The July 2020 update of the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) assured Feds that modernization efforts are continuing on despite pandemic disruptions, and the latest update on Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goals released today reveals agencies are still on track to meet key milestones across goals.
On the category management CAP Goal, leaders are predicting that the Federal government is on track to save $40 billion in cost avoidance by the end of Fiscal Year 2020 because of efforts to streamline how agencies buy common goods and services as an enterprise. These savings are the result of eliminating nearly 150,000 – or 35 percent of – duplicative or sub-optimized contracts.
Within its category management milestones, the update states that the government is on track to meet several key milestones by the end of FY2020, including modernizing IT product service codes, developing an IT acquisition intelligence capability, enhancing IT spend transparency, and improving the facilities, maintenance, and management schedule.
The September 2020 update states that other efforts – specifically the IT modernization and data CAP Goals – “have been instrumental in helping agencies make this rapid shift and create the foundation for an agile and responsive government” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But while agencies are on track to meet IT modernization milestones – such as mobile device management and automated access management – by the end of the fiscal year, some asset management goals, the intrusion and detection prevention milestone, and the data protection milestone are all at risk to miss the fourth quarter due date.
On its building a workforce for the 21st century goals, the team completed its inventory of promising policies, practices, and tools to promote effective and innovative performance management in the third quarter, and is on track to make sure that all supervisors are appropriately trained on performance management by the end of FY2020. The goal to provide agencies with a simple performance management system with real-time feedback has been delayed until 2021 due to COVID-19. Reskilling and hiring efforts are on track to be completed through FY2021.
To meet the CAP Goal of improving customer experience with Federal services, the team concluded the government-wide pilot of the subject matter expert hiring process, established a central space to route customer experience feedback, and completed the annual update to A-11 section 280 during the third quarter of FY2020.
To meet its goal of shifting low-value to high-value work, leaders have made several strides in robotic process automation efforts such as building a use case inventory portal, and reporting to Congress on eliminating unnecessary reporting requirements to streamline operational processes.
Across goals, agencies also made progress on several milestones, including:
- developing proposed updates to the Bayh-Dole Act implementing regulations for agency and public feedback;
- conducting a pilot program to sync agency internal databases with the infrastructure permitting process dashboard to reduce duplicative data;
- issuing the AcqCelerator challenge for data mashing, cleansing, and visualization;
- formally launching the Periodic Table for Acquisition Innovation; and
- developing project initiation documents for the non-data mitigation strategies roadmap.
