**BLM Workforce Planning\
Distance Learning Series\
**Course 1400-24

A Telecast Originating from the

BLM National Training Center in Phoenix, Arizona

Day 3 of 3 Days: October 10, 2002

This transcript is from the closed-captioning file produced during the
telecast.

It may contain errors and omissions in transcription.

Announcer: The Bureau of Land Management Satellite Network presents live
from the BLM National Training Center in Phoenix, Arizona, BLM Workforce
Planning\... a three-day interactive television course outlining the
basic concepts and practice applications for successful workforce
planning. And now your course instructors.\
\
J. Romero: Good morning, everyone. Here we are at day three. Thank you
all for returning. We believe we have a good day today. Today is where
the rubber hits the road. So I want to just briefly share with you what
we intend to do today. As you know, we have been working through the
five-step model, and today is really focussing on the action planning
phase, that is, now that you\'ve gathered datea and you\'ve thought
through the process, what are the options for actually making progress
and pursuing action? The step 5 of the model and I\'m coming over to
Elmo again, Elmo and I have become good friends this week, we\'ve been
\-- we\'re talking about action planning, and as you can see, there are
a variety of options in action planning that range from contracting out,
partnering work, redeploying work, hiring or developing and we are going
to focus today on the issue of development, how you actually go about
making sure that you can develop the skills that you need. Then the last
step is step 5, and that\'s document, monitor and evaluate, and in my
way of thinking, this is the day when we really pull in the field
committee template to eninsure that you have the tailored BLM
instructions for how to document and submit the work that you do. So a
significant part of today will be walking through that field committee
approved template so that you will all of the instruction that you need
to be able to submit the workforce plans in January as requested. So,
that\'s what our day is about today. I want to welcome my partner, Gary
Dreier, and one of the things that we\'ll be doing this morning for
starters is to review the homework. Again, we were very gratified that
you all took the time to work through and submit the information that
you did. I also want to remind you that we very much enjoy getting your
comments, and we really want to hear from you. Since this is the last
day, we expect to get and answer questions. We want to make sure that
you\'re clear about what it is that\'s expected, how you use the data,
what role you will play and, of course, we will be giving you a lot of
the how-tos today. With that I would like to get started on kind of
reviewing the homework you all sent in, and actually the one I have
right at the top here is from Max lockwood in the Washington Office. Are
you with us this morning, Max?\
\
Caller: No, Max is not here just yet.\
\
J. Romero: Who is speaking?\
\
Caller: This is Debbie.\
\
J. Romero: Debbie. Ok. Thank you, Debbie, because Debbie reminds me that
I want to also remind you to let us know who you are and where you\'re
calling from so that if we get into a traffic jam, which we have the
last couple days, I can be a traffic cop and know who we\'re calling on.
Debbie, I don\'t know whether you were part of the group that worked on
this exercise, but it was an interesting one because what Max submitted
for the group was pretty creative. They went through and looked at the
data and realized that they had a botanist working in the weeds program
and they decided that perhaps the most efficient way to allocate that
work was to move that work to the recovery plans and therefore put the
FTE allocation to better use. So it was a way of shifting work to be
more efficient. So I know, Gary, you looked at it also. What was your
take on what was sent?\
\
G. Dreier: I think they did a pretty good job for the limited time and
information they had to deal with. We knew there was going to be \--
kind of information overload to some degree and a lot of the information
wasn\'t provided. They had to fill in the voids. So you had to be a
little creative there. What they spent the time doing was trying to find
ways to balance their current workforce against their future work
requirements. So I think that\'s a good starting point, let\'s use those
capital investments we have sitting at our desks and right next to us
and put them most efficient place and then look at how to deal with
those other work increases.\
\
J. Romero: Absolutely. In fact, that\'s really the point of all of this.
So we thought that was great. I\'d like to hear from you. As you worked
through, some of you did work through the exercise, what are some of the
insights that you had while working through the exercise?\
\
Caller: This is Kathy from Alaska.\
\
Kathy from Alaska. Welcome.\
\
Caller: I guess one insight was some of the types of work were no longer
going to be needed in the next year, so it was kind of allocated to
something else right away instead of just hiring that position
automatically to do the same work, hire a position that could do other
work better.\
\
G. Dreier: I think it did typifiy that we are a changing organization
and that\'s fairly typical in every situation. We know what we\'re
buying today is only good for a certain amount of time and it\'s going
to have to change, modify or buy something new. That\'s always a
problem. I\'m glad you caught up on that, because I think that\'s one of
the critical issues we will always deal with.\
\
J. Romero: I do, too and I Harkin back to the notion of vacancy
management. You don\'t stop to look at the assumption the work is
stable. So if things are changing, excellent opportunity as you think
through that to be able to reallocate work or change the skill that
you\'re going to use in the future. Any other insights as you went
through this? So there was one that was shift work. There was one that
the work is changing and we acknowledge that. Anything else?\
\
G. Dreier: I would like to add a point, some of what I have read, and
that is that they already actually were getting into exercise 3, which
we had planned today. They were looking at the cost to do work, the
efficiencies and actually did quite \-- quite a few did all that in this
exercise. So I like to thank all of you who did that because I think it
was an excellent \-- you kind of jumped ahead of us and I think it
showed us that you\'re ahead of the game in that regard and, in fact,
that you\'re looking at those things, and we were going to plan to work
on them today. I am not sure we need to spend much time on the exercise
today and move into some other areas.\
\
J. Romero: I think you\'re right. In fact, I\'m looking at one right
now. Actually, I can\'t tell where it came from, but given the same
example, somebody said, well, we could hire a temporary to inventory the
weeds to get the work done. Somebody else said, we could stop doing
recreation permits, but would do weeds inventory. Again a shifting of
work. I think people did take the next step, which is the action
planning, what are you going to do about it. So I agree, Gary, I think
today we can focus more of our time on making sure you know the next
step as far as documenting and submitting and won\'t have to spend too
much more time on that.\
\
G. Dreier: So, our plan today will be we\'re going to not deal with
exercise 3 but ask you to take a look at it in your spare time. It does
have some ideas about costing that you need to include, like total costs
versus just the typical operational or labor costs that we apply to our
work. So take some time to look at exercise 3 but for today I think
we\'re going to put that aside and move onto some things that people are
probably more interested in delving into.\
\
J. Romero: Before we get started, I want to do two things. One, I want
to let you know that we will be moving \-- we will give you the page
numbers, but we will moving through the book a little bit differently
today. We will kind of move back and forth from time to time, and we
will pay attention to the page numbers. So if we forget to do that,
please let us know. The second thing I\'d like to do is to point out
that what we\'re going to start with is talking through the action
planning phase, and as we do this, I would encourage you to think about,
again, the template that we\'re going to talk about, because it is
intended as the rubber hits the road, so to speak, with the action
planning. It is important for you to be thinking through, what have I
picked up in the four or five steps that I can now directly funnel into
the field committee template. So I want to start out by saying a little
bit about the action planning phase itself. Now, as I go into this, if
there\'s any questions that pop up leftover from the last two previous
days or anything we say, please feel free to break in. What we\'re
saying in the action planning phase, and we\'ve said it a couple times,
is that local level is best. It\'s at the local level where the action
happens and you know what\'s best at the local level. Whatever decisions
that you make or logic that you walk through should really be useful for
making future decisions. So like Kathy from Alaska indicated, we\'ve
looked at work, we know that the work is changing or that we might not
be doing as much of that. That\'s input to future decisions. So future
oriented always works best. Use the latitude you have and I\'m going to
divert just briefly here. One of the things that I have come to believe
is that at the Field Office level and at the State Office level you have
a fair amount of latitude. I mean, in the end, you\'re the one who
decides what\'s this TO going to look like? How can I move things across
a T.O.? You have a fair amount of latitude. I say that because I\'m
thinking about latitude with development, the latitude that you have
with recruiting, the latitude you have with targeting SCEP students, et
cetera, so use the latitude you have. The plan obviously should be
flexible and cumulative, meaning that you have a requirement to submit
something in January, but as you do that, you need to be thinking about
the future as well, because this is kind of a sliding \-- a rollover.
You will have one this year but you\'re planning for next year, and then
next year you\'ll update it and so on. So it\'s a moving kind of thing.
In the action planning phase, also, goes without saying, but I would
encourage you to think about how is the volume of work? Do we see it
going up? Do we see it staying the same? Or do we see a downward trend?
What about the costs? I think the data that we\'ve talked to you about
is a way to get good information about what\'s happening in the cost
arena. Some skills have gotten very, very expensive, as you well know,
radio telecommunications experts, a variety of technical skills are
pretty expensive. What\'s happening with the workers? And I know that a
couple of you have talked about supplemental workers. I think that\'s a
relevant issue to think about. For example, do I live in a geographic
location where it\'s relatively easy to get retirees? In Arizona
there\'s probably a lot of retirees. I\'m not sure that\'s true in the
Eastern States area. So what\'s your local situation? And what are the
specifics for your location? So as you get to actually creating your
actions, these are the kind of considerations that you\'ll have, and
when we start with the template, you\'ll see that the same, and some
additional questions are asked. So you should be prepared to deal with
them. Also, I think we\'ve talked a lot about the work. What\'s the
work? Currently? What\'s the work for the future? When we talk about the
workers or the workforce, I think it\'s really important to introduce
the notion of risk. What kind of risk am I putting the agency at when
I\'m only one deep in certain skills? I think that whole issue of risk
has to be looked at. Am I at a lesser risk with certain types of
positions or individuals? I also think this whole idea of assessing
skill development needs starts directly with the local level manager.
That is another way of saying as you go through your assessments just to
step back and ask yourself, what are the skills that if we had would
fundamentally improve our operation? If you live in a community where
the constituents are particularly challenging, does my staff have the
skills they need to create and sustain relationships and partnerships?
So those are the kinds of things we\'re talking about, assessing skill
development needs, tying those to the IDPs and making them useful. Also,
skill capacities. You know, when we teach management or leadership
classes, one of the things we talk about is it is incumbent on every
manager to understand for every employee what is my \-- what level of
cape bill tea does this \-- capability does this person have and what
level of willingness does this person have and am I managing to that. So
that whole notion of at the local level doing an assessment of what\'s
my capability, what\'s my capacity and can I expand that capacity, that
is, can I get more for what I\'ve got here? So those are some of the
questions that are really important to think through. In terms of
documentation, and this is really where we want to shift our emphasis in
spending significant effort, walking you carefully through the template.
Now, I don\'t know whether that\'s something you\'re all familiar with,
but as I understand it, the \-- your national field committee has been
pretty closely involved in making sure that you have what you need to be
able to meet the OMB circular mandate of having workforce plans, and
part of their effort, as I understand it, is to ensure that there\'s a
consistent template or outline for how the plans are documented. Before
I move into that, I want to make sure that if Gary has anything to add
about that.\
\
G. Dreier: Back there in May, the field committee went through a review
of some suggestions that the workforce planning staff had and came up
with a template that\'s been approved across \-- vertically and
horizontally in the organization, by the field committee, Washington
Office, state offices, and this is what we are designing our
documentation around, and it fits closely with the DOI perspective.
We\'re just asking for certain things to come to us in a certain format
so then, of course, we can put a national plan together, which is
ultimately what we have to get to.\
\
J. Romero: Good. With that, I want to say something about the national
data, and this is on page 98 of your workbook, and it\'s intended to let
you know what the national requirements are. As you can see, the local
workforce plan is the foundation, and since Tuesday we\'ve been talking
about bottoms up, and so this is again another way of saying your
foundation for the workforce plan is the local workforce plan. The scope
is 2004 to 2008. But, again, you\'re going to focus specifically at the
year in front of you and then kind of move forward. There is a standard
data call, and the data is due on January 15th, coming right up. Then
you will be using selected data, and as we go through today, you\'re
going to see the selected input forms because they are on Lotus Notes
and so we are going to walk through that with you today. So before I
move on, let me just check with you, are there any questions about
what\'s required or what it is that you will \-- what you should be
concerned with at this point for January?\
\
G. Dreier: I\'m a little surprised there\'s no questions, Jo Ann,
because I know I had lots of calls before this about when are we going
to get training so we can get started. Maybe everybody is chomping at
the bit and getting their data ready to input.\
\
J. Romero: This has been a very advanced group. It\'s possible that
they\'re way ahead of us. What I\'d like to do is I would like to walk
through that template so that you\'re very, very clear about what\'s
required and as we go through this, I want to make the alignment or the
delineation between the steps that you\'ve been working on the last
couple of days so that you can see that if you follow the five-step
model there\'s a direct correlation to what your results are in terms of
providing the appropriate input for the field committee template. So the
first part of this template is a section called mission, vision, goals
and performance objectives, and, again, this is a format by which to
document the results of your planning efforts. Essentially, if you look
at that template document, which I understand is on the link, is a link
on the website, you will see that it really talks about \-- there\'s
some links within the document that will take you, for example, directly
to the BLM strategic plan, which is supposed to be updated by September
of this year. So it should be updated already. Do you know if that\'s
done, Gary?\
\
G. Dreier: I think they\'re still working on it. It\'s been
departmentally reviewed and it\'s going through some reviews but it\'s
not quite there.\
\
J. Romero: So it\'s getting close. The main thing that I want to point
out here is that if you check in with that website you will see that
there are some guidelines, there are some specific department of
interior departmental guidance, and as I mentioned on Tuesday, if you go
to my workbook, it is also included there, and that is also a link. So
you should have plenty of information about what the requirements are.
