Originally Broadcast Saturday, June 16, 2007

Washington, D.C.

Welcome to The Business of Government Hour, a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government does business.

The Business of Government Hour is produced by the IBM Center for The Business of Government, which was created in 1998 to encourage discussion and research into new approaches to improving government effectiveness. You can find out more about the Center by visiting us on the web at businessofgovernment.org.

And now, The Business of Government Hour.

Mr. Morales: Good morning. I'm Albert Morales, your host, and managing partner of The IBM Center for The Business of Government.

As the National Aeronautics and Space Administration approaches its 50th year, it retains one of the most complex and exciting missions in the federal government.

With the Shuttle Program, the International Space Station, and its cutting-edge research in aeronautics, space science, and earth science, NASA expands our knowledge of the universe and applies these insights to our daily lives.

A few years ago, President George Bush gave NASA a defining challenge for the 21st Century, to expand human presence in space. The success of this ambitious vision rests on NASA's pursuits of an effective workforce strategy.

With us this morning to discuss NASA's critical effort in this regard is Toni Dawsey, Assistant Administrator for Human Capital Management, and Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA.

Good morning, Toni.

Ms. Dawsey: Good morning.

Mr. Morales: And joining us in our conversation is Solly Thomas, associate partner in IBM's human capital practice.

Good morning, Solly.

Mr. Thomas: Good morning, Al, and good morning, Toni.

Ms. Dawsey: Good morning, Solly.

Mr. Morales: Toni, many of our listeners are generally familiar with NASA as an organization, and certainly given its public recognition.

But can you give us an overview of NASA's history and its mission today?

Ms. Dawsey: Congress sent the legislation creating NASA to President Eisenhower less than one year after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. October 1, 1958 was the official start of NASA, and almost immediately, NASA began working on options for human space flight.

Between 1961 and 1975, NASA completed the Mercury; Gemini; the Moon Landing Program, Apollo; Skylab; and Apollo-Soyuz Programs. After the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz test projects for the early and mid-1970s, NASA's human space flights efforts again resumed in 1981 with the Space Shuttle Program that continues today to help build the International Space Station.

NASA also has continued to conduct cutting-edge aeronautics research; launched a number of significant scientific probes that have explored the Moon, the planets, and other areas of our solar system; and sent several spacecraft to investigate Mars.

The Hubble Space Telescope is very popular, and other space science spacecraft have enabled science to make a number of significant astronomical discoveries about our universe. NASA has helped bring about new generations of communications satellites, and NASA's earth science efforts have also literally changed the way we view our home planet.

NASA technology has resulted in numerous spin-offs, also in wide-ranging scientific, technical, and commercial fields.

And then, as you said, in January 2004, President Bush gave us a new vision, and that is to go back to the Moon and then on to Mars and beyond. That vision changed our mission. We are planning to retire the Shuttle in 2010 and launch the new Crew Exploration Vehicle by 2015, and hopefully return to the Moon in 2020.

Our New Crew Exploration Program is referred to as the Constellation Program.

Mr. Morales: Now, Toni, these are very, very broad and complex missions. Could you give us a sense of the scale of the organization? Can you tell us a little bit about how NASA is organized, the overall budget, a sense of the number of full-time employees and contractors, and its geographic footprint?

Ms. Dawsey: Sure. NASA's organization is comprised of NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. and 10 principal field centers, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and many smaller facilities located around the country.

In addition, NASA has a wide variety of partnership agreements with academia, the private sector, state and local governments, and other federal agencies, and a number of international organizations.

NASA's appropriation for fiscal year 2007 is $16.2 billion, and we have about 16,400 permanent employees and over 18,000 civil service employees of all types. We also have over 38,000 on or near-site contractors.

Mr. Thomas: Toni, now that you've provided us with a sense of scale of the larger organization, could you tell us more about your specific role? What are your responsibilities and duties as NASA's Chief Human Capital Officer? And could you tell us more about the areas under your purview, such as how the office is organized, as well as the size of the staff?

Ms. Dawsey: Sure. I have responsibility for NASA's civil service workforce. I'm responsible for setting the workforce strategy, assessing workforce characteristics and future needs based on mission and strategic plan; aligning the human resources policies and programs with organizational mission, strategic goals, and performance outcomes; developing and advocating a culture of continuous learning to attract and retain employees with superior abilities; identifying best practices and benchmarking studies; and serving as a member of the Office of Personnel Management-led Chief Human Capital Officer Council.

