April 14, 2016
On Thursday, April 14, the National Academy of Public Administration and Grant Thornton hosted a Symposium on the topic “10 Years of the NASA Shared Services Center – A Retrospective”.
The quarterly WCF Symposium aims to develop discussions to adopt a more streamlined WCF approach. Through this collaborative effort, government executives and managers can discuss WCF issues, share lessons learned, and gather best practices. Agency leaders share their insights to implement and sustain Working Capital Funds.
Dan Blair, President and CEO of the National Academy of Public Administration, welcomed the group and thanked the guest speaker Anita Harrell, Director of Support Operations Directorate, NASA Shared Services Center. For 10 years now, NASA has celebrated their Shared Services Centers with locations across America. The NASA Shared Services Center (NSSC) provides high-quality services and achieves cost savings for NASA through consolidation, standardization, and automation. NSSC has found success in establishing a caseworker approach and contracting methods that are constantly praised by OPM.
Ms. Harrell discussed factors that make shared service centers successful, including data integrity, a formal governance structure that includes customer advisors and oversights groups, structured management of customer interactions, service level agreements and service level indicators, and accurate cost estimates. Some notable lessons that have been learned from the past 10 years are that sometimes the least offensive approach is the least efficient, she pointed out. Additional lessons learned include: validating service level indicators before transition, giving equal attention to how rejects are handled, and designing the optimum process for handling rework. It is furthermore rewarding to baseline the pre-transition process (volume, timeliness, quality, customer satisfaction, and costliness), resist designing a process that involves customers in performing the work, and allow them to retain their resources. The mission of the NASA WCF is “to establish a revolving fund that promotes economy, efficiency and accountability with fully reimbursed rates while focusing on streamlining operations, extending resources and measuring performance, and improving customer satisfaction” and is focused on supporting shared services use.
Jennifer Ayers, Chairperson of the Working Capital Fund Symposium, discussed the continuing formation of Strategic Interest Groups (SIGs), the purpose of which will be to develop solution papers around issues that are key to the WCF group. A Rate Setting SIG has already been established, and volunteers will be solicited for the formation of groups on governance, decision making, and reporting requirements.
Renee Miller, Director, Working Capital Fund Staff, Office of the Controller, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, discussed the initial activities of the Rate Setting SIG. The group is involved in DOD, DOC, EPA, CDC, DHS, and others, and thus far volunteer members have met to discuss rate-setting pain issues and a survey has been sent to collect additional information regarding rate-setting activities of group members.