Making People Count: Scoring Human Capital Management Programs

An organization’s human capital management (HCM) practices must align with its strategic goals and be linked to its performance to be effective. Organizations are increasingly turning to metrics or scorecards to systematically evaluate these linkages. Finding the “right” metrics, however, for scoring these linkages in a meaningful but feasible way can be challenging.

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management is responsible for overseeing Federal agencies’ commitment to the strategic management of its human capital. OPM’s responsibilities include monitoring and scoring agency’s human capital management (HCM) efforts under the President’s Management Agenda (PMA). HumRRO worked with OPM to develop and enhance its capacity to evaluate Federal agencies’ HCM programs and their success in meeting PMA initiatives.

What We Did

Our approach was multi-faceted, given the nature of the challenge facing OPM. Specifically, it involved the following activities:

• Reviewing a sample of agencies’ strategic HCM plans and workforce plans to examine their alignment with the agencies' strategic plans and guidance from the Human Capital Assessment and Accountability Framework (HCAAF).
• Assisting in the development of the HCAAF metrics package to be used by OPM to monitor and evaluate agencies' progress and status in HCM.
• Developing an instruction manual and other training materials for agency HCM representatives explaining how to calculate and report the HCAAF metrics.
• Delivering the training to agency representatives and evaluating their reactions to the training and the instructions.
• Analyzing the first round of HCAAF metrics data that agencies delivered to OPM. The results of these analyses supported the use of the HCAAF metrics to evaluate organizational performance.

To ensure OPM’s performance would be successful in this initiative, they also needed tools that they could use internally to support their evaluation activities. Accordingly, HumRRO:

• Helped OPM identify desired outcomes from their activities.
• Developed metrics for OPM to assess their success in meeting these outcomes.
• Examined the final HCAAF metrics package and developed baselines that OPM can use to set appropriate targets. Our examination addressed issues such as the feasibility of computing the metrics on an ongoing basis, the metrics’ interpretability, and whether they met necessary criteria for government-wide reporting

Impact

By arming OPM with the “right” metrics and the tools needed to make effective use of them, this project increased its capability to fulfill its mission – to enhance Federal agencies’ HCM.