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The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced today yet another program to improve government, but this time the focus is on the top tier: the Senior Executive Service (SES). The new effort involves creating a single office to serve the 7,000 SESers currently in the federal government, in order to free up human resources across the agencies that would otherwise handle the often stressful SES requests.
Typically, when an SES member has questions about pay or benefits, their only resources are the OPM website, their wives who insist on having better memories, or their local human resource office, which typically handles only a small number SES and may not be up-to-date on SES issues. However, if the SES member is lucky enough to be at the department level, they can reach out to an executive services office, but in most cases they rely on the Senior Executive Association (SEA), a non-government professional association, for the real skinny.
Regardless, all the local offices and the SEA still need direction from OPM, since they manage the overall federal executive personnel program and provide the day-to-day oversight of, and assistance to, agencies as they develop, select and manage their federal executives. To ensure the SES gets equal quality human resource attention as the rest of the General Schedule (GS) folks, OPM is taking several program functions which are currently spread across multiple offices and consolidating them into one central office to serve the SES program.
The new structure will mean fewer OPM officials handling SES issues, but those who are involved will spend all their time on SES matters and be much more knowledgeable.The hope is that doing so will increase efficiency and better serve agencies across the federal government by getting SESers out of HR offices.
Duties of the consolidated office will include outreach to stakeholders in the SES program, such as the Senior Executive Association and Executive Resource managers throughout the federal government. More importantly, the office will coordinate leadership development (aka, boondoggles) to provide long needed executive resource forums and roundtables on leadership development topics. The office will also take on the management of the Qualifications Review Board, which certifies the executive core qualifications of SES applicants and provide recommendations on the requests for agency SES, Senior Level, and Senior Technical position allocations, certification of senior performance appraisals systems and candidate development programs.
The new office, which OPM hopes to open by the end of the year, will likely be the first in a series of changes OPM will make to SES under the Obama administration.
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