Mr. Thomas: And regarding your responsibilities and duties as the agency's Chief Human Capital Officer, what are the top three challenges that you face in your position, and how have you addressed these challenges?

Ms. Dawsey: Well, as I've said, we're going to continue Shuttle flights to complete the International Space Station, and then retire the Shuttle by 2010, and in the meantime, prepare to launch a new Crew Exploration Vehicle by 2015. This is going to cause major workforce transitions.

So the top three challenges that we in Human Capital face are developing good workforce planning processes and tools; ensuring workforce skills stay aligned with changing mission requirements; and providing HR systems that ensure timely, reliable, and authoritative data for agency workforce decisions.

Mr. Morales: Toni, you're returning back to government, so I'm curious. Could you describe for our listeners your career path? Many probably don't know that you came back first as Deputy Chief Human Capital Officer and now serve as the Chief Human Capital Officer.

What brought you back to NASA?

Ms. Dawsey: In brief, my career as an HR specialist started at the Federal Trade Commission, back where we started as functional specialists. So I started as a staffing specialist and then moved on to classification.

And I left FTC to join NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center to broaden my experience, and there, I became a personnel management specialist, which not only incorporated the first two functions, but broadened them into employee relations, and I was an HR advisor on all programs to the head of the Engineering Directorate.

From Goddard, I went to the Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Service and became a team lead and then a supervisor. From there, I moved on to the Department of Transportation's Office of the Secretary to work on the policy and program development side of HR, and later to manage their HR Operations Branch.

I left the Office of the Secretary to become the Personnel Officer for Transportation's Office of Inspector General, and then two years later, I left HR altogether to serve as the Deputy Assistant Inspector General for Inspections and Evaluations. And there, I directed headquarters and regional staff in providing independent and objective inspections and evaluations of Transportation's programs and operations.

I retired from that position, and then after nine years of retirement, I rejoined NASA in 2004 to serve as the Director of the agency Human Resources Division, and then in December of '05, I was appointed to my current position.

When I was offered the opportunity to work for NASA, I was honored. NASA had just received an award for being the first human capital office to go Green on the President's Management Agenda, and the agency was working hard to return to flight, and I wanted to be working in this agency that was so progressive, had employees dedicated to a terrific mission, and had many exciting challenges ahead of it.

Mr. Morales: That's a great set of broad experiences. So I'm curious: how have your previous roles prepared you for your current leadership role and shaped your management approach and your leadership style?

Ms. Dawsey: First, as I said, I started out as a specialist in two of the major HR areas -- staffing and classification. And that gave me a very important and thorough grounding in those two functional areas.

I then accepted other positions earlier in my career, with the intent of building a well-rounded HR portfolio, and then later, working to build a leadership portfolio, which gave me both credibility within the HR community and confidence.

Second, I was greatly influenced by the director of the Engineering Directorate at the Goddard Space Flight Center. As I also mentioned earlier, I served as his Personnel Management Specialist and advisor. And very importantly, he included me at his table, along with his management team, and he treated me accordingly.

He told me the same thing he told them: I want to hear how we can get things done, not how we can't, and I want to hear solutions for problems, not just problems. It would require that we think outside the box, and I never got back in that box.

Lastly, just moving across different occupations, working with different leaders, and in different types of agencies was very developmental, and it went a long way in building my knowledge base and my confidence level.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic.

What is NASA's human resource strategy? We will ask Toni Dawsey, Assistant Administrator for Human Capital Management, and Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour.

I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Toni Dawsey, Assistant Administrator for Human Capital Management, and Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA.

Also joining us in our conversation is Solly Thomas, associate partner in IBM's human capital practice.

Mr. Morales: Toni, according to the 2006 Federal Human Capital Survey, NASA ranked in the top three agencies in job satisfaction, leadership, and workplace performance. Why do you think your co-workers think so highly of NASA as a place to work, and what do you think the secret is?

Ms. Dawsey: The secret really isn't a secret. It's our mission.

NASA is filled with employees at all levels who love what they are doing. They're inspired by supervisors and managers who love what they are doing. And they are surrounded by highly educated dedicated co-workers who keep the bar high and make for a challenging, exciting environment.

