Article 106. US Governments New Budgeting and Management System

US Governments New Budgeting and Management System

Top Down Budgeting Practices
Congressional budget committees at times makes across the board cuts to Federal programs without the knowledge of where cuts can be made and have the least effect on services. Although commendable for its boldness this is a wild and irresponsible attempt at cutting the budget without knowing consequences but it is also a common approach made by the US Government.  The key message is that Congress does not know where or how large of cuts to make and still maintain government services.

Once the New Government Management System has been implemented budgeting personnel will know what Departments and Agencies are over staffed and how many personnel are needed to maintain government services. This is where precision cuts have an advantage over across the board cuts. Across the board cuts harms areas where government services are under staffed and has little to no effect on other over staffed areas of the bureaucracy.

Recommended New Bottoms-Up Budgeting and Management System

Implementation of Enterprise Lean Teams
Starting with the implementation of Enterprise Lean Teams throughout the government. This reform brings a positive cultural change to the organization.  Bottom level functional Lean Team employees become members of Lean Teams and are motivated by empowering them to improve their jobs through innovation. By bringing innovation and continuous improvement to the government’s processes the government will save $billions through increased efficiency both now and in the future. This reform amounts to a win-win situation for government employees as well as the tax payers through employee empowerment and by ending bureaucratic waste.  See Article 104. Enterprise Lean and the New Government Management System.

The key activity I require by my Lean Teams that they develop a Daily Plan, a graphic depiction of the processes that they do on a daily basis.  This depiction may be in the form of a wall chart where each operation performed by members of the Team are depicted graphically in the sequence that the work is done. The accuracy of the wall chart depends on an accurate time for each process.   When the wall chart has been reviewed and no other improvements are known photos of the wall are made and passed to other teams doing the same operations in other government locations.  The final wall chart is not carved in stone but available for continuous improvement.  This activity gets the highest possible efficiency from the function.

Implementation of The New government Management system
The New Government Management organization will be within the Office of Inspector General organization which I recommend be separated from the Government Departments and reports directly to the Office of Management and Budget. 

The new Government Management System is used to set staffing levels and a bottoms-up budget using the Lean Team study data.

First  OIG (Office of Inspector General) Analysts will be trained as Facilitators setting-up and organizing each Lean Team.  The number of VA Lean Teams will depend on the number of functions within each hospital.  An OIG Analyst will be able to Facilitate about 20 Lean Teams. After setting-up the Lean Team the OIG Analyst will monitor and assist in the development of the wall chart. The OIG Analyst will become the manager of his Lean Teams.

The OIG Analyst will be trained to manage about 20 Lean areas:
1. He will work closely with each Lean Team in making improvements including the installation of additional equipment.
2. He will develop and monitor a schedule for each Lean Team based on patient backlogs.
3. He will make a monthly progress report for each Lean Team.
4. He will create a bottoms-up manpower budget for each Lean Team.
5. He will create a annual bottoms-up budget for his functional Lean Teams.
The annual functional bottoms-up budgets are summed establishing an actual min cost at the highest efficiency for the Department all other costs are negotiable.

An Advantage of this Approach
The advantage of this approach is that all actual manpower and operations costs are known creating a minimum known budget.  This means that only addition added budget items need to be negotiated and not the entire Agency Budget.  It also means that with a steady backlog little scheduling and management is needed.  The function nearly runs itself like the health care routine Procedure Clinics.

Where tasks are variable the Lean Teams will be more involved with scheduling and management of daily activities.