One of the things that this calls for is very consistent with what we
talked about the last couple of days, identifying future work. What we
talked about was scanning the environment, internally and externally,
and then using those as indicators for the kinds of things that you will
have to focus on in the future. It\'s interesting that the template also
suggests that you do an environmental scan. So if you go through the
process with your workforce planning team and have that dialogue and you
look at the land use plans, the strategic plans and all of the things
that you have, you should be completely ready to document what you have
found. So I think we\'re right on track with that. It does talk about
local strategic objectives and plans, and it does ask you to include a
discussion of the major influences \-- influencers on your work, so,
again, some of that futuring exercise should be helpful. So, with that,
I want to turn it \-- unless there are any questions, I want to turn it
over to Gary who is going to walk you through the Lotus Notes links that
will pop up and help you to actually document this thing.\
\
G. Dreier: Before I go too far, I would like to say Lotus Notes was our
selected tool for the automation, and what it really is is just
automating the paper product to make it easier. The first discussions
were around sending the plan out and having a paper product come back
just as you would bring the plan to Washington Office and basically
combining all the plans into one large national plan. But our concern
was that that was, first of all, would take some of the focus away from
the local plans, making them specific and value added for you, and
second, we didn\'t want to have to sift through all the data. We found a
more automated tool to deal with the data we needed. The template we are
asking for is a \-- the minimum required for this go-around but we
expect you will have local plans that are much more robust to gain this
information from. Let me just go with the first \-- the first template
in the data management will be the narrative on local and strategic
commitments. This is nothing more than one box to give you a chance to
fill in some of the things you are doing locally, that you are required
to do, for instance, if you have land use plans that are out there that
you\'re complying with, if you have got agreements with partners and
other agencies that you\'re working from or your community, services
that you\'re providing that you have come to with the local county
commissioners. All those things that would help yourself and the Bureau
understand what your requirements are, your strategic needs based on
those issues. So that\'s where we are, I think. It\'s a narrative. You
can fill it in. Because it\'s in Lotus Notes and you have the ability to
type in as much text as you knee, and you can also attach whatever you
want just as you would on an e-mail. It\'s a pretty broad-based open
field but our goal is just to try and have as much information available
for you to provide at this point. Like I say, your point about prepare
for the next plan is important. Yes, you need to get this done for this
year, but this information should be helping you next year when we go
through this process again. Remember, why are we doing what did we do?
How did we come up with these decisions? And why did we document the way
we did?\
\
J. Romero: One of the things I am looking at with the template as well
is that it really does specify detail the kinds of work, the magnitude
of work that you expect over the next five years and how you see it
changing. I also wanted to point out and this is where I will flip over
a little in the book, if you look on page 84 and 85 of your workbook,
what you will see is another series of questions that will help you to
figure out, what is it that I should think about as I sit down with pen
to paper? Or in your case, to input the Lotus Notes. There are a series
of questions, and the assumption 81 lying those questions are \-- under
lying those questions are things like, who is my audience, how are we
going to use this? Have I considered the skill mixes? Have I gone
through and thought through? So I would encourage you as you begin to
work, and with your team, you might want to take a look at page 84 and
85 and ask yourself some of these questions. I also want to have you
look over at page 86, and I\'m getting a little bit ahead of myself but
I wanted you to know it\'s there. As we go through the template, you
will begin to see that some of this is background. What\'s the strategy?
What have you done in the past? Et cetera. But there\'s a fairly
significant portion on action planning, and again, what decisions have
you made? So page 86 is somewhat of a sample for you to take a look at,
and it\'s nothing more than a format for documenting the decisions that
you make locally. So if you look at page 86, it basically says, for
example, if I know that I have a retirement coming in the computer
technician arena, because I have done some analysis, what my action is
going to be is to contract this work out. So it documents the expected
results, the decisions and the action dates. So these three pages kind
of go together, and, again, they\'re intended to be just an auxiliary
set of support questions and guidance for you to use. So any questions
from the floor before we move on to the second part of the template?
I\'m wondering if our bridge is up?\
\
G. Dreier: It is \--\
\
Caller: Jo Ann \--\
\
J. Romero: People are just shy today. I am going to move your attention
to section 2 of the template, and, again, this is entitled past
organizational changes and work improvements. This is a section \--\
\
G. Dreier: Your IFB is going out. While she is kind of redressing
herself here, let me \--\
\
Caller: Where is section 2 of the template?\
\
G. Dreier: Right now I think we\'re still talking about the strategic
side of this, and I believe we still have to get to the part that deals
with future work. I think we\'re kind of jumping ahead of ourselves a
little bit. Let me talk a little about the future work requirements if I
may.\
\
Caller: Gary, can you hear Washington D.C.?\
\
G. Dreier: No, sorry, I didn\'t hear you.\
\
Caller: Could you address where we are in the workbook, please?\
\
G. Dreier: I\'m sorry. Right now if you look at page 99, you\'ll see a
summary crosswalk slide. We are just getting ready to go to that. We
just come off the local strategic commitments. Does that help?\
\
Caller: Thank you.\
\
G. Dreier: Ok. Sorry. I didn\'t catch that earlier.\
\
J. Romero: You were going to say about future work.\
\
G. Dreier: This is the time we need to define future work and where
it\'s going to occur and the volume and when a the amounts and all that.
So now we have taken this approach of rather than trying to define all
our new work by program activity, business activity, program element,
we\'ve determined we\'re going to go one step above that, one hierarchy
above that and go to a crosswalk between the goals \-- the strategic
goals and the business processes, or the work processes. This will give
you a little more latitude. You don\'t have to be quite so specific.
That was our goal. So what we\'ve done is we\'re going to use the
template that\'s in the crosswalk, the summary crosswalk, for PEs
against the strategic plan, and that\'s on page 99. Let\'s look
apartment slide now. \-- let\'s look at that slide now. As you can see,
this is \-- gives of gives us the opportunity to look at in the one,
which is 103 as the mission goals, or strategic goals, and also look at
the work process, too, assess inventory and condition status. It gives
us a group there of four business activities to look at rather than
having to look at each one of those individually, we can group that work
as volume based on those. If we were going to go down to a lower part,
which would be down here \-- I guess the pen isn\'t working \-- down in
the 1.02 and business work activity 4, you would see there is almost 12
items in there. So we\'re able to group those in hopes they will make it
simpler for you to do this part of the process. What you will be having
to put in will be in the form of this fashion. You\'ll have the mission
goal number and the work process number against the current work total
and how they change from that total. The mission and goal number for
these three changes here you\'re looking at, it will be a dropdown menu,
so you won\'t have to know those. They will be provided as well as the
work number. But you need to know the current here as in our example is
a thousand hours and you will have to put change in, you\'re going up
another 100, so the total will be 1,100 but for your entry you will put
the 100. As the same would be if we moved up into year five, if it\'s
going up another hundred, you\'ll put the change up, and it will be
1200. Then finally the last change is a down change, so it\'s showing
you it\'s changing from 2005 and you just show that much of it going
down and the total would be 1100 if we would be putting the totals on.
So what you will be putting on is 100 where we started, the change up
100, so the total actually would be 1100, but you are putting the 100,
it went up another 100 in 2005, so it actually went \-- it went up 200
from the thousand and in 2006 to 2008 it actually went down a hundred,
so your total would have been 11 hundred. But remember, for our \--
it\'s \-- that\'s the form we want to look at.\
\
J. Romero: Great. So, again, questions, go ahead and ask. I\'m going to
transition now talking about section 2 of the template and it\'s
entitled past organizational changes and work process improvements. Oh,
and in case you are wondering, my earpiece fell out. It was either
lettuce on my teeth \-- I guess it was my earplug, but I\'m wired now.\
\
G. Dreier: Now we\'re able to hear you. Now if they call in, we can
respond.\
\
J. Romero: It fell out again. Having trouble with my earpiece today. I
knew I shouldn\'t have washed my ears. Again, looking at the past, this
is a section that enables you to talk about what you\'ve already done.
And my experience with the agency has been that you\'ve done a lot.
There\'s been a lot that\'s gone on in the last few years \--\
\
Caller: Jo Ann, tell us where we are again in the work pages again.\
\
J. Romero: We are not in the workbook. We are walking through the
template.\
\
G. Dreier: So this is new information, and what we are trying to do is
give you just a few more clues. We have reoriented today a little to
focus on some issues that we\'ve become aware that are \--\
\
Caller: I\'m from Washington. Where is the template?\
\
G. Dreier: The template right now is in the back \-- it\'s in the
website under policies and foundation, but what we\'re really talking
about here is the \-- how the template has been translated into Lotus
Notes, which is the tool we will be using. We refer to the template
because that\'s \-- the underlying principles and process that form this
tool we are going to be looking at. So we refer to it, and Jo Ann is
reading from it, pieces of, but what we are trying to do is focus you at
the Lotus Notes application, because that is a translation of that
template to a more automated fashion.\
\
Caller: Gary, since the template is not available to people, it might be
useful to have that template displayed on the screen \-- there\'s just
not a connection here between the template when you make a reference to
and it anybody sitting here in the room. So if you can be able to put
that up, we can see it then remember what it looks like so when we go
back to our desks to pull it up, then we can begin to make some
association. What do you think?\
\
G. Dreier: It\'s an excellent suggestion and let\'s give it a try.\
\
J. Romero: I agree with you, Nick. Let\'s see if we can\'t get that to
happen. So with your permission, we would like to move forward, but
behind the scenes we\'re paddling real fast to get something up on the
\-- at least on the Elmo where we could begin to look at that, or have
you see it. Just to back up, because I realize you\'re at somewhat of a
disadvantage without having the template, I want to reit rate and add on
to something that Gary said. He said, our real purpose here is to have
you understand the Lotus Notes and I want to say it is that plus I think
it\'s also to have you understand that the field committee really has
gone through a great deal of effort and consideration to make sure that
you have the tools that you need to document the plan in such a way that
there will be consistency. So we\'ll see if we can\'t get this up and
running, but just to recap, the first section is on mission, vision,
goals and priorities. And the slides that you saw from Gary were the
ought \-- that you saw from Gary were the automation portion of how to
dump that information into Lotus Notes. The second section I am talking
about now is really the past organizational changes and work process
improvements, and what I said previously was that I know firsthand that
many of you have, in fact, done a lot of process improvements and a lot
of thinking and streamlining and so forth. So this is an opportunity to
submit that, to have some acknowledgment for that. So what the template
calls for is for you to identify those kinds of efforts that you\'ve
done since October 2000, which is in the last two years, to arrive at
improvements. You know, what are the process improvements? Have you
consolidated work? Have you streamlined processes? Have you enhanced
technology? Have you \-- what have you done in the area of shaping the
workforce, improving or maximizing, leveraging the use of the workforce?
This might include reorganization. It might include knowledge transfer.