Mr. Morales: Toni, earlier you mentioned the PMA, so let's delve into that for a moment.

NASA was one of the first agencies to achieve a Green status in human capital management under the PMA. Could you elaborate on the challenges and your efforts to getting to Green, and what's the Department need to do to achieve and sustain a Green status rating?

Ms. Dawsey: NASA got to Green quickly because the human capital organization had tremendous support from the Administrator and his management team. They believed that the human capital agenda was an agency agenda, and we continue to operate that way. And that is not only how we got to Green, but how we have remained Green.

Mr. Morales: So pretty straightforward, then?

Ms. Dawsey: Yes.

Mr. Morales: Let me switch gears a little bit. The NASA Flexibility Act of 2004 gave your agency certain flexibilities for recruitment and retention purposes. Could you talk a little bit about some of the flexibilities you were given, and which of these has had the biggest impact on recruiting and retaining a high-quality workforce?

Ms. Dawsey: Well, we were given over a dozen flexibilities that include enhanced recruitment, relocation, and retention bonuses, expanded use of term appointments, pay authority for critical positions, and enhanced travel benefits and annual leave benefits for new hires. And what works best for us really is combining all these different flexibilities into incentive packages tailored to the needs of specific candidates.

And that's been a particularly successful strategy for us.

Mr. Thomas: Toni, earlier, you had talked about the workforce planning efforts at the agency, and I want to talk a little bit more about that, if you don't mind.

NASA's most recent workforce strategy represents a new, more centralized approach to workforce planning. Would you talk about this new approach? What are some of the central components of this new planning process, and how does it better position NASA to meet the demands of its mission?

Ms. Dawsey: NASA has a number of initiatives underway to improve workforce planning, which, as I mentioned earlier, is one of our primary goals in human capital.

We needed to go from a near-term, budget-driven process to a longer-term, scenario-based workforce planning process. And we needed to go from a center-centric planning to an agency, a corporate workforce planning process. So we established an agency workforce planning governance structure. We enhanced workforce data tools to identify people with programs, and to be able to locate expertise across the agency.

We've developed workforce capability measures so that we can identify early gaps and surpluses across the agency. And we've established a Shuttle Human Capital Council just recently that includes not only NASA HR directors, but contractor HR directors so we can work with another as we transition and learn from one another's best practices. And we've integrated -- and this is the most important -- we've integrated this workforce planning process with our budget process.

In addition, we're currently engaging with Mission Directorates and the Centers in scenario planning. We're developing a workforce planner's handbook so that we're all talking a common language across the agency, and most recently, we've started a mapping process. We're developing a process where we can map employees from the Shuttle workforce to Constellation program work.

And with a strong workforce planning capability, the agency will be able to synergize its ability to meet challenges and perform the overall mission. We're integrating workforce planning with the program, budget, and business support functions, and that will allow us to take workforce planning from the near-term that I was talking about to the longer-term process that starts as soon as program requirements are defined and as far out as they can be defined.

Mr. Thomas: And staying on the workforce planning topic, NASA's workforce strategy places very strong emphasis on the development of 10 healthy centers that are fully engaged and productive.

First, within a human capital context, what is a healthy center? And second, what are the seven key attributes that you see of a healthy center?

Ms. Dawsey: Within the human capital context, a healthy center is one that first of all can assess its overall capability of total workforce and has the ability to align that workforce to future work.

The second is to be able to surface workforce misalignments that require agency intervention; that is, solving the problem at the agency level. And the third is to be able to shape the size, composition, and the management of the center workforce over time.

The seven key attributes that we use are: one, core, clear, stable, and enduring roles and responsibilities for a center; two, clear program project management leadership roles; three, major in-house durable spaceflight responsibility; four, skilled and flexible blended workforce with sufficient depth and breadth; five, technically competent and value-centered leadership; six, capable and effectively utilize infrastructure; an seven, strong stakeholder support.

Mr. Thomas: Toni, NASA's new approach seems to reflect planning and integration at many levels of management. What are the specific benefits of this enhanced workforce planning capability, and how do you feel it better enables NASA to address the workforce challenges and issues?

Ms. Dawsey: Well, leaders will be able to identify skill gaps quickly and plan strategically to address surpluses and gaps in a targeted and deliberate way across the agency, and to quickly identify expertise and be able to use it wherever it is needed in the agency.

