customers that our federal talent management tools have met the security standards and requirements in accordance with FISMA. Acendre is currently undergoing an accredited third-party assessment audit aligned with a FedRAMP Agency ATO. This achievement and status gives Acendre users assurances that our customers meet the rigorous requirements of FedRAMP.

08

Workflow Flexibility

In its strategic plan, OPM cites existing inefficiencies, redundancies and excessive costs as some of the downside of legacy systems, while advocating the elimination of redundancies through innovative modern technology.

Clearly, an important advantage of modern technology over typical legacy software is flexibility. To quickly adapt to a changing environment, whether that is a new administrative directive or a change in agency goals, modern systems can adapt to an agency’s unique business process workflow and specific requirements, no matter how complex. This contrasts with legacy systems, which generally require custom, time-consuming changes.


> Instating performance management processes that help agencies retain top employees and efficiently remove those who fail to perform or to uphold the public’s trust;

> Reducing skills-gaps and eliminating redundant positions;> Simplifying the hiring process for managers;> Enhancing personnel management IT, including creation of a paperless

employee personnel file and digitalizing health benefits and retirement systems administration;

> Spreading effective practices among human resources specialists;> Improving manager satisfaction with the quality of the human

resources service provided; and> Rebalancing relationships with Federal employee unions to

ensure citizens’ interests are kept front and center.

From the President’s Management Agenda – aligning and managing the federal workforce of the 21st century means

09

With an administration set on workforce reform, modifying federal hiring and overhauling performance appraisal processes, federal agencies in the 21st century now require systems that allow any of their processes to be modified and adapt to new regulations rapidly – quickly and at low cost.

“We’re going to demonstrate some new ways in looking at the workforce, not only in recruitment or performance management, or even separation management … but the DNA of how we actually reward people, how our culture works,” says OPM Director Pon.

Proper performance management processes and technology are necessary to accomplish this. Currently, too many agencies rely on paper, forms and manual processes that do not allow for digital analysis and insight, which makes thoughtful organizational transformation virtually impossible. Fortunately, modern technology is now available to agencies to help agencies move to a paperless environment and transform their organization.

Improved performance management can help agencies retain their top employees and efficiently remove or redeploy employees who do not perform according to their job’s basic requirements. It also helps identify and reduce skills gaps and identify redundant positions that could be eliminated. As employees focus on critical work only, it will be important to manage and track results and performance – this is where modern, data-driven performance management systems are necessary.

Faster and simplified hiring is also critical to helping agencies move to a better, streamlined 21st-century workforce. This is another area where new technology that provides more flexibility according to an agency’s unique hiring processes and can help reduce hiring time should be implemented.

Acendre’s unique business process workflow engine is designed to adapt not only to each agency’s specific hiring and appraisal review processes, but also to readily adapt to any new or modified OMB requirements. This powerful and flexible configurability helps agencies improve their hiring and performance management while boosting overall agency workforce performance.

Optimized Agency Performance

OPM also wishes to make operational improvements by focusing on areas that optimize agency performance. This includes improving collaboration, transparency and communication among OPM’s leadership to make better, more efficient decisions, while investing in tools to maximize employee performance and improve other OPM services.

This is the foundation for OPM’s desire “to build a trusted and effective civilian workforce” and realize its vision of promoting excellence in government.

These OPM goals are in line with the administration’s goal of making federal employment more attractive. In summary, advocating and promoting excellence in government is accomplished through:

> enhanced talent acquisition

> data-driven hiring and performance management

> improved employee engagement and development.

“We make it too hard to hire, too hard to reskill and, yes, too hard to deal with poor performers,” OMB Deputy Director for Management Margaret Weichert says. In addition, President Trump has called for moving away from across-the-board pay raises and near automatic step increases and toward a pay-for-performance system. This has been a long-rumored action, but there are still many hurdles to overcome before it could become reality.

Agencies will “identify leading practices” on using incentives to reward and recruit employees, such as performance awards and skill-based bonuses. Agencies must demonstrate by June an “initial capability” with automation in the hiring process and later determine the best practices in alternative personnel systems that agencies have piloted.