It might include restructuring. There\'s a number of things. So in your
template, it has a section to have you kind of think through what have
we done, and let\'s submit that, because I think collectively I\'ll bet
you\'ve done an awful lot to shape up the organization already. One of
the things that it does ask for is for you, and this is on the screen,
Nick, and others s to evaluate your previous effort. If you have done
some things, did it make the organization more efficient? What were your
results? Did these actions improve anything? Did you save money? How was
the customer service improved? So, again, this section of the template,
section 2, is really about looking first ahead and then back. With that,
I\'m going to turn it over to Gary, who is going to talk about the Lotus
Notes link and how you can document this part of it.\
\
G. Dreier: Jo Ann, this part of the process isn\'t what we would
normally think or typifiy as a workforce planning part of the process,
but what is really important is that we provide some history and a
starting point for our planning to this point forward, and what the
field committee was interested in and I think was rightly so, we need to
have a starting point that displays some of that information that got us
to where we are. For instance, I know a big issue is becoming more
efficient, getting more direct service delivery down low and that\'s
what our Field Office strategy was designed to do and they want to be
able to relate in that some of this discussion. So when we produce our
plan for the department \-- that kind of information will be available
and also be highlighted so they understand where we\'re coming from and,
in fact, what successes we have had in the past. So in the Lotus Notes
application, there\'s one section, again this is narrative section,
basically open for anything you\'d like to put in it, as you can see
from the screen \-- I guess we will bring it up shortly \-- that you
fill it in, whatever text is important for you, and provide that
information in the form and, again, I think the real power of the Lotus
Notes application is you can attach other documents to this in the form
of icons that come in and so this is can be as in depth, as explanatory
as you feel is important to really get your position started so people
understand how you got to where you are and where you\'re going forward.
Now, we\'re asking that you try to keep this back only since October 1st
last year so we don\'t go too far back in this process, but we want to
tell a current story, but we want to tell a story that has some context
to it. Jo Ann?\
\
J. Romero: Thank you, Gary. Before we move forward, any questions or
comments about where we are or what\'s going on, even though you can\'t
see the template? And during break time we will try to see if we can fix
that for you so that you can at least see it. I want to turn over to
step 3. We\'ve talked about 1 and 2. Step 3 is really, in my view, where
the rubber hits the road again. It\'s that summary of your workforce
analysis, and if you think back about the model that we\'ve been working
through, we talked significantly about doing an assessment of your work
gaps and your skill gaps. Then we\'ve talked a little bit about figuring
out, what are my options for addressing those gaps, both in work and in
skill, and this is where you would document all of that. So if you have
gone through the process, this is where it would feed out. So,
essentially, what section 3 is asking for is that you identify your
future skills and your future knowledge that\'s going to be required
and, of course, your ideas for addressing those needs. So what it talks
about here is you\'ve got your information, you\'ve got the information
we\'ve been talking about, which is the FPPS and the MIS reports, and
this is where you would actually go ahead and document all of that. So
it is a summary of your workload analysis, and I have got some tools in
your book that I think will also assist you as you go forward and
document this section. If you turn to page 87, what we\'ve got here is a
series of questions, and they are intended to get you to think about
what are the management decisions that we need to make, and as you\'ve
identified your future work and your skill gaps, now you\'re asking the
question, so what do I want to do with them? And on page 87 it\'s called
capability planning management decisions, which is kind of a mouthful,
but the essence of it is it\'s really asking you, have I identified my
critical skills? Have I thought through how I\'m going to address them?
Is it in house? Can I develop these skills in house? And if so \-- there
it goes again \-- if I develop them in house, have I thought through the
investment that it\'s going to take? If it\'s not feasible to develop
them in house, then what are my plans to work with them? So page 87 is a
series of management questions to ask, and clearly a significant part of
workforce planning is the issue of recruitment and retention, and page
87 \-- excuse me \-- 88 and 89 are some considerations around
recruitment and retention, and I will just step back for a moment and
let you know that in my view recruitment and retention and the whole
issue of \-- well, retaining people is a significant part of workforce
planning, and my notion is that if you\'re not recruiting, if you don\'t
have a pipeline going all of the time, you\'re behind the curve. So
whether or not you have openings, are you savvy about what kind of
skills I really need, do I know where I can get them? Am I really
maximizing the use of local universities? Using student intern programs
and other kinds of programs to really make sure that I keep a viable
pipeline going at all times? And it\'s my view that this is again
something that can be done at the local level in concert with the State
Office level about what is our recruitment plan? Do we have a viable
pipeline? Have we targeted the niche markets for folks who would want to
work at BLM, or are we casting our net to the total sea? So I think
it\'s important to get somewhat sophisticated about recruiting efforts
and I know the BLM has done some focused work in that area, but our hope
is that these couple pages will give you some ideas for how to think
about and manage recruitment and retention, provided that you have a
recruiting strategy that you\'ve identified, where are the likely folks
who would be feeders into BLM, then that positions you well to have a
very robust document in terms of what it is that you\'re \-- your
actions are. I will also say one of the folks I have worked with in BLM
told me that at one time in the past the peace corps was a market niche
for finding BLM employees and that at that time it worked very well. So
that\'s what I mean when I say, what\'s the market that you\'re Pooh
suing \-- pursuing? I have talked to folks all over country who say
it\'s not fancy to work in the government anymore, we don\'t have such
good salaries and I really suggest to you that you reframe that thought,
because my view is you don\'t want the Dot COMERS who are looking for
100,000 dollars a year. You want somebody with the values of keeping the
land in conservation and protection and people who care about the legacy
of BLM. So I think it feeds directly to your recruiting issues and that,
in fact, this is where you sort of step back and think about, who is our
workforce for the future and what am I doing today to encourage and
support the people that are working for us, and what am I doing with
sort of the mid-term employee who is contributing and has been
contributing? Am I focussing my retention on maximizing their
satisfaction and their contribution to the organization? So to my way of
thinking, this analysis that you\'ve done at this point is really good
management and thinking about what am I doing to make sure that we can
not just fulfill the requirement, but really ensure that we\'ve thought
through carefully what is it that we\'re trying to do for BLM in the
future?\
\
Caller: Jo Ann and Gary, and Gary this might be more directed towards
you since you\'ve been in the organization, how does this workforce plan
fit in context to the sort of traditional organizational structure in
terms of how people would make it up the ranks? I mean, is there any
sort of traditional culture that BLM has, has had in the past, for
people to come in, learn Baseline operations, et cetera, and then
gradually get exposure to other different fields? I was wondering if
this has any relevance or connection to that?\
\
G. Dreier: I think it most certainly does, max. We will discussion some
of that later. Let me get to your question more directly now. As the
Bureau has changed in and migrate in the last several years, it\'s
become a little flatter, and those paths that were traditional across
the Bureau are becoming more vague and harder to see. What used to be a
career ladder, now I think we\'re talking more about career paths. It\'s
kind of a circuitous route rather an straight line. Used to be you sat
in certain chairs and got to a certain place and that\'s where you
moved. Today I think it\'s becoming more critical based on the kind of
work you do, the competency tool box, basically, that you are filling
daily. I think what is becoming more and more critical is those kind of
skills that you have portable with you and I think those are what are
giving you the opportunities for career advancement. It\'s unfortunate
right now I don\'t think the Bureau has a very defined or definitive way
of \-- map for you, per se, to get to a certain spot at a certain time.
But I think it does give you some opportunities with the 360 evaluation
of your leadership skills. You have those opportunities to rate
yourself. There\'s a lot of opportunities in multi-tasking and teams to
acquire these skills around the board. So, yeah, I think there\'s \--
there \-- we\'re going to get better at this again and define a map, at
least kind of an approach that we don\'t have right now, but I think for
the interim, it really revolves around getting that suite of skills
under your belt and packing it in your pack and having it available. I
think basically what it is saying is we are looking for people who can
do the job. We are looking for people who can be successful. That\'s the
best I can tell you, Max.\
\
J. Romero: I would like to add to that if I could. In one of the earlier
slides we talked about use the latitude you have. I\'ve come to believe
that wherever you sit, whether it\'s at a Field Office for at a State
Office or in the Washington Office, you have a fair amount of latitude
in terms of deciding what am I going to do with my current and future
staff? So I think that workforce planning is an opportunity based on
data and real need to step back and say, what is our \-- what is our
approach here locally to doing development? In other words, who is it
that has some critical skill that I need to get to coaching and
mentoring somebody else? What is our process for doing the IDPs? And
what\'s my philosophy, if you will, as a manager about making sure that
people have the opportunity to get development? So I just wanted to
piggyback and we are going to cover this more in depth in a little bit
and I\'ve got a couple of road maps and tools that I think will help you
to do this, but I do really want to stress how important it is wherever
you are to really be thinking about \-- how much latitude do I have
here? I mean, clearly you would like to say, we can change policies or
we can change practices, but backing down from that wherever you sit,
what is our approach to developing and do we need to put in, say, a
career ladder for certain positions that are very, very hard to develop?
So I think it\'s a good conversation starter between local management
and the state and to really be asking yourselves based on data and need,
what is it we really need to do to ensure when we document these actions
they\'ve got some teeth behind them. So that\'s what I would add.
Anything further? I want to give you an example of that also, Max. One
of the groups that I was working with in BLM took a look at their future
and their demographics, and they decided the realty specialist was
really a gap for them, and they also know how challenging and how much
time it takes to actually develop that skill, and what they decided
among themselves in a state management team was to put together a job
ladder, a career ladder, a career family, not sure exactly how you call
\-- what you call that, but they decided they were going to pursue for
the realty specialists kind of a career ladder approach. So, again, I
think in the past we\'ve thought of development as a nice thing to do,
and it is a nice thing to do, but beyond that, it\'s really based on
necessity, and that\'s why people like me are seeing fairly well honed,
sophisticated set of tools for developing people. It\'s a business
necessity these days.\
\
G. Dreier: Let me kind of back us back into the application or the data
information you\'re going to have to be required to and part of that is
on how successful we are in the SCEP program and the current status of
that. In our form in the application, we\'re going to deal with, where
are you today on the current status of SCEP program? And on the form you
can tell, we\'ll bring it up, it\'s very simple in the fact we just need
to define who is doing what job series work, where they\'re located and
how many of those do you have? And the other, of course, is just how
many have been converted? This is information you have been doing for a
long time. It\'s pretty straightforward in the application and the data
requirements. Just put in the job series they\'re doing, the office
location, which is the State Office or center office, two digit
alphanumeric code and the five digit numeric code that goes with that to
identify the unit and just the number of students. That\'s been pretty
typical of the way we have dealt with this information. I think this
will be fairly straightforward. What we would like to do at this point
is take a brief break to get organized and regroup a little bit and
provide some stretch time. So at this time I think we would like to take
a 10-minute break and go off the air a little while and give you a
chance to stretch and get ready for our next segment. With that, good
luck and we\'ll see you soon.\
\
J. Romero: Welcome back from break. One of the things I love about
electronic media is it\'s real time, so we heard you, Nick, and assume
you\'re speaking for others. We want to take a brief step back to make
sure that you can at least visually see the template that we\'re talking
about. So over to the Elmo, what you\'ve got, and this is when you get
back to your office it will be in electronic media, but basically what
you\'re going to see is state, center and directorate workforce planning
for fiscal years \'04 to \'08. That will be your cover page. Then
you\'re going to see again. , and I know that you can\'t read this, if
you can read it, you\'ve got bionic eyes, but I will share with you
what\'s on here. This is an introduction paragraph that basically backs
up and talks about the annual workforce plan is a 5-year plan that
provides information on skills and knowledge that will be required. So
it\'s got some background information and it talks about milestones and
so forth. You will recognize again that we\'re going back to this first
piece I talked about, which is the section on mission, vision, goals and
performance objectives, and it does summarize the national strategic
plans and it\'s got a link on it that will take you right to the
strategic plan, and it does specify some principles, some guiding
principles, and, of course, those are that you\'re customer focused,
responsive to customer needs, the notion of working in partnership,
which I know you\'re either doing or attempting to do, so it does kind
of restate some of the operating principles that you will be required to
work with, and then it gets into, again, asking you to document and to
let people know what is it locally at the strategic plan level or the
local level that you are going to be pursuing in the way of objectives
and plans. So here again it calls for that. It also calls for you to
extrapolate your work requirements. It asks you to detail the kind of
work and the magnitude of work that your organization expects to do in
the next five years. And it does require that you emphasize the change
that you expect. So, again, it walks you through increase or decreases
of business activities, work \-- projected work and budget planning that
you\'ve done. So it\'s very, very comprehensive and I think what\'s
really nice is that you have a road map or a guideline in how you
actually deliver this workforce plan. Again, our notion is that if
you\'ve gone through the steps we\'ve been talking about, you are ready
to actually lay this out, and, of course, this is the screen that Gary
talked about, and so it does talk about there\'s a note on here, it
says, based on your work performed and the designation of the mission,
goal number, et cetera, so it gives you very detailed instruction.