Mr. Morales: Toni, it's been said that NASA's workforce is not ideally aligned to the programs and projects that are being undertaken to support the vision for space exploration, and it's commonly referred to as uncovered capacity.

Could you elaborate on NASA's efforts to reduce its current uncovered capacity level?

Ms. Dawsey: Sure. Two years ago, we had over 2,000 FTE that we called uncovered, and that translated to far more than 2,000 people. So we went into what we called a transformation mode, and today, there are very few what we call now "available for new work."

To solve the problem, we conducted buy-outs and early-outs. We held job fairs to place employees within and outside NASA. We used our new legislative authorities. We had hiring freezes. We set tight ceiling controls. We moved work across the agency. We reassigned staff, provided career transition assistance, and we started retraining programs.

Mr. Morales: Along those lines, could you elaborate on recent NASA initiatives to close the core competency gaps? Specifically, could you tell us about NASA's competency management system?

Ms. Dawsey: Yes. The competency management system first of all was built in-house by engineers at the Kennedy Space Flight Center, one of whom is still on my staff.

And it's an agency-wide competency inventory in a common language, populated with both an employee's position and individual competencies. And it enables NASA to know first of all what the current competencies are in the workforce, and then, as I mentioned earlier, locate expertise that's required to implement specific tasks.

And it also gives a good demographic snapshot to enable us to do more in-depth workforce data searches. It aids in the competency gap surplus problem, and it assists in assessing center readiness for new activities.

If you use it in conjunction with the workforce planning processes, which we're doing, we can help assess workforce impacts on programs and projects at a greater level of detail. And it also provides, then, information to our Office of Education so we can recruit students in those areas, and we can help employees in determining how best to expand and develop their careers.

Mr. Morales: How is NASA managing its blended workforce?

We will ask Toni Dawsey, Assistant Administrator for Human Capital Management, and Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour.

I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Toni Dawsey, Assistant Administrator for Human Capital Management, and Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA.

Also joining us in our conversation is Solly Thomas, associate partner in IBM's human capital practice.

Toni, NASA has a fairly heavy reliance on contractors. I believe in earlier segments, you mentioned 38,000. Could you tell us how federal managers can effectively manage an ever-increasing blended workforce composed of contractors and federal workers? And what are some of the key differences intrinsic to these two core groups?

Ms. Dawsey: Just to give you some perspective, less than 15 percent of the agency's authorized funding is expended on civil service salaries and benefits. In fact, one of our most renowned installations, the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, is run entirely through a contract with Cal Tech. We have approximately, as you said, 38,000 contractors working on or in close proximity to our NASA sites.

In managing our blended workforce, we have to make sure always that the government is in the driver's seat. There are, of course, numerous inherently governmental activities carried out in NASA. These are defined by the Office of Management and Budget, and they include the exercise of discretion in applying government authority or the making of value judgments and making decisions for the government. Civil servants make the plans, formulate the budgets, and decide strategy and policy.

In managing the blended workforce, we need to ensure we have a sufficient in-house knowledge base to be a smart buyer of services from industry. And that means we have to have sufficient depth among civil engineers and scientists to specify our requirements, and not only oversee the contractor efforts, but have insight into the technical issues that arise.

In the end, it is NASA personnel who make the go, no-go decisions for our programs. Additionally, it's also critical for us to have strong capabilities in systems engineering and project management, since these skills are critical not only to our mission success, but also to getting the most out our contractor workforce.

Mr. Morales: Toni, I also want to go back to one of the other topics from our previous segment, and that's around recruitment. Could you tell us what changes are you making to the recruitment process at NASA? Does the agency use flexible compensation strategies to attract and retain high-quality employees who possess these mission-critical competencies?

Ms. Dawsey: NASA is refining our recruitment process, our recruitment strategy, in several ways. We're conducting more targeted recruitment. For example, we're recruiting for mission-critical occupations and underrepresented groups in diversity.

We're increasing our collaboration with our Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity and our NASA Education Office, and we're enhancing and expanding student programs that can serve as a pipeline into our workforce. We're developing our partnerships and relationships, for example, with non-profit organizations, industry, other federal agencies, professional organizations, and educational institutions that can be beneficial in future recruitment efforts, initiatives, and strategies.