By the end of this year, the administration will identify three areas the government can automate and create pilot programs to start that conversion. It will then develop a plan for those employees who lose their jobs from automation to reskill them and match them with existing vacancies. OPM has set individual goals of enabling paperless employee transfers between agencies and improving the certification of federal human resources professionals.

A key element of Acendre’s dedication to helping organizations improve their workforce performance is through tools to help maximize employee performance. Hiring, retaining and developing the best employees is a critical component of ensuring high performance and achieving an agency’s mission.

10


> Minimal change> Minimal setup > Bottom-up participation> Narrow scope> Technology-driven> Low risk

> Moderate to radical change> New processes> Top-down participation> Insight via data analysis> Broad, organizational scope> High risk

> Radical change> Competency assessment and analysis> Personalize and competency-based training and development > Talent management review> Leadership development> Workforce alignment

2 REENGINEERING

Incremental Process andData Transformation

4AUTOMATION

Quick Win

1ORGANIZATIONALTRANSFORMATION

Structural Change and

Reinforce ContinuousImprovement

> Incremental change> Minimal setup> Bottom-up participation> Baseline access to organizational metrics> Refinement of processes> Further automation> Cultural change

3 RATIONALIZATION

ContinuousImprovement Cycle

> Minimal change> Minimal setup> Bottom-up participation> Narrow scope> Technology-driven> Low risk



REENGINEERING

Incremental Process andnData Transformation

AUTOMATION

Quick Win

ORGANIZATIONALTRANSFORMATION




RATIONALIZATION



2 RATIONALIZATION



3 REENGINEERING

Incremental Process and

Data Transformation

> Minimal change> Minimal setup > Bottom-up participation> Narrow scope> Technology-driven> Low risk

1 AUTOMATION

Quick Win


4ORGANIZATIONALTRANSFORMATION



Federal Agency Workforce Reform Road Map

A Partnership with Human Capital Management Leadership

Acendre meets regularly with federal human capital and HR leaders, while monitoring OMB and administration initiatives and OPM policy. The goal of this collaboration is to provide direction, leadership and support to federal agencies designing, developing and implementing human resources systems that support current and future human capital needs.

Acendre provides HR products and services to meet the evolving human capital needs and mission requirements of federal agencies. The products and services are designed to enable the execution of government-wide HR strategy and policy as well as the human capital priorities of any administration. We use a broad team of human capital leaders and specialists, HR leaders and specialists, data scientists, IT and security leaders to deliver this.

Acendre technology helps federal agencies consolidate, standardize and modernize their systems and data in a FedRAMP-secure cloud environment. This technology is designed to improve workforce performance and ultimately transform the workplace to a 21st-century state. From sourcing, hiring, engaging and development, Acendre is a partner to forward-thinking federal agencies.

11

Acendre Elevate Your Workforce

Acendre’s cloud-based performance management system is designed for federal agencies – with input from and through partnerships with federal agencies. By working closely with federal HR leaders and federal performance management experts, we’ve built a federal performance management system for today’s federal government that also meets stringent federal security requirements.

Call for a personalized demo today and let us show you how we can help you and your agency improve employee engagement, while meeting the new federal requirements of maximizing employee performance and ensuring a high-performing agency.

Why not get started today?

For more information please contact us via our channels below.

w. acendre.com/industries/usfederal p. 703 350 4496 e. [email protected]

Acendre’s federal workforce solutions and team of federal talent management experts is ready to help you now on your journey toward meeting the new OMB directives.

Acendre Performance, with our exclusive People Analytics, is helping federal agencies elevate their workforces today through these measures:

Improving employee engagement and morale

Eliminating paper work

Automating and speeding the federal performance review process

Aligning individual performance with agency mission

Linking individual performance to agency performance

Improving productivity

Saving money

Ready to get Started?

www.acendre.com

Talent Management Solutions

acendre federal human capital strategy guide

Documents