Moving from that, it goes into section 2 that I talked about, which is
your past organizational changes and work improvements, and here again
we talked earlier about what process improvements you\'ve worked on,
what you\'ve done to shape the workforce, how effective that effort was
and what the results were. There\'s a series of questions that I kind of
want to hone in on. These will be questions that you answer, and those
questions are, did the work effort \-- streamlining effort make your
organization more efficient? What were the results? Did these actions
improve anything? What were your cost savings? And how was the customer
service improved? So, again, it walks you step by step through defining
your past organizational improvements. These are the charts that Gary
talked about with respect to SCEP, your current stat us and your
conversion rate of SCEP students and then it gets right to where we left
off prior to our break, and that is a summary of the workforce analysis,
and here it talks about the fact that you do need to conduct a workforce
analysis, and it talks about what kind of present and future workforce
capabilities you\'re going to need, and it talks about how you\'re going
to meet your mission requirements for the next five years. So, again,
once you take a look at this, you are going to find it\'s very
consistent with what we\'ve been doing here. Where we left off prior to
break was this section right here, which is actions and time frames. So
backing up, what we\'ve said is, what is your strategy, what have you
done, what actions have you already taken, what\'s the summary, in other
words, what have you done with it, and now it\'s going one step further
and says, what are the actions and time frames that you are intending to
do what you say you\'re going to do? So here it includes start dates for
any restructuring activities for any key milestones in the process, what
your target completion dates are, and then what actions you intend to
take over the next five years to arrive at your workforce plan goals. So
here it talks about specific actions for 2004, 2005, et cetera. It
should include planned reorganizations, et cetera. So here there are,
again, some slides that Gary\'s going to speak to in a minute, but
you\'ll notice, and this is kind of where we had been talking, and that
is the skills and knowledge acquisition requirements and your
recruitment strategies. So it really does get into what is it that
you\'re going to do in this whole development area. I\'m going to turn
the page here, figuratively, I\'m going to switch slides, and I lost my
IFB again, so this isth really does get into skill and knowledge
replacement. What I want to switch to here is back in your workbook, so
you do have a page on this, and it\'s on page 90, and it really speaks
to the area of training and development. So I would like to get your
attention over to page 90 in the workbook, and page 90 is really
speaking to four boxes there that talks to how people develop, and I
think this is important here. My hope is that it will help you as you
begin to think about skills and what you need to do to develop folks.
This box is a result of probably 10 to 12 years of my own personal work
in the area of career development and people development, and one
evening I was thinking about it and I realized that if I really thought
hard about it, there\'s probably four ways that people develop over time
once they\'re on the job, and this is once you\'ve completed your degree
requirements or whatever you\'re doing, but there\'s really four ways,
and I like to show this because I think it\'s relevant to what we\'re
talking about. The first box talks about on the job, and the interesting
thing about this four-box diagram in my way of thinking is that it\'s
been proven, it\'s been researched that once people are on the job only
25% of their growth and development has to do with in the class
training. That said, that means 75% of people\'s development is what
they do outside of the classroom. Now, I believe that that\'s
particularly relevant for workforce planning because it says that you
have 75% of other options to help people develop, so one of the key ones
is on the job. So clearly when you think about your own growth and
development, the assignments that you get, the activities that you
perform on your current job, the mentoring, the coaching, that kind of
thing tends to be fairly significant. Another way that people develop,
and particularly it seems technical people, seem to have an affinity to
do what I call self-development. They like to read. They like to study.
Being involved in professional organizations is a great one. And just
being able to. Do some self-development. Then a third way, and I think
this is very useful when we talk about succession planning because I
think it\'s a great way to develop what is high potential people and
that is this whole area of special assignment, rotations, temporary
duties, new positions, details, that kind of thing. So I share this
because I believe that, again, it\'s incumbent on the local management
to spend some time thinking about, \"am I using all the options
available to me to develop people? Have I thought about what are the
particularly important skills in my own unit that I\'m at risk for
losing? And am I engaging those potential retirees in doing mentoring
and coaching? Am I engaging people in doing some self-study and making
sure that they\'re having special assignments?\" I really believe that
there\'s a set of capability that belongs to any position, and, in fact,
the next page, page 91, speaks to what I\'m calling a road map, and what
I\'m advocating here is that local management pays attention to, \"What
am I doing in the way of development and am I going just beyond
training?\" Training is wonderful, but it\'s expensive and time
consuming. What are the other things I\'m thinking about and how can I
make sure I\'ve thought about that particularly as I follow the template
and document what it is we\'re doing? I want to say a few words about
page 91, because it\'s, I think, \'very useful tool. Page 91 is again
what I call a road map. This one happens to be for a realty specialist
position, but I want to call your attention to the column on the left
and it basically talks about the different competencies, and you need to
know where this came from was really being out in the field and
listening to what people were telling me. What I would ask people is,
what does it take to do your job? Not what degree do you have? Not what
position do you have? But what does it take to actually do the work? I
lost count, but it was over 200 people basically said to me, \"Well,
with my job you got to have some technical skill,\" and clearly that\'s
true in any job you have. I have to have some technical ability. \"i\'ve
got to have some knowledge of regulations,\" because you are in someways
really \-- regulatory issues are huge to you as well as policies. \"i
have got to have some level of knowledge in regulatory policy.\" And
\"i\'ve got to have some interpersonal ability.\" You are talking about
service first. Talking about partnerships. You\'re talking about
leveraging work. I have to have some interpersonal ability to do that. I
have to have some corporate knowledge, meaning, I have to understand how
things get done around here, what the linkages are with the Washington
Office, and Washington, what the linkages are with the field. So I have
to have some level of corporate knowledge and I have to have some
knowledge of the resources. I have to know the land. I have to know the
issues. So my notion about this is if you had a road map for the
positions that were particularly at risk, meaning that I know we\'re
going to lose a lot of these folks or I\'m worried about not having
depth of that skill, that this is something that could be developed and
you\'ll notice, even if you hired a GS-13 and they had several degrees,
the likelihood is they still wouldn\'t have the regulatory knowledge,
and they sure wouldn\'t have the corporate knowledge, et cetera. So my
notion is this is a useful workforce planning tool, and you will notice
as you move to the right that for each of these competencies we\'ve
asked, what is this skill and ability that you need to do, to have, in
order to do this particular job? And so you can see in the technical
arena, I better know AFMS, I better know PC skills, I better know the
LR-2000 system. This might be outdated, I\'m not sure. If you look
forward again to the left, what we\'ve asked people to do here, what are
the development options? How would I get those things? You\'ll notice
there\'s a nice mix of the four boxes that I\'ve talked about. So I
wanted to introduce this here because as you begin to work through the
template and document what it is you\'ve done, my hope is that locally
you will have had some tools or someways to think about how you actually
go about getting that development. So, again, to summarize, what I\'m
saying here is there\'s lots of ways to develop people. It\'s not as one
dimensional as send them to class. And I would hope that for some of
your very critical skills you might actually think about, should I have
a road map? And even if I hire people, wouldn\'t it be nice to be able
to hand them this thing and say, this is what you are going to need to
be focussed on on for the next few years as you develop and into your
job. And we can\'t wait three years for someone to get skilled. How can
I get skilled quickly? So again, going back to the issue here of the
template, you can see there\'s a fairly robust training and development
section that asks you to address some of these issues that I\'m talking
about, and so we go right from training and development over to
succession planning, but before we do that, there is a Notes chart that
will help you document this. Gary, can you talk about that?\
\
G. Dreier: One of the most important things in workforce planning,
obviously, is skills acquisition, and Jo Ann has been talking about that
and some other facets of that as well. One of the things we have to do
as an organization is be sure we get those skills onboard and in fact do
them in a unified fashion and try to build on other people\'s efforts,
and part of that \-- we\'re going to be asking you for skills
acquisition information, and part of the information the template asks
for is in fact skills acquisition, along these lines. The fiscal year,
you need them. Where they\'re going to occur. Again, we\'re using job
series and FTE \-- excuse me, job series and grade as our surrogate for
our skills and competencies. So our skill and skill families is what
we\'re shooting at here. The more specific you can make it, the better.
But also, if you have to retreat back to family groups, that is fine
also. What we\'re trying to get at is what\'s occurring and where is it
going to occur at. The fiscal year will be one of the five years, 2004
through \'08. The location will be some sort \-- two character plus the
five INTEGERS we see in FPPS. The families are the 400 or 1300 or
whatever and individuals could be like a 455, 454, 460. Those are the
kind of things we\'re looking for in this series and family. Whether
they\'re full time equivalents, not talking just positions, talking
equivalents and in the last discussion the last two days, and I think we
covered this, we\'re looking at FTE as the denotor of work, work
capacities and not positions. Of course, what\'s the source? Are you
expecting to use this as a permanent employ, contract, non-contract,
Federal partner, student, temporary \-- what we are trying to get at
here is looking out of the box a little bit and also trying to start
defining how is our workforce changing on where our workers are coming
from? Are they employees or are they supplemental work centers lastly on
this form, is it a new work capability or is it a replacement
capability? Is this some new work you\'ve never have been doing in your
organization before or, in fact, is this a replacement of some work
because of a retirements, you\'ve lost a contract, your volunteer corps
has gone away for some reason. Is this new work? That\'s the part on the
skills acquisition we will try to have them put in.\
\
Caller: Gary, this is Greg \--\
\
G. Dreier: How you doing, Greg?\
\
Caller: Ok. On your chart you show 34 FTE. Is what you are saying in 05
you will need 34 additional FTE or is that the total number that will be
used?\
\
G. Dreier: No, that\'s the number you require. That\'s new. That\'s
acquisition only. The number is fairly large if you were a state, but I
was thinking on a national level when I made the chart. Fit turned out
to be employees, it would be 34 positions. Does that answer your
question, Greg?\
\
Caller: You answered it, thank you.\
\
J. Romero: I want to switch to a topic now that I\'m actually a little
bit passionate about and it is succession planning, and you\'ll see over
here on the template there\'s a section on success planning and it
basically says that BLM is starting a process of really focussing on
preparing people for the losses that are anticipated and it basically
targets from the Field Manager to the deputy director positions, and I
want to say a few words about that. I\'ve been doing succession planning
now for probably 10 years, and in the last 5 there has been an enormous
spike in interest, if you will, and over the years some of the lessons
learned that I\'ve had are things like you want to be careful not to
target specific people for specific positions. You can get yourself in
trouble that way. I think a far more useful way to do succession
planning is to even at the local level to identify what is your high
potential candidate pool? So I\'m an advocate of doing succession
planning by having a pool of identified candidates as high potential and
that that should ERR on the side of being very inclusive rather than
exclusive, and I also believe it\'s very important to think about as a
management team, what is your criteria? What is your criteria for Hawaii
potential? \-- high potential? I think it\'s important to think about
that in terms of what are the skills \-- not what are the skills but
what are the attributes of our most successful manage centers what are
those attributes? Have I identified those important for us in the future
and am I working specifically to develop those kinds of skills and
attributes within the folks that I have with me here on site already? I
know I\'ve been doing some succession planning for department of energy
for basically an area and what they\'ve said is that \-- what they\'ve
not said, but what they\'ve done, I think, is really a practical way of
getting to succession planning and making it meaningful. And the
elements of that are that they\'ve identified what\'s important to them
for the future, things like breadth of capability, things like the
ability to partner and maintain relationships. They\'ve talked about
identifying results orientation, somebody has to be pretty results
oriented. So they\'ve identified a handful of attributes and then once a
year they sit together as a management team, they identify their pool of
high potential candidates and then they carefully design some
development plans for those folks. They also are very careful to share
those attributes with the rest of the organization so that all employees
are aware of what they are, and they try to make sure that development
is available to everyone. So succession planning is not a mysterious
process. It\'s something that can be very practical, and as you go
forward, I would really encourage you to think about, how are we
addressing some of the potential losses of skill and capability? I often
ask people in a classroom setting, think about what would happen,
what\'s the risk, what would happen, if you were to lose a variety of
key decision make centers what\'s the likely impact? So it\'s a serious
issue, and I was very pleased to see that within the BLM template you do
address that. So, again, succession planning and it really talks about
the Bureau is concerned about it, and we want you to think about how you
are addressing that wherever it is that you\'re sitting. Again, there
are some charts that go with this, so, Gary, I\'ll turn it back to you.\
\
G. Dreier: What we want to talk about on the skills and knowledge and
realm of succession planning is the Bureau has taken a position that\'s
been endorsed by management and leadership teams that the Bureau is
going to be succession planning for primarily their line management
functions across the Bureau. Therefore, since that function is being
taken over on a national viewpoint, of course, it will be coordinated
locally but for this exercise on the template we are going to deal with
those skills that do not house just the line management. We are going to
talk about the skills that are more localized and more specialized, like
realty specialists or the like. So what we\'re talking about pry mayor
\-- primarily is the loss of corporate skills we need to take care of
and primarily the realm of probably processes, knowledge process,
corporate knowledge, that\'s important to your organization and some
selected skills, some critical skills that occur within your
organization. That\'s what we\'re looking for on data that comes forward
to us to the Washington Office. So let\'s look at the form and see what
we have here. What we\'re talking about is those that are at risk of
loss, and, again, it\'s a fairly simple form to fill out. Where it
becomes interesting is in the vital skill and knowledge area. We are
identifying to identify this with some sort of action, verb and noun.