Mr. Thomas: Toni, although it's important to bring new talent into NASA, your organization's approach to strengthening competency needs also involves leveraging the talent that's already available in the current workforce. Could you elaborate a bit on NASA's retraining efforts?

Ms. Dawsey: Yes. NASA is engaged in several activities designed to realign our workforce to meet our new objectives. We have training and what we call retraining programs in support of program and project management, systems engineering, and quality of mission assurance, and we're also training technicians to be technologists.

We're developing a deliberate and systematic growth and development opportunity path through actually what we're calling a career pathing approach, and through redesigned leadership development programs.

The career pathing is providing for each discipline a transparent career progression path. Ordinarily, employees when they enter government are looking to see what duties they need to perform to be promoted to the next-higher grade level. But in NASA, we're looking to build pipelines for our journeyman level, our program project management level, senior executive service, senior technical, and senior leads.

And that requires more than just working to be better within what we consider a stovepipe of the promotion career ladder. We're trying to give employees a look at the broader goals they need to seek to be part of the technical management leadership team at NASA.

So each career path will not only show the duties they need for the next grade level, but it will show recommended and sometimes required assignments, competencies, developmental experiences, training, certifications, if needed, rotational assignments, coaching, and mentoring.

And the purpose of this is to have employees that we can select from inside who understand all of NASA, not just one center, to have employees understand the institutions and the programs side of the house, and employees who have networked and know how to network and collaborate, both internally and externally.

So we're trying to start at much lower levels in the agency to develop well-rounded professionals to take on our management positions over the next several years.

Mr. Thomas: Toni, staying on the employee development theme, could you talk a little bit more about NASA's key learning and development strategies and initiatives? And in particular, what is NASA doing to ensure continuity of leadership through succession planning and executive development?

Ms. Dawsey: Okay. I started to touch on that, but we are doing so much at NASA, I really like to talk about it, and so I'll expand on that a little.

We have a corporate integrated approach to leadership development first of all. NASA has created a leadership strategy, which is used by both agency-wide and center leadership program managers as a framework for designing and implementing leadership programs. This framework provides continuity through succession planning and executive development.

We've redesigned the agency's residential leadership programs -- that includes a program focus on the strategic alignment of leaders to the NASA vision for space exploration, as well as programs that focus on current hot leadership topics relevant to achieving mission.

We have a new program. What we've done is we realized that while we have excellent leadership training programs, those programs have been geared to employees at the journeyman level or close to. And we realize in today's world that this type of training is very important at much lower grade levels. We need to teach our professionals at -- for example, grades 11 and 12, which we started doing with a new program called NASA First.

We're teaching them about NASA, about rotating around centers to learn what centers are doing, and learning the leadership skills of collaborating, benchmarking, using best practices. And with that program, starting at grades 11 and 12, we're getting to people when they're also -- it's a lot easier to get them into training and start the culture change. And in NASA, that means learning that mobility is important, and that being called from one center to another center is something that they should expect and probably will be required to do in the future as the mission transitions to Constellation.

And they set up a network that has been really, really helpful, and that they're seeing how an engineer can help an information technology person, who can help a scientist, and just through the different kinds of tools that we have in common, for example, systems tools, and hear that exchange and see the network -- for example, of an engineer expand to include people in the chief financial office and in other business support offices -- for example, procurement, even human capital. It's very exciting.

And so the leadership development program now basically starts at a much lower grade level and then proceeds up through into our senior executive candidate development program, which is a rigorous program, and we're very proud of it. It has Office of Personnel Management approval. It is a program that they hold out as a model in government.

We also have fellowship programs that ensure that employees have the opportunity to obtain best-in-class development at the finest educational institutions. And in terms of our succession planning efforts, we've developed and implemented a succession planning framework also.

The plan centers around NASA's leadership model and includes a newly created leadership framework which is designed to articulate developmental experiences for all leadership roles within the agency. This corporate leadership succession strategy supports creating a skilled pipeline for leadership within the agency. It includes a variety of components -- workforce planning and analysis, formal leadership development programs, formal and informal coaching and mentoring programs, and leadership training -- and is supplemented by center-level developmental activities.

The plan capitalizes on the agency's long-time support of leadership development and training. It defines a leadership life cycle of development and enhances existing programs by incorporating, as I said, the entry-level leadership program NASA First, and we have created an advisory council composed of senior leaders that will oversee succession management within the organization, including participating in selections for our formal leadership development programs.

