Management Reform

The National Performance Review (NPR), a major government reform effort under the direction of Vice President Gore, has established "reinvention labs" to test ways for federal agencies to improve their performance and customer service by reengineering work processes and eliminating unnecessary regulations. Lab officials throughout the country indicated that the labs addressed a variety of topics. Although nearly half of those surveyed reported that customer service was their labs' main goal, they often said that the labs' customers were other government organizations, not the public as the Vice President originally suggested. At the time of GAO's survey, about half of the labs were up and running, while the rest were still in the planning stage. About two-thirds of the respondents said that they collected data on their labs' performance, and more than 80 percent said that this information indicated that the labs had improved service, productivity, and employee morale. In GAO's view, the labs' results suggest several promising approaches to improving agency work processes. However, the labs' real value will be realized only when the improvements they initiated, tested, and validated are widely adopted.

GAO found that: (1) more than 2 dozen federal agencies and other entities have developed a total of 185 reinvention labs; (2) the labs deal with a variety of issues, from personnel management to improving operations using technology; (3) almost all of the labs consider customer service as their primary goal, and consider other government organizations to be customers; (4) while labs considered management support to be important to lab development, the use of regulatory waivers and communication about the labs' progress were rarely needed or used; (5) other federal reform efforts, such as downsizing and the implementation of the Government Performance and Results Act, had both positive and negative effects on the labs' development; (6) labs experienced difficulties in sustaining efforts that crossed agency boundaries or challenged agencies' existing cultures; (7) over two-thirds of the labs had collected some type of performance data, ranging from information on unit outputs to informal comments from staff and customers, but some lab administrators refused to collect performance data because they believed it was unnecessary or not worthwhile; (8) the performance data are inconclusive, since there are no previous data for comparison and the nature of the data is subjective; (9) the labs have yielded results by improving customer service, increasing unit productivity and employee morale, and reducing costs at some federal sites; and (10) the value of the labs will be realized only when lab efforts proven to be effective spread beyond the lab sites.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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