Our is interpret water right laws \-- if that\'s one you see you are at
risk of losing, that\'s one we want to put down. What we\'re trying to
get at is some sort of a feel, a magnitude of some really critical
skills that are at potential loss and put the organization at risk of
being successful \-- or risk of being litigated against successfully.
The other part we want to look at is how are you going to deal with
this? What is going to be your strategy to deal with that loss of skill
or knowledge? Are you going to come one some sort of overlap situation?
Are you going to mentor it? Are you going to shadow? Some automated or
someway to capture knowledge? Or is there something we haven\'t thought
about and you\'ll have the opportunity to also give us that on the form
as well? So our attempt is to just start really highlighting those areas
that are extremely critical that\'s going to put the organization at
risk so we can start getting a feel for what what do we have to do to
start catching up with that part of the organization and make sure
we\'re not at risk in the future. Jo Ann?\
\
J. Romero: Thank you, Gary. As ILIS unto you talk, it strikes me that
it\'s a very robust system that you\'ve got that actions to work it
locally and then you\'ve got the tools and template to help you commit
yourself to doing it. So I think over time that has potential to be very
powerful. I want to move now to talking about the SCEP requirement.
There\'s some information \-- I know you\'ve been pretty serious about
utilizing the SCEP program for students and also for conversions, and
so, Gary, have you talked about those forms? You might want to share
some of those as well, because the plan really does call for your paying
attention to that and making some commitments around that.\
\
G. Dreier: That\'s right. We\'ve already talked about the SCE. Kind of
past performance, who is on board, how did the conversions go? This is
one I\'m sure you\'re all familiar with and done in the past as well and
that is, which of those are you going to acquire? It\'s the same sort of
form. Identify the fiscal year, the job series that you\'re looking at
or job family, if it\'s more generalized, the location where it\'s going
to occur, again the same location and go ahead we\'ve used before and
simply the number of employees you\'re seeking to fill recruitment
requests through SCEP and. Help us get a feel and help our recruiters
and recruitment teams and help them go out and get the best individuals
with the best capabilities for our organization.\
\
J. Romero: The next part of the template is called workforce utilization
\-- improve workforce utilization and as you\'ll see, the issue here is,
as skills change and things change, as work gets \-- as work is reduced
or business activities change, there is some need to have \-- to have
skill utilized in a different way and what the template speaks to is the
idea that there is help from Washington, if in fact you find out you
can\'t effectively reassign the skills in your own organization, then
you can go ahead and submit this form that will identify those skills as
available to others at headquarters and you can actually then look to
reassigning those skills this way. So, Gary, I know there\'s a form
there to speak to that.\
\
G. Dreier: Skills reassignment and job utilization, our anticipation is
that primarily you\'ll handle most of these changes within your
organizational unit. The state \-- especially in the State Office
arenas, you have the flexibility and the organizational identity to move
around people within your organization more effectively than we would at
the national level. So what we\'re looking at is only those kind of
skills that seem to be misplaced in your organization, at the state,
directorate or even the center that we need to deal with on a more
national viewpoint. It really is just flagging skills that have changed
that we need to address, and, again, it\'s a very simple of what is the
kind of job series out there that we\'re looking at to be balanced or
leveled in the organization, what is the grade to get some sort of level
of proficiency and how many employees is that? Our expectation is that
this normally won\'t have many entries in it, but the option is that if
in fact we are running into a problem, organizationally where our skill
mix is \-- we\'ve become overbalanced on the kind of skills we have and
don\'t have a way to level them locally, we need to find a ways to make
those skills transportable and effective in the organization.\
\
Caller: Gary, I have a question. This is Joe in Roseburg, and earlier
when ABC first came out, there was some talk about trying to find
efficiencies among different offices within the Bureau, and earlier in
the presentation this week you\'ve mentioned units per FTE as a measure,
and is there any thrust or emphasis to consider moving people around
within the whole nation in order to maybe find efficiencies between
different offices? For example, weed inventory, you may find if you
centralize add team out of Denver or something that was going national
to do weed inventory, they would be able to achieve more units than some
other function. I\'m sure this would lead to some certain morale issues
and other problems as well, but is there any talk about those kind of
efficiency aspects?\
\
G. Dreier: In the vein that you\'ve asked the question, the answer is I
think primarily no, but there are some components of that I think we
need to address and that is we\'re always looking forward to making the
organization more efficient and part of what we will talk about later is
process improvement, which is probably the bigger ploy in this game of
making \-- making the organization more efficient and doing work better,
faster, cheaper. Our goal here isn\'t to come one a broad based employee
movement system or transfers or anything of those other things. What
really our goal is we know locally you can deal with most of these
situations much more effectively than we can, but there may be a point
where in fact you can\'t. That\'s all we\'re saying. We\'re putting the
backboard up or safety net in case you don\'t have the ability to do
that. We want to see if we can intercede and help out because there
might be a state that has that same problem on lack versus an overage
that we could deal with. Like I say, our anticipated use of this part of
the template we believe will be pretty minimal at the national level but
we\'re hoping in any organization that works for us, planning is looking
at balancing skills against the work, we don\'t want people overworked
or underworked, we want them to be appropriately worked.\
\
J. Romero: Let me just add to that if I might. A couple things I have
seen that are pretty creative are, if you can\'t do it at your local
level, I\'ve seen some good discussions between field offices within a
state, and, again, it comes back to what latitude do you have where you
are, and there are some opportunities to do some of that leveling across
the state. I think what happens is we tend to get sort of isolated
within our own functional areas. So, again, if you find yourself in that
situation, I\'ve seen some pretty creative things go on, especially with
zoning and those kinds of things. So I just throw that in the mix for
what it\'s worth. There is a new slide we have added, and these are the
very same questions that you\'ve got in the template, and, again, in the
whole area of workforce utilization, some of the questions to consider
are the following. Have you made any improvements in employee
utilization? How efficient are employees being used within the program
area? What plans will accommodate shifts in workload, budget and skill
needs? So, again, as you work with the template, those are the kinds of
questions that you\'re going to see. The next section has to do with
something we\'ve touched on a number of times over the course of the
last three days and that is this idea of improved work processes. And
clearly there\'s been a move afront for many, many years to try to look
at process improvements, and I\'ve seen various reengineering efforts
from the very minimal to fairly significant. So what the template
attempted to here is to get you to think about, what have you done, or
what are you thinking about doing in the area of improving your work
processes? We believe that by going through your workload analysis you
have identified \-- you\'ve got a picture from which to pick what are
the \-- what are the work improvement processes or process improvements
that make sense? So the workload analysis, I think, plays into that
quite significantly. What we\'ve done is we\'ve asked Colleen from
Washington Office to say a few words about the process improvement that
you are involved in. So, Colleen, are you with us?\
\
Caller: Thanks, Jo Ann. Can you hear me?\
\
J. Romero: Yes.\
\
Caller: Ok. I want to actually refer to the five-step process that
we\'ve been talking about throughout the last few days, and actually TN
on step 2A, which is, of course, improve the processes as needed.
Basically to alert the managers and supervisors there are additional
resources from the Enterprise Architecture effort that are available to
you to support you in this step. The business Enterprise Architecture
has launched a business process reengineering, or BPR, lab at the
beginning of October. So we\'re just getting started with this, but
basically what does it is it\'s providing a resource to managers and
supervisors in the form of many facets, number one being a standardized
methodology in terms of how you should conduct BPR. That is already
available on our website. It basically provides you with a step-by-step
guide, which you can click through the website to learn how to conduct
BPR. Also, it provides you with templates and identified tools, for
example, process modeling tools, that might support you in that effort.
Again, some contacts, if you have additional questions or need
additional information. Now, why are we doing this? We from the
architecture effort really have a vested interest in improving our
business processes, and essentially the main reason, of course, is we
don\'t want to automate broken or overly complex processes into our
information systems. So I\'m looking, you have the slide up, and that
pretty much gives a high level view of the major steps to conduct BPR.
Of course, recognizing the need for change and to just key in on that
first block, we recognize that there might be several catalysts that
cause you to enter into a reengineering effort. Workforce, planning, of
course, being one, but potentially dissatisfied customers; the need to
introduce new technology to support your processes; or exorbitant costs
for performing the work. So that can vary. But the whole point in this
is that as you conduct reengineering that we want to look at it from a
holistic standpoint in terms of what are the effects, the outcomes on
BPR and so that again may be workforce organizational changes \-- a
caller just mentioned potentially that it might make sense to have a
centralized team that supports the weeds management program. That might
be an outcome from going through a reengineering effort. So obviously
you would look at your existing processes, plan for new processes, and,
of course, all of these have an organizational or a workforce impact, if
you will. Planning the transition. Again, coming out of that you can see
workforce impacts. Facilities, you may even identify the need for new
facilities or outpost areas. And, of course, organizational changes and
changes in introduction of technology or your existing systems. Then, of
course, to implement the change. So basically I just wanted to simply
alert you to the fact that we are doing this and this is an available
resource. Can you put the slide up on the contact information? Thank
you. We have pretty much three service options. The first, of course, is
to \-- if you have a very simplistic reengineering effort, just
basically do it yourself, follow the website, which identifies the steps
to go through, and we are in the process of refining that, by the way.
Also we do have some in house resources within BLM that support BPR in
especially WO-800,jE.K. James, and many of you probably know E.K. James.
He has been with BLM for some time and really has been doing
reengineering quite extensively. The third is we have from the
architecture effort award add contract that is already pre-competed. If
you have a significant reengineering effort that you would like to
undertake, we can support you with, and it would follow our methodology.
The interest in that, of course, is that once we do that, we can share
that information throughout the Bureau, not recreate the wheel, and then
leverage those reengineer processes as they see feet as managers see
value in that across BLM. So with that, any questions? Or I would like
to turn it back to Jo Ann and Gary. Thank you.\
\
J. Romero: Thank you.\
\
G. Dreier: That was very good. I\'m glad you had the time to join us
today, Colleen, because I think this is important information, and as we
all know, we\'re on kind of a colliding course here. If we don\'t find
ways to improve the way we do work and our budgets aren\'t increasing,
there comes a point where we run out of our capability. So this is one
way I think will help our workforce if we can improve the way we do
work.\
\
J. Romero: Consistent with what we talked about earlier which is what
have you already done, I think you have already plucked a lot every
low-hanging fruit and now it\'s time to look at some of the major
processes, so I wish you luck on and that I\'m sure you\'ll do a great
job. I want to go back to again \-- thank you, Colleen. Very timely.