The group also will complete an annual review of the succession management framework to ensure that it stays relevant to agency needs.

Mr. Thomas: Toni, NASA is also addressing unique challenges presented by retiring the Space Shuttle. Could you talk about some of the specifics of these challenges facing the organization, and also, what is NASA doing to address these challenges?

Ms. Dawsey: Yeah, NASA is facing some unique challenges associated with Shuttle retirement, and we need to retain skills necessary to safely execute remaining Space Shuttle missions to the very last flight, and then we need to manage the transition of appropriate Shuttle workforce into Constellation; and we need to retain skills between fiscal years 2010 and fiscal year 2015 necessary to safely execute Constellation flight operations.

To address these challenges, one effort underway is what we are calling the Shuttle workforce mapping project. Many of the employees currently working on the Shuttle program will be needed to work on the Constellation program. For that reason, a team of headquarters and center representatives is developing a mapping of the Shuttle workforce to Constellation work. This plan will reflect the planned migration of our employees supporting the Shuttle program to Constellation, phased to correspond to key milestones in both programs.

And the first mapping is scheduled to be completed in mid-August. It will be iterated and refined regularly after that date, particularly as Constellation program needs and the Shuttle flight manifest schedules are updated.

In addition, we're holding agency-wide capability assessment forums to further refine our workforce planning picture. Several modeling, simulation, and analytical tools also are being evaluated in our quest to better capture system dynamics and requirements-driven workforce and skill mix forecasting.

Cumulatively, these activities and prospective tools will enhance our analytic capability in these areas.

Mr. Morales: Toni, let me switch gears for a moment now. Under its Integrated Enterprise Management Program, and sometimes it's commonly referred to as the IEMP, NASA is transforming its finances, human resources, assets, and processes through a combination of supporting technology and business infrastructure. Could you elaborate on the IEMP's human capital information environment project, and could you give us a sense of the benefits from its implementation?

Ms. Dawsey: Sure. Until just recently, we had 75 different human resource systems that were not integrated. They didn't talk to one another. So we set out two years ago to integrate them first, and that was, as I said, accomplished last month, and as of the end of this month, our HR portal, as we call it, will be open throughout the human capital community.

We are now, as part of what we're calling the human capital information environment, working with IEMP to incorporate that HR portal into the other business support systems. We intend to provide authoritative single source and timely workforce data this way.

To kind of give you an idea of what the human capital information environment will provide, we'll be able to integrate existing NASA budget data with workforce data, and we'll be able to view projected workforce information, budget actuals, and workforce planning data. And we've not been able to do that.

We'll be able to view employee-related cost information, view a collection of current and historical workforce information to support the budget planning process, and we'll understand the total workforce composition, moving from a system with compartmentalized, self-contained capabilities to a system with a better understanding of all its capabilities. We'll be able to facilitate informed decisions regarding the current and planned workforce, to view their status based on plans and actual labor charges. And we'll be able to assess full cost data and loaded rates.

Mr. Morales: Toni, we talked earlier about some of the challenges around the blended workforce. And so given the composition of NASA, how does your organization evaluate HR field performance, as well as impart the best practices to NASA's HR community? And what steps are you pursuing to ensure that these policies and procedures are documented and communicated in a timely and comprehensible manner, and that its implementation is being monitored?

Ms. Dawsey: NASA evaluates center HR performance through a comprehensive human capital accountability system designed to assess the health of human capital programs across the agency. The accountability system ensures accountability for efficient, effective, and aligned human capital programs while balancing the need to assure that human capital decisions are made based on merit.

NASA has embraced the five-pronged approach to managing the assessment activities. We do agency program studies. We do agency quality reviews. We do agency on-site reviews. We do center self-assessments, and we do external oversight audits.

We utilize several methods to evaluate center HR performance and to impart best practices to the HR community. The workforce strategy division within the Office of Human Capital conducts human resources on-site reviews on a quarterly basis at the NASA centers. The overall purpose is to focus on three specific goals: first, the review team seeks to understand how NASA's workforce implementation plan sub-goals are translated at the center level. And we haven't talked about it, but our workforce implementation plan was developed from the agency's strategic plan, and it contains approximately 150 tasks that we need to perform to meet the goals that I talked about earlier in workforce planning, workforce alignment, and systems and accountability. So that is one area of the review.

The review team is also concerned with strengthening relationships within the HR operating community, and the review team assesses NASA's compliance with human resources laws, rules, and regulations. That review focuses on the HR authorities that sustain the three key drivers of human capital management: strategic competencies, performance culture, and leadership and learning.

At the conclusion of each of the reviews, a comprehensive report is prepared which includes recommended and required actions as appropriate. The report is sent to the center human resources director and the center director, describing significant positive, for example, best practices or negative findings.

On a monthly basis, NASA headquarters conducts video teleconferences--we call them VITS -- with the HR community on a variety of subjects. The VITS affords NASA the opportunity to communicate information in an interactive format in real-time. NASA also issues personnel bulletins on a variety of HR-related issues. The personnel bulletins supplement current NASA policies and procedures, and if necessary, provide guidance to clarify any existing policies and procedures.

Mr. Morales: So, Toni, along similar lines, recently, the National Academy of Public Administration, otherwise known as NAPA, released a report entitled "NASA: Balancing a Multi-Sector Workforce to Achieve a Healthy Organization." And in this report, it recommends that NASA continue to find ways to balance its multi-sector workforce and restructure its existing civil service components.

Could you tell us briefly about this report, and to what extent is NASA planning to implement any of the human capital recommendations?

Ms. Dawsey: The NAPA report is quite far-ranging, and was done as a joint request of NASA and its appropriations committees in Congress. NAPA believes that NASA has an opportunity to lead the public sector as it manages and realigns its multi-sector workforce, the civil servants and contractors, for Constellation.

In planning and decision-making, NAPA recommends that we develop a risk-based planning strategy to deal with alternative futures, including program, budget, and schedule changes. NAPA favors scenario planning to inform decision-making, workforce plans, and strategies.

We have been thinking the same way, and, as I've explained, we are currently exploring methodologies for doing budget and workforce scenario planning.

Our administrator has set the policy that all 10 of our centers will contribute to the work required to implement Constellation. All have their own strengths and will be needed. The program work assignments have been managed in NASA to ensure all 10 centers can remain strong and healthy. NAPA proposes a health center framework and metrics with critical factors and success elements. They believe that NASA headquarters should conduct annual center health evaluations, and centers should perform ongoing assessments. This is something we are increasingly engaged in, and we will look carefully at NAPA's recommendations in this area.

Other areas covered by NAPA in its report include acquisition management, the engagement of the human capital function with agency planning and decision-making, maintaining an appropriate balance between contractors and government personnel, and between permanent and non-permanent civil service appointments, and finally, some ideas for new civil service flexibilities to enable more-rapid expanding or shrinking of the workforce. And as I've mentioned, we're already engaged in a lot of what NAPA is recommending.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic.

What does the future hold for NASA? We will ask Toni Dawsey, Assistant Administrator for Human Capital Management, and Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Toni Dawsey, Assistant Administrator for Human Capital Management, and Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA.

Also joining us in our conversation is Solly Thomas, associate partner in IBM's human capital practice.

Toni, with the evolution of NASA's new vision for space exploration, how do you envision NASA's human capital needs evolving in, say, the next three to five years? And specifically, how do you envision your office will evolve to meet these challenges?

Ms. Dawsey: I see human capital evolving in a very positive way. I see human capital specialists becoming true partners in the strategic planning process, not only internally with our stakeholders, but externally.

And I think in terms of skills, I was talking earlier about how important it was to have the functional expertise. A lot of that is being sent to shared services centers, and what's evolving is the real true professional human capital expertise, which means looking more towards people who have some of the skills that I was talking about earlier -- workforce planning skills; that is, statistics and modeling competencies -- and skills in systems development and integration, program project management skills, because we're helping to develop and implement programs on an agency level -- and a lot of them.

And I think we need human resource specialists who have real good communication skills not only in writing and speaking, but the ability to see the way to communicate a huge amount of data that we create nowadays in a format, in a dashboard, for people at all levels in the agency. We can't give all this workforce data I'm talking about as it is to the leadership when they need to make decisions. We need the kind of HR people who are analytical enough to know what of that data is critical for the immediate decisions.