Want to talk a little bit about this whole area, continue to talk about
improving the work process. If I go back to the template, what you\'re
going to see is a series of questions that will help you to begin to
think about. Process improvement from your own perspective here. So
where is our slide here? So some of the questions that the template asks
and some of the questions you will need to go through, are not only what
processes are we going time prove, but how are we going to do that? Do
do we have \-- some of the basic questions are, are people handling
payable more than one time? Are we shuffling paper around? How efficient
is that whole paper process? Can it be streamlined? I find that one of
the best ways to find out which processes most need work is to ask the
people that have to work with them. Ask your customers. Ask the people
that are actually doing the processing. Where is the redundancy? Where
is the bottlenecks? Do you know that within your own organization and
for your own work? Are there people involved who don\'t need to be? In
other words, how many handoffs do you have? Am I clear that every time
it is touched it\'s a useful touch, there\'s some value added? So you
can really, I think, help yourself by backing up and asking some of
these questions, absolutely outlined in the template, and the fact that
you\'ve got some resources to help you through that, I think that\'s
great. So you should be all set up to make that work. So as we walk
through the template \--\
\
G. Dreier: Let\'s talk about the format as well on that for the data
requirements that you are going to have to do on that. As with all our
pieces here, we want to be sure there is a place to get this information
up to the national office for their national plan and in process
improvement is no different. We have a form, and the unique part of
this, you have seen the years, you know the codes, what\'s unique is
we\'re asking for business activity code and that\'s from the Enterprise
Architecture and it\'s called a normalize model and don\'t get overly
concerned you won\'t be able to figure this out. We have designed in our
template a way to have a pulldown list of all the activities that can be
addressed by definitions and titles and it\'s a matter of picking out
the one that best fits the kind of work you are talking about. Then we
want you to define with an action verb, a noun and what other kind of
information clarifies that, the kind of work you\'re looking at for
process improvement. Our hope is by doing this we will start to flag
areas of interest that we can in fact hone in on a national viewpoint or
at least regional viewpoint. The goal isn\'t to have \-- kind of put you
\-- if you put this down you\'ve got to do this. No, what this is
supposed to do is provide you with an opportunity to identify areas that
we can start looking at that would be our first area of investigation to
see if there\'s a broader base than just one office that we can do kind
of a major process improvement or process improvement, of course, has
more efficiencies to sit and a broader base. So that\'s our goal.\
\
J. Romero: Very good. I want to just summarize again what we\'ve been
talking about this morning before we cut to another break. We\'re going
to give you two short breaks today instead of one kind of long break,
and essentially what we have been working \-- walking through this
morning is the field committee approved template and as I said earlier,
the intention here is to give you all some guidance and some very
specific help with documenting what it is that you do in workforce
planning. We also want to emphasize that if you\'ve gone through the
steps of doing workload analysis, identifying your work gaps,
identifying your skill gaps, and thinking creatively about what options
do I have for addressing those gaps, both in the work and with the
people, then you are ready to document. I want to say something about
the documentation part that I haven\'t said before, and that is that
it\'s our belief that it\'s very, very important to do the monitoring
piece, in other words, I\'m an advocate of quarterly, either a local
or/or state management team ought to sit down together, pull out that
plan and take a look at it. Is it serving us? Is it alive? Do we have
changes? What do we need to amend? How are we doing? Are we following
through on the decisions we made? Are we on target with our actions? So
my belief is that the template is an enormously helpful guide to help
you get there, along with all of the Lotus Notes help that\'s there,
very advanced from what I\'ve seen in other places, and am I actually
making it meaningful and a useful document. So you, as I\'ve said, will
have or already have the electronic version of the template. We want to
in encourage you to take it, use it, read it. There\'s a summary
attached beyond the last page that we just talked about, and it kind of
backs up to give you the logic and rationale for its use. So a special
thanks to the field committee who obviously is very interested in this
and took a great deal of effort to make it work. What we\'re going to do
after the \--\
\
G. Dreier: Could I interrupt you a minute? It\'s come to my attention I
missed one of the tables and I think we ought to quickly cover it and
that is on the new emerging skills and knowledge requirements which come
under the training and development side, again, it\'s a fairly
straightforward, I think, in \-- on the first three columns, and then
we\'re asking for the scope of demand, you know, where is that skill
needed? Is it broad based across your centers, directorates, or states?
It\'s on page 104 of your handbook. It\'s concentrated \-- if it\'s \--
see if it\'s concentrated in one or two offices. What we are trying to
get at, are there new skills out there that we should identify so we can
start preparing to envelope those and have them part of the organization
and train for them, develop for them, but we need to know the magnitude
as well. So the idea is by giving us the skill area, which is the \--
again an action, verb, noun and whatever modifiers help make that clear,
and the scope, we should have, then, the kind of new skills that are out
there and the magnitude we need to be concerned about. If it\'s only one
person we won\'t take a national view but if it\'s a broad base and we
see that from several areas, there is probably a training need we need
to address and address it rather quickly.\
\
J. Romero: That makes sense to me. Want to share with you what we plan
to do after break. I understand that the SAS people, that is the
developers of the data functionality you are going to be working with
actually sat and did the development of these screens with the template
in their lap. So very much paid attention to how is it that we want to
set up these screens so that they match the template and that everything
is consistent. So following a short break, we\'re going to bring
somebody from the SAS organization to help you answer any questions or
make sure that you\'re comfortable with the template, how it\'s used and
what your role is in using the template. Before we shut down, I want to
say it\'s been a little quiet from the gallery today. So we\'ve covered
the template, we\'ve talked about that, so I would like to hear from you
and find out whether there\'s any open questions, concerns, issues,
compliments, anything you would like to say. We want to open up the
bridge and find out if there\'s anything that needs to be said before we
turn the dial to talking about the software.\
\
Caller: Jo Ann?\
\
J. Romero: Yes?\
\
Caller: This is Marilyn from NTC.\
\
J. Romero: Hello, Marilyn.\
\
Caller: I just wanted to say that we\'re not \-- the expectation of our
senior management in this organization is that we\'re not just going to
collect the data, do the plan and leave it. What their expectation is
that we would identify improved work processes, make recommendations for
change. I think there was a comment earlier about maybe regionalizing
some skills or looking at broad-based use of skills across the Bureau to
do work where we\'ve got shortages. Those are the sorts of
recommendations that our senior management is looking to 8700 as the
sponsor but looking to us to make to them so that they can consider
these things for implementation. So we\'re not just going to do this to
meet the plan, we\'re going to do this in an honest effort to improve
the processes in the Bureau and to make a more efficient, effective
workforce.\
\
J. Romero: Marilyn, I\'m so glad you said that because it hits on a bias
I have and it is, if it\'s not going to be meaningful, why bother? I
really believe that workforce planning is an opportunity to engage in
some critical dialogue about where we going, what are we going to need
to get that done, what do we need to do differently in order to achieve
these goals, how can we shake ourselves out of vacancy management and
really look for the creative ideas that are going to make this real? So
I really appreciate the comment, Marilyn, and I want to underscore it
and I also want to say that there\'s a temptation \-- I think your
challenge is to have those good discussions and to actually make some
changes and get to the creative solutions and I think one of your
challenges is balancing that with the data requirements. So while the
data is useful, it\'s helpful, you have to have it, the historical \--
the new management reports, I mean, those are excellent tools, but be
careful not to lose sight of the fact you really want this to be
meaningful and not just another document on the shelf. So I really want
to underscore what you had to say. Anybody else? Any comments before we
turn the dial and give you a short stretch break and come back and let
you look at some of those forms and what you need to know about them?\
\
Caller: This is Joe. I would like to be the first to commend both of you
for taking a very difficult, complex process and passing this stuff
along to us. I\'ll talk to our managers down here about maybe having our
workforce plan add Jo Ann to our staff down here. You have a great
knowledge about BLM. Thanks a lot.\
\
J. Romero: Thank you, Joe. Appreciate the comment. I know Gary and I
have spent some long discussion times, so it\'s nice that we\'ve been
able to translate it at least for you, Joe.\
\
G. Dreier: Any other comments out there before we go to break?\
\
J. Romero: Ok.\
\
G. Dreier: With that I guess we will take a 15-minute break, when we
come back, it will be the last part, we will wrap up loose ends, and
also take care of how to get to these applications that you\'re going to
input and also acquire information for the template. With that we\'ll
see you in a little bit. Thank you.\
\
G. Dreier: Welcome back. As you can tell from the size of the group,
we\'ve got a few more players at the table and before we get started I
would like to give them a cursory introduction. On my immediate right is
Clark Collins from the World Wide Web office and human resources, IRM
advisor, and to his right is Devon Olson who works at the training
center as an application programmer. I guess I would like to start and
kind of talk \-- we\'ve been talking about the template. Now it\'s about
time to give them some tools so they can get to the automated template
and make sure that they can get there and navigate around successfully.
Clark?\
\
Thanks, Gary. Today we\'re going to talk about the actual data and the
actual applications that we\'ve used to build the data set. Today\'s
Powerpoint presentation that I\'ve prepared for you will give you a
brief overview of how to access the data and to show you what the actual
reports will look like that we\'re going to build into the data set. So
I\'m going to the slides. We have the FPPS data on the left that was
migrated into the data warehouse, and that data was merged with the MIS
data, and in that merge we used 12,000 records from FPPS to show the
current employees as of September. The MIS data that we built was from a
year\'s worth of data. We had an 88% rate of migration with the FPPS and
MIS data and the 12% that was missing we identified as seasonal, fire
employees and temps and SCEPs.\
\
G. Dreier: Do they have these slides in their books?\
\
No, these slides are not had your book. These are created from the slide
on page 43 and also from a current presentation that we did with SAS to
talk about the migration stat gee. Down at the bottom of the Powerpoint
slide you will see the reports. We\'ve used with the SAS tool and I\'m
going to briefly identify the skills, worker costs, current staffing,
working structure slides and what the diversity reports look like. The
SAS software is a tool that we\'ve used. It\'s a statistical analysis
system. The company is located in Cary, North Carolina and I have posted
the website as WWW.SAS.com. SAS is a fully web based tool, in a secure
environment, that enables decision makers to share information across
the enterprise. You have the flexibility to add, change and update
information easily from both internal and external information sources
as your business needs change. SAS will be given to the workforce
planning coordinators and the website. I will e-mail to those
coordinators and we will access through Lotus Notes. As the organization
upgrades to windows XP, we will then start using Internet explorer 6 to
access the SAS tool. Right now this tool is not accessible through the
Netscape browser. Through the next slide, I will talk about what happens
when you access the system and what we were accomplished in integrating
the FPPS and MIS data. You will see four basic reports that we created
from the templates that Gary has been talking about the last two days,
and the first report that you will see is the current staffing report
that we created with the SAS software engineers about three weeks ago.
This is just a sample set of the reports and how we\'re going to allow
you to look at the data that\'s been merged with FPPS and MIS. The next
slide is the actual SAS diversity report, and you notice there was a
homepage that will show you a link and list canned reports that we have
automated and put in HTML format. The first report is a sample of the
accountability report that we used back in 1998 and was created for the
FY-2000 report to show race and national origin in the organization. As
we build this tool I work closely with the states in looking at the
data. I will allow the workforce coordinators to understand what the
FPPS and MIS files and tables look like. Then we will build the
application together so that you\'ll understand what the queries and
what the reports will look like. The number that you see on the screen
is the number for the Washington Office. Sheldon nobles in the
Washington Office will assist me in collecting the information and
keeping my schedule together as I travel across the country working with
you to build this SAS applications? Are there any questions? Now I would
\--\
\
Caller: This is Kate from Washington.\
\
How are you?\
\
Caller: Good. I have a question. How in the world are we going to hit
that January 15th date when we are not converted to XP and the
statistical \-- the strategic plan is not even updated yet?\
\
I\'m going to work closely with the data next week. I will be in Denver
working with the SAS software engineers to clean up the data. Since the
files were so large, we had 350,000 records out of MIS, we need to do
some data cleansing. I am going to then build reports for you that you
can access using the Lotus Notes enterprise \-- use the Lotus Notes
Internet explorer to access those reports. So I will build the reports
for you. You\'re going to access them through the Lotus Notes Internet
explorer and then we will work on training you probably in January, but
the initial steps is for me to get you started with the data and using
the SAS analytical tool.\
\
Caller: When?\
\
Probably in two weeks. The number that I showed you on the screen, you
can reach me at that number, 202-50 1-6723. Nobles, who will be
assisting me in this endeavor, will be collecting the information. I
will be working with the SAS software engineers to build the reports and
to give those reports to you, probably in the first week in November. I
hope that answers your question.\
\
G. Dreier: If I could ask a question, Clark. Some of this data, of
course, is the data join we have been talking about. But others is, in
fact, data they already have available. They have FPPSs available still
to all the end users as well as MIS data, it\'s just some of the join we
haven\'t been able to perfect yet and is that what\'s delaying the
process?\
\
Collins: I think delaying the process is getting a handle on what the
data looks like, building the right fields, selecting the right tables.