Mr. Thomas: Toni, today's broader multi-sector workforce requires the high level integration of acquisition and human capital planning, which is long overdue for the federal sector. How will NASA be at the forefront of the 21st Century governance, perhaps pointing the way for other federal agencies facing similar workforce challenges?

Ms. Dawsey: Well, we're finding it quite difficult to forecast the workforce and human capital policies we'll be needing five, 10 to 20 years out, and especially for Constellation. The decisions to what we call make or buy, meaning do work in-house or contract out -- the decisions to do that -- to decide how the work will be accomplished is a critical one, and greatly impacts the size of the civil service workforce we'll need.

What we found is that the critical make-buy decision needs to be addressed earlier in the planning process rather than later. We're making changes in our planning processes to move these decisions up and make sure the right players, including human capital, participate in the decision-making.

Mr. Thomas: There's much talk about commercial best practices in the government, in particular in service areas such as human resources. What emerging technologies do you see that hold the most promise for improving the federal management of human resources?

Ms. Dawsey: We believe that automation is key to improving the management of human resources. I've already talked about our human resources portal and our human capital information environment. And we've implemented a lot of other automated systems.

The one that we haven't so far that we're looking into is our performance management system. We want to implement a system that will not only contain electronic documents, but also route them appropriately and provide immediate notifications and feedback to employees and management officials.

Mr. Morales: Toni, I often ask my guests about the pending retirement wave in government and what type of impact it may have on their operations. What are you seeing within NASA, and what are the plans to mitigate these effects?

Ms. Dawsey: Well, right now, we have about 12 percent of the workforce that is eligible for immediate retirement, and this is normal for NASA. Fortunately, the percent of scientists and engineers that are retirement-eligible is less. They're only at about 11.3 percent.

Over the next five years, each year, about three percent of the current employees will become new retirement eligibles, and about three percent of all employees will actually retire each year.

We have forecast total expected retirements over the next five years. Some of the retirements will cause a loss in our corporate memory. Nevertheless, as NASA moves out of the Shuttle era and into a new phase of space exploration, retirement losses should be well within our capabilities to hire replacements, and retirements will give us the opportunity to bring in new talent.

Mr. Morales: Now, Toni, you've had obviously a very successful career within public service, and as we mentioned at the start of the show, you're actually returning to federal service again. What advice would you give to a person who perhaps is out there thinking about getting started in a career in public service?

Ms. Dawsey: I think there is now so much information available on a career in the federal service that we didn't have years ago. And so I recommend that those looking for employment and trying to decide between the public and private sector make sure that they do their homework about all the career possibilities across government and within each department or agency. For example, people are surprised when they hear about all the career opportunities in NASA, because they tend to think engineers, scientists, and astronauts. So do your homework.

The second is learn about the work/life benefits and flexibilities that now exist in government and which allow us to be competitive with the private sector. We have put a lot of focus on that in government, and I think it would surprise a lot of people of how important that work/life balance is in government now.

And I guess lastly, I asked a new employee whom I just hired from the private sector why he chose to go federal, and he replied that after years of working in the private sector, he did not have the feelings that he saw existing at NASA, and that is contributing on a team to fulfill a real mission for the nation, actually for the world, and so I think that's important that you look at a job in terms of what it is you're contributing to society, and the government gives you plenty of opportunity to do that.

Mr. Morales: So it's a real sense of pride and accomplishment in the role.

Ms. Dawsey: Yes.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic.

Toni, unfortunately, we have reached the top of the hour, and we've run out of time. I do want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule today, but more importantly, Solly and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service to our country.

Ms. Dawsey: The last thing I would like to say is we're very proud of NASA. There is a lot going on at NASA. And we invite you to learn about us on nasa.gov.

Thank you.

Mr. Morales: Thank you.

This has been The Business of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with Toni Dawsey, Assistant Administrator for Human Capital Management, and Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA.

My co-host today has been Solly Thomas, associate partner in IBM's human capital practice.

As you enjoy the rest of your day, please take time to remember the men and women of our armed and civil services abroad who can't hear this morning's show on we're improving their government, but who deserve our unconditional respect and support.

For The Business of Government Hour, I'm Albert Morales.

Thank you for listening.

This has been The Business of Government Hour. Be sure to join us every Saturday at 9:00 a.m., and visit us on the web at businessofgovernment.org. There, you can learn more about our programs and get a transcript of today's conversation.

Until next week, it's businessofgovernment.org