Since MIS is such a large file, it\'s going to be hard to look at the
labor detail data that comes out of MIS and look at the financial data
that we\'re building into the personnel data. So I think a lot of it is
just doing a lot of data cleansing. The SAS software engineers will be
assisting me in doing some data mining exercises, doing some data
cleansing and trying to give you the right tables and the right fields
to build your reports for your state information. Hope that helps,
Gary.\
\
G. Dreier: It does. Let me kind of see if I can understand this. In the
longer view we\'re using this as a reporting tool this go around? But
isn\'t kind of the grand plan to have it be more robust and, in fact, be
the full body tool for accessing and input and the whole game?\
\
Collins: yes, as we build this tool, you will be able to create and
customize your own reports. The system is very robust and SAS has did
not done an outstanding job making this tool user-friendly, web based,
we\'re actually building the application so that the users will have
some flexibility in doing the queries and reports, but doing them very
analytically. So as you fill out the templates, as you build the
information, using the Lotus Notes application, you will be able to
massage the data the way you want to. So it is going to be very
user-friendly, very flexible, but is a very analytical tool.\
\
Caller: When?\
\
Caller: This is Trina from Washington. Is this SAS different \-- is the
template that we\'ve been going over \-- is that with SAS or something
different you can get from Lotus Notes? Is that two different things we
are talking about?\
\
Collins: Two different things. I will now turn this over to Devin Olson
and he will talk to you about the Lotus Notes application and what it
means to use that application to fill it out, the templates.\
\
Caller: Clark, this is Marilyn. The way you all explained it to me in
8th grade English was that Lotus Notes was the entry point for them to
input their data and SAS is basically the manipulation tool for the
data. So in order to fill out those tables that you all went over this
morning, what Devin is about to show them is what they need to be
concerned about first?\
\
That is correct, yes.\
\
Caller: So we don\'t need to worry about the SAS tools just this moment.
We need to be more concerned about the input source, which is the Lotus
Notes application, is that correct?\
\
Right, there are two parts, Lotus Notes is to collect the information in
templates and the SAS is the tool to do the analytics based on
information collected in the templates.\
\
Caller: Thank you.\
\
G. Dreier: Are there other questions before we move on?\
\
Caller: This is Trina again. One last question. Lotus Notes \-- we
should be able to have our report that\'s due the 15 from the Lotus
Notes portion of whatever he is about to talk about.\
\
G. Dreier: Absolutely, Trina. The whole reason for the Lotus Notes was
to have an expeditious view of the template and have a way to view the
information quickly and easily and your coordinator already has that
ICON on their screen or laptop or computer or desktop, and they can in
fact access that today. They can provide that that access to other users
on Lotus Notes as well. I think we\'re ready to go with that. With that
I guess we\'ll turn it over to you, Devin.\
\
Caller: Gary, this is Terry in Winnemucca, Nevada.\
\
G. Dreier: Go for it.\
\
Caller: You keep talking about a state level coordinator who apparently
is the only one who has access to some of this data, and in the workbook
it talks about local plans. I\'m assuming we\'re going to do a statewide
plan and we will not develop a stand-alone local plan?\
\
G. Dreier: That\'s probably going to be the case in your state but it\'s
up to your state, frankly. Our position is any time you can do the
lowest level plan possible, the better off you are going to be, however
\-- with such a short time frame, we\'re anticipating most states are
going to have to be doing this at a state level. That doesn\'t beg off
the question you need to be looking at it at a local level. We are
hoping at that level it\'s going to be a dialogue between local offices
and the State Office and, in fact, you will be doing both plans in kind
of sense simultaneously. So our hope is that, yeah, you could be doing
it at a local level and migrating up to the State Office and doing a
combined plan and then migrating it to headquarters, but our suspicion
is for this go-around that based on the time constraints you are
probably going to have to do it in more of a global fashion. So you are
probably going to be restricted to the state. Does that get at that?\
\
Caller: That answers part of it. Is the data that\'s needed by that
State Office coordinator, who is the only one who has access to the SAS
data, is that available right now?\
\
G. Dreier: Not the SAS \-- the SAS hasn\'t been put out yet. The Lotus
Notes application is available as we speak. It\'s already on their
desktop and accessible to them.\
\
Caller: If we don\'t need the SAS, why are we developing it?\
\
G. Dreier: The SAS is providing a data join of information that we\'ve
never had in the past and that\'s the tie of work to worker. We\'ve
always had a deal \-- we\'ve had personnel information on one hand, cost
information in another and we\'ve never been able to join those together
very well. Our attempt with SAS is to provide you with a more in depth
look at those two \-- those two associations. Our hope is that you will
be able to use that information to get up some \-- some interpretations
you never had the ability to do in the past. For instance, that you\'ll
know THPO job series and great level are doing this kind of work. Right
now the best you can do out of the database is that Gary Dreier is doing
work here in this arena. But what we probably want to know more about
is, what is the job series and skill level that he has that\'s required
to do that work? That\'s what SAS is trying to do s do that join of
information to provide that kind of access for the analyzing and
analytical part of the development of your workforce plan.\
\
Caller: I must not be asking the question clearly. The join of the data
that we were shown yesterday in the slides that was important to relate
work to worker, you\'re saying that is not available right now and
won\'t be until sometime in November and people won\'t be trained on it
until January?\
\
G. Dreier: Well, for what we\'re doing in the application in SAS is
we\'ve taken and it squeezed it down into just a report function and not
the whole \-- not the whole training function of the application.
That\'s why Clark has graciously put himself on the firing line here to
provide specialized reports for each organization.\
\
Caller: Gary? This is Marilyn. Is it not true that SAS will basically
invisible to the user? It\'s the Lotus Notes application they need to be
concerned about right now and that when SAS comes on later we\'ll be
doing the calculations, but that part of it they should not have to be
concerned with right this minute? Is that correct?\
\
G. Dreier: Not entirely. The in the ideal world, it would be that all
this data would be available for them today and that would be their
first step of starting their workforce assessment and an lawization.
However, not all that data is hidden from them or gone at this point,
it\'s just there are some associations that are going to be difficult to
do at a local level and that\'s where SAS had the power to join together
and make those analytical tools available. Ideally it would be nice to
have both tools available today, but at least we have the ability to get
it out fairly soon and the Lotus Notes application, the input
application that\'s required for \-- by the memo that you signed \-- or
that you put together as the A.D. back there and had signed by the
director is \-- can be met using the Lotus Notes application.\
\
Caller: I\'m going to try one more time. Back on page 45 it shows tables
that combined FPPS and MIS that I assume we\'re being asked to utilize
in this workforce planning process. Is that data available right now
today?\
\
G. Dreier: The join of those two is not available today.\
\
Caller: I\'m not sure I can ask an appropriate follow-up question.\
\
G. Dreier: I understand.\
\
Let me make one stab at this. What we\'ve done is we have merged the
data, the FPPS and MIS data, with the SAS tool.\
\
\> We have an 88% success rate in making that merger, something we
haven\'t been able to do. We needed to data cleansing to make the data
ledgeable and make it so it\'s readable so when you want to do specific
queries on specific fields and data elements that you can make logical
types of reporting based on what it is you want to do for workforce
planning. So the data has been merged. We are doing some data cleansing.
The file is so large that it just doesn\'t make sense to give you
something where you\'re going to have 15 minutes to wait for a query or
wait for a report to come out of the system. So what I\'m saying is in
the next two weeks I will be meeting with the SAS software engineers in
Denver working on doing the data cleansing so you will be able to run
the reports and hopefully after that two-week time period I will be
sending out an e-mail message notifying the workforce planning
coordinators that the data is now ready for them to start using.\
\
Caller: Clark, what I hear you saying is we may not need some
specialized SAS reports in order to meet the January 15th data call?\
\
Collins: that\'s right.\
\
G. Dreier: Also, again, you will be available for some specialized
reporting?\
\
Colorado Lynne: I will be available, yes. \--\
\
My name is Devin Olson, I am the the software developer, senior notes
developer here at the NTC and I was the one who put together the notes
application. I would like to thank Marilyn and Trina, I believe her name
was, for those lead-in questions. Just to you a lever 88 any confusion
whatsoever. The notes tool that I\'m about to show you is designed
specifically for you to input your information. The SAS tool is designed
specifically for reporting on that information. The SAS tool
incorporates MIS and FPPS data. The notes tool does not have that
information built into it. It has different types of information. The
notes application \-- I\'m sorry, this is on page 111 of your workbooks.
The notes application that we put together is based directly upon the
template, that workforce planning template, that was approved and passed
around and studied. The purpose of the electronic version of this tool
is to allow you to automate your steps for entering your data. Also, it
standardizes the workforce planning training content. If everybody was
to fill out the nice paper reports and send them all in, they would
essentially be useless. It\'s difficult to analyze that type of
information. The point of the electronic version is to standardize that
data so we can pull that information and eventually pass it over to SAS
where the high-end analytics and processing can be performed. In
addition to all this, the tool breaks down the fairly complicated
workforce planning template into easily understandable chunks, content
areas. It\'s much easier to fill out your information in here because it
is very, very discreet, it\'s very small pieces, it\'s very simple to
understand and easy to follow. I would like to go to the slides. What
you see here is the log-in that will appear \-- excuse me \-- the ICON
that will appear on your Notes client desktop. This icon should have
been mailed to the workforce planning coordinators. If it hasn\'t, it
will be shortly. In addition to this, the workforce planning
coordinators will also be receiving a copy of the paper version of the
workforce planning template. So we\'re going to send this out very, very
shortly. You should be able to get it. Once you get it, you can go into
the system and I would like to explain a little about how we work with
it in the system. Once you launch the application, this is the initial
view that you will see when you step into it, kind of complicated and
kind of terrifying. Relax, it\'s not that scary. Let me give you a
little explanation of it. It\'s broken into three primary areas. You
have a navigational area here. You have a content area here and you have
a detailed information area here. When you first launch it, what appears
here is a picture, essentially of the actual application with detailed
instructions about how the navigation is performed in there. The
application design description shows up in there initially and you can
take a look at it. It will explain how everything works. This when you
initially launch it the workforce planning introduction and background.
Talks about this entire project, the scope of it and gives detailed
information about where you can go if you have specific questions. One
thing I want to point out f you guys have questions while I\'m talking
about this, please go ahead. You can interrupt me at any time. I work
well with interruptions. If you have a question about how it works,
security, go ahead, you don\'t have to wait until the end. Ok? Moving
onto the next slide, this details it a little bit more. This is the
navigation area. When you come in, in this area what you will see are a
list of documents in that navigational view. Each of one of these
represents a single focus area or single section, if you will, of the
workforce planning template and they\'ll appear in this view, just one
after another. When you select on any one of those documents in order to
work with it, what happens is that that dockment is displayed in detail
in this area right here, in the content area, and you can look at it,
examine it. Some of the documents have narrative information where you
can just type in along, rich text explanation about what it is you want
to do specific to that particular area. Some of them do not. When
you\'re in that area and you select on what\'s \-- another thing that\'s
inside there is a thing called an embedded view. It\'s a real fancy term
and what it means is a table of detailed links. When you select on one
of these detailed links, inside of here what will happen is that
detailed information will show up in the detail area down at the bottom.
What you can then do is edit that, there is a little edit button right
there, you can edit that, modify it, update it at any point in time as
you choose. Because it\'s a live system,s what what happens is as soon
as you make a change, it is immediately reflected up here. It happens
instantaneously. It\'s a live system. Ok? So there\'s no waiting for
back-end processing to occur or anything like that. Any questions on
that?\
\
G. Dreier: I have one. In the navigation area, will they see
everybody\'s state and they can \-- if I\'m in Arizona k I look in
Nevada?\
\
Olson: that\'s a good point. The system has security built into it. What
that means is the state center or directorate coordinators have the
initial access and they have control over who is allowed to see the
information for that state, center or directorate and those coordinators
can add people, take away people at any time because they have complete
control. Try and be careful. Don\'t take yourself out, because if you
take yourself out, you immediately lose access and we can fix that, but
just a little warning there. Let\'s tap back to the slide real quick and
I\'ll actually show that. In the main navigation area I showed before,
when you come in, these are your detailed documents down here as I
described before, but there\'s a little button right here, and when you
\-- it\'s called State Office configuration. When you press this button,
what happens is it changes the content of this navigational area \--
oops excuse me \-- to show detailed state information, and these are all
of the state center directorates appear in here and what you can do is
choose your particular state, center or directorate that you have
visibility to and it will be displayed in the content area over here.
The interface is pretty much the same. One thing I do want to point out,
because of the security built into the system, when you take a look at
these state, center, directorates, you\'re not going to see all of them.
The only people that get to see all of them are folks who have access to
every single one. If you are not listed as having access, you can\'t see
it. It\'s not there. Once you do do that, then when you come over here
to the content area for that state document, you can edit it right
there, and what happens when you do that is you can then change who is
allowed to read these documents for your state, and you can define who
is allowed to read and write. Now, obviously if you have write access,
you have to have read access. You have to be able to see it to change
it. So that\'s why we say read and write. We kept that in red so that
it\'s quite apparent what\'s going on and so it stands out. Once you
make those changes, all you have to do is hit the update button and your
changes are immediately reflected throughout the entire system, through
every document in the system, they go right through, and the access is
locked and the new readers or writers that you\'ve set now have access.
It is up to you, the state coordinator, the person who is filling this
out, to notify the person that they have access to it, but once they\'re
aware of it, they can go into the system, they can work with it, they
can edit the workforce plan documents, as they choose. The really nice
thing about this, because it\'s a live system, is you can change this
information as your information changes. What I mean by that? Well,
let\'s say you go in and you say, ok, for this particular \-- say we\'re
working with SCEP, and you say I\'m going to need three SCEP students
and you put it down and then a week later you discover, oh, dear, I near
five. Well, your three is fine. You just go in and change to it a 5.
It\'s not like once you make it a change in the system and save it
you\'re locked into that forever. It\'s a live system. You can change
information as you choose.\
\
Caller: This is Greg. When you\'re making the changes and giving the
permissions, do you need to select the notes address book?\
\
Yes, thank you, Greg. That\'s a very, very good question. Let\'s pop
back to the slide quick and I\'ll show you \-- there we go. These fields
here are multi-value names fields and they will have, when you\'re in
that mode, this slide doesn\'t show it well, but there will be a dinky
button right there and right there and when you press that button, a
dialogue box will open and allow you to choose the name of the
individual you want put into the system.\
\
G. Dreier: If you have a management group set up in your Lotus Notes,
can you just select a group?\
\
Well, you could, however, the problem is this security is based at the
server level, so if your \--\
\
Caller: I see you like this idea of generalizing at the state level?\
\
The nice thing about that is it makes \-- it makes control and
modification of the stuff a whole lot easier, but the problem is if you
have a local group, you don\'t want to choose it because the security is
controlled at the server level and the server is not aware of your
groups. So just be careful. Make sure you choose the individual people.
Granted, you can have a whole bunch of individual. You can have 30, 40,
50 people in there. It\'s completely and totally up to you. That was a
really good question there, Greg. That\'s pretty much it. It\'s very,
very easy system to operate. It\'s designed specifically to be easy to
use, to be quick to use, to be easy to understand. The buttons are
pretty much self-evident, they do. It guides you through the process,
you get prompts, pick lists. Using the automated tool you don\'t have to
know have those memorized. You go into the tool, you are working on
inputting something and if it\'s asking for activity code, off you have
the ability to select from a live realtime list of of all the current
activity codes. You hit the button, it comes, select the one you want,
press enter, you\'re done. It\'s pretty easy.\
\
G. Dreier: I\'m pretty impressed what what you\'ve done.\
\
Thank you.\
\
G. Dreier: For those who haven\'t had a chance to see it or use it, it
does have some background information, it\'s just not go to a table,
input the data and get out and it go somewhere else. It has some
background from the template. It\'s \-- it puts context to it so you can
follow along and it\'s not like let me go back to the book and look at
it. I think it draws you through the process.\
\
That\'s right. It\'s built into the system on those focus area documents
for lack of a better term. The actual narrative, the text, the
background information, information that would tell you what you need to
do in that particular area from the Timm is right there in the system
\-- from the template is right there in the system. When I designed this
application, Gary had kindly provided me a copy of the template. It was
a pre-copy, but it was a copy nonetheless and I use that template to \--
as a base to build this entire application, the entire application is
build from that template as its foundation. So it follows the template
very, very, very closely. There\'s a couple areas where changes are made
and stuff like that, but that\'s primarily for fonts or what looks well
on an electronic screen versus a paper copy.\
\
G. Dreier: I would be curious to know if anybody out there has had the
opportunity to take a look and if we have any feedback at this point. I
know it\'s been out for about a week now. Has anybody been throughout
and had a chance to at least kind do have a drive-through to see what it
looks like?\
\
Caller: Yeah, Gary, this is Nick. I took a look it a and it looks pretty
impressive, but I have some questions that I\'ll be talking to you about
as we go through the process.\
\
G. Dreier: Ok. Anybody else? Was there any kind of \-- is it intuitive
enough? Does it get you where we want to go? Obviously silence is yes,
isn\'t it?\
\
Olson: let me show some phone numbers real quick here. If you have
questions and need help with the system, I have a slide one some phone
numbers on it. It\'s kind of broken down. If you have questions with the
SAS application, these are the numbers that you call. If you have
questions with the content, these are the numbers that you call. I think
\-- oh, and this is in your book. Let me make a little note right here.
See that phone number? If you have problems with the notes application,
that\'s my phone number. It rings to my desk. This is one of the things
I built. I have a little bit of pride in it. I have a lot of confidence
in it. If you have questions with it, if you have problems concerns, you
don\'t know how something operates as far as the application works,
please call me. The number is area code 602-906-5537. That rings right
to my desk here at the NTC. Or you can contact me via e-mail. Either is
fine. That information is on page 114 of your book. With that, I think
we\'re done.\
\
G. Dreier: As you can see from the help screen that was up there that
you also have the opportunity to call for content in the SAS product,
content on the Lotus Notes, and, of course, Clark has given you his
personal number \-- a number can he always be reached at for help on the
SAS product.\
\
Caller: A question, Gary. As far as how far down in the organization do
you envision this Lotus Notes application going in order to respond to
the imminent data call?\
\
G. Dreier: Again, I think it totally depends on your organizational
design. You obviously only need one person for data entry but it would
be nice to have everybody on the same page of what you are putting in
and available to see what\'s going on. I think from the read side, I
would \-- in my own personal opinion, I think it should be almost an
open book to your organization. But that depends on how your management
style is and how you are going to go through this process and deal with
it. Obviously the \-- you have to be careful on who has read and write
because when January 15th turns the clock hand, that means we\'re going
to take that datea and assume that\'s your report for Washington Office.
Did that get it?\
\
Caller: I believe so. Thanks.\
\
G. Dreier: There are some more help options for you out there. Use them
as you can. I would like to thank the two folks here because they\'ve
been put under a pretty close time line to do this, and we\'re doing
this as quickly as we can. I think there\'s been some excellent work
done and I think they should be Thad for and it I do thank you all for
it. With that, we are getting close to the end and I would like to take
the time to reintroduce Jo Ann and see what we have at the tail end.\
\
J. Romero: Interesting, Gary. I am sitting here thinking how
comprehensive BLM has gotten with all of this. What we tried to do in
the three days, in the limitation of a live broadcast and nine hours,
what we really tried to do here was try to provide you with a
comprehensive approach, kind of soup to nuts, how do you get started,
how do you convene a team, what should the team talk about, down through
the actual documentation of the plan. We introduced some new material,
I.E., the template and we\'re darn glad we did, because actually that\'s
your partner and your path forward, if you will, for you specifically.
So I just want to thank all the folks that worked hard to make that so
practical and useful for folks. As we summarize, there\'s a couple of
things I want to say, and that is that you will have when you get back
to your desk an e-mail of the field committee template. It\'s also up
available on the web. So you\'ve got it in your hands as soon as you hit
your button back at the desk. I also wanted to say that we\'re always
interested, I\'m very interested, in the feedback from the course, and
so in e-mail also you\'re going to have an e-mail from the NTC. So we
ask you to please fill that in and get it back. Just by way of summary
also, I did want to point out that there are some additional resources
available, and I\'m going to go to a slide here. As you know, I\'ve been
intimately involved with workforce planning since 1999, and we\'ve put
together a couple of classes, live classes, one of them is just an
overview, one-day overview for managers and supervisors, that really
emphasizes the role that management has to play, and how very critical
their commitment is. One of the classes that we seem to be doing a lot
of these days is a three-day workshop that\'s intended for practitioner,
and it\'s a very practical approach, how do you actually conduct this
workload analysis? What are the considerations that you ought to think
about, et cetera? And so that\'s being offered through the DOI
university fairly frequently. The other thing we\'ve been doing a lot of
is just onsite consultation and facilitation. So as you work through
this, we are available to help you out either as a consultant or, again,
bringing the training and tail oring it to you. Couple clients have had
the three-day class made into a two-day for their specific work group
and then on the third day we actually pull it together and come up with
the information. So I just wanted to let you know that we are available
to help. I thought my e-mail address was on here, but I\'m going to put
it on here. The Elmo will work better, I am told. What I am going to do
is just let you know that I don\'t charge for phone calls or e-mails, so
if you have a question, I\'m always, always happy to offer to my
students my time and attention as far as if there\'s anything not clear.
My e-mail address is STRATWKS@flash . net. So I would encourage you, if
you are so inclined and you have any questions, I would really love to
help you out any way I can.\
\
G. Dreier: Jo Ann, the information on your two courses is linked to the
workforce planning website under training and it\'s also linked to the
university \-- DOI university. If you don\'t know where to go and you
forgot, try to give that a try.\
\
J. Romero: Right. I also want to thank people for calling in and being
as participative as you\'ve been. We do have a few minutes and would
love to hear from you. Is there any sort of consternation, any open
issues or just anything that anyone would like to say? I think it\'s
absolutely terrific that the NTC is using this technology, so I want to
congratulate Marilyn and the staff for taking this on. We\'ve tried to
be comprehensive. So anything else before we shut down the wires?\
\
Caller: Jo Ann, this is Bob in the Arizona State Office. I\'m wondering
what considerations you\'ve taken as far as privacy data on the
databases and on the reports?\
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J. Romero: Not sure \-- Gary, I would think \--\
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G. Dreier: I\'ll take part of it. First of all, we selected data that
isn\'t necessarily sensitive, for instance, even though we\'re doing
some calculations on retirement eligibility, you\'re not going to see
age, date of birth, those kind of things. Most if not all the data I
don\'t consider to be sensitive. However, any data you ought to control
and manage and with that, is there something \--\
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I just want to add that the SAS tool offers a lot of security and will
lock down the data so that we can create some privacy with that data. So
the SAS data will be locked down.\
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And as far as the Lotus Notes application goes, it\'s extremely secure.
We\'re using full levels of Notes security. We\'re using access control
lists for the database itself, so we\'re controlling who has access to
the database. Right now when we set it out initially, default access is
author access to the system. In addition, we are using document level
access control lists and that\'s what I was talking about on those
fields where you fill out who is allowed to read or who is allowed to
edit your information. The way the system works, if you don\'t put them
in there, they don\'t see it. It\'s that simple. This is proven security
technology. It\'s been tested and proven by the NSA. It\'s rockdown.
However, because you the workforce planning coordinators can control who
has access to it, you need to bear in mind when you are giving someone
access to the information. That\'s pretty much it. It\'s pretty solid.\
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J. Romero: Good. Anything else from anybody out there? One last comment
that I would make is I would \-- as I think about BLM and other groups
that I\'ve worked with, I think with the template in particular you have
a very straightforward, solid hand-holding, if you will, to get you
through this. So if I were a workforce planning coordinator I would be
feeling pretty confident that you\'ve got the tools that you need to
move forward. So good for the field committee in getting that template
done. And tying it to the Lotus Notes. So, any last comments as we shut
down the wires here? I want to thank all of you again and we look
forward to hearing from you and getting your feedback, and \--\
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G. Dreier: I think it\'s time we also thank you, Jo Ann. You\'ve done a
nice job for us, and it\'s always nice to have a contractor who
understands the Bureau and I know you\'ve done extensive work and it
shows in the presentations.\
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J. Romero: Thank you. Thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of the day.\
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