Strategies for Achieving the Objective
The Department of State and USAID are pursuing several courses of action to achieve this objective. They will continue to explore balanced, smart, and lean approaches to addressing joint management issues. The Joint Management Board, which was a direct result of Government Accountability Office recommendations, will continue to find ways to drive efficiency into our overseas operations and reduce operating costs, including successfully consolidating vouchering in July 2015. The Department and USAID will continue to adopt balanced, smart, and lean methodologies for continuously improving core business processes. The Department and USAID will also leverage learning from each other to advance efficiency and effectiveness in their contributions to the achievement of Federal Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goals.
USAID and the Department will enhance their effectiveness by implementing new technology solutions. These are geared to improving the provision of American citizen services, streamlining and simultaneously enhancing the scrutiny given visa applicants, reducing operating costs, boosting collaboration, improving security and countering extremist threats, and broadening engagement opportunities. By applying existing and new analytical tools and data sources, USAID and the Department are aiming to strengthen their staffing and operations through identifying opportunities for more cost-effective procurement processes and foreign assistance management.
Another focus of the Department’s efforts involves transitioning its engagement activities from ones which tended toward engagements that involved limited, exclusive, and direct contacts to an approach based on a culture of openness. This has resulted in the expanded use of digital communications platforms such as social media, digital video conferencing, smart phone applications, and similar means that allow the Department to reach directly to people and that open up its public engagement to all who are interested, not just the limited audience that can be invited to attend our events in person.
Innovations at USAID make it possible to deliver results on a larger scale while simultaneously pursuing more strategic, focused, sustainable, and results-oriented approaches that maximize the impact of our development dollars. Evidence-based planning and increased operational efficiency and effectiveness are among the factors accounting for the impressive improvements in performance and results.
USAID is also promoting sustainable development through building high-impact partnerships. USAID is
collaborating with and directly supporting host governments, the private sector, civil society, and academia, all of which serve as engines of growth and progress for their own nations. USAID is using, strengthening, and rendering accountable local partners so they can sustain their own development. These and other efforts have made it possible to identify and scale up innovative, breakthrough solutions to hitherto intractable development challenges. For USAID, the power of science, technology, innovation, and partnerships are all being applied to the goal of delivering more effective, cost-efficient results for sustainable global development.
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Strategic Objective Progress Update
USAID is modernizing the way it does development, advancing new theories of change, and institutionalizing its new model of development through enhanced public-private partnerships and multi-stakeholder alliances.
These actions are part of the JSP, building on the USAID Forward reforms begun in 2010. USAID began
systematically tracking activities that support this objective at a corporate level in November 2013 through the Agency’s Administrator’s Leadership Council. The Agency has had considerable success on its five corporate objectives due to these reforms, and is refining a set of new metrics for FY 2016.
Specifically, one of USAID’s five corporate objectives focuses on ensuring it is a strategically managed and operationally efficient and effective development partner. To accomplish this, USAID has adapted evidence-based strategic planning and results management best practices for its operations, which includes using data to drive improvements and decision-making. For example, as part of its reforms for procurement and to reduce the Procurement Action Lead Time (PALT), or the time to make an award, the Agency has been tracking over 20 procurement metrics since FY 2013. Some of these metrics include tracking: 1) the percent of contractor performance assessments; 2) satisfaction ratings of procurement training; and 3) the fill rate for Contracting Officers. USAID conducts data-driven reviews semi-annually to review the data, track progress, and identify challenges.
Moreover, by tracking these metrics USAID has identified areas that need further improvement, and has taken action to do so. For example, due to the results of a data-driven review, the Agency modified its PALT metric to remove days in protest from the overall calculation, improving the accuracy of the metric.
Excellence in Consular Service Delivery (APG):
In the face of increasing demand, the Department of State maintains timely and high quality consular service delivery by leveraging technology and building on best practices to ensure that U.S. citizen and visa service delivery to the public is efficient, vigilant, professional, and within the targeted timeframes. The Department continues to exceed its goal of adjudicating 99 percent of passport applications within the targeted timeframe.
Passport Services adjudicated 99.9 percent, 99.8 percent, 99.7 percent, and 99.1 percent of passport
applications within the service level commitment to the American public in quarters one, two, three, and four, respectively, and anticipates that it will continue to exceed its goal.
Executive Order 13597 (Establishing Visa and Foreign Visitor Processing Goals and the Task Force on Travel and Competitiveness), issued in January 2012, required the Department of State to increase its visa adjudication capacity in Brazil and China by 40 percent and ensure that 80 percent of nonimmigrant visa (NIV) applicants worldwide are interviewed within three weeks of receipt of an application. The Department surpassed the Executive Order target of a 40 percent increase in capacity, as defined by the number of adjudicating staff, in Brazil in June 2012 and in China in November 2012. In FY 2015, the Department adjudicated more than 13 million nonimmigrant visa applications, a 13.5 percent increase over FY 2014. In FY 2015, more than 92.5 percent of applicants worldwide, on average, were interviewed within three weeks of submitting their applications, a significant change over the 82 percent in FY 2013.
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The ‘Excellence in Consular Service Delivery’ goal provides additional benefits toward the achievement of the Department’s goals. In calendar year (CY) 2014, the Department’s efforts facilitated the travel of 75 million visitors to the United States, who, according to the Department of Commerce’s United States Travel and Tourism Statistics, spent $220.6 billion, an average of approximately $3,000 per visitor. International travel supported an estimated 1.1 million jobs in the United States. In addition to the economic benefits, the visa adjudication process puts the Department on the front line of U.S. border security, as consular staff vet individuals who seek to travel to the United States.
ConsularOne is the Department’s major information technology initiative to modernize, restructure, and enhance our consular software, as well as improve efficiency, security, and consistency across consular workflows. ConsularOne comprises a complete consular suite of application services, which will incorporate virtually all the major functions of domestic and overseas consular work into a common, intuitive, and integrated user interface, and improve how information is shared within the Department and across the government. The first phase of ConsularOne will be an online passport renewal service, which will enable U.S.
citizens to submit passport renewal applications, payments, and photos electronically.
USAID Procurement Reform (APG):
Sustainable development through local, multi-partner alliances and public-private partnerships have increased the technical capacity of local governments and empowered them to make changes that will endure.
USAID has nearly doubled the percent of mission program funds, from 9.6 to 16.9 percent, provided to local organizations between FY 2010 and FY 2014 (FY 2015 data will be available in May 2016).
Since completing a business process review in 2010, the Agency established a goal to reduce PALT by 40 percent by the end of FY 2017. In FY 2015, USAID made progress on streamlining the procurement process and
institutionalizing a series of procurement reforms to reduce PALT. Of particular note were the below-average PALTs for several large Global Health Supply Chain awards, which were the first to implement a full spectrum of best practices: 1) early engagement; 2) communication across bureaus; 3) sequestered technical evaluation panels; and 4) collaborative approach with additional resources. USAID also completed a large number of procurements that had been in the pipeline for two years or more.
The Agency is currently using several methods to streamline assistance action lead times. These include: 1) engaging early with the technical teams during the conceptualization of the program; 2) improving the quality and utilization of market research; 3) improving the industry’s understanding of program needs; and 4) employing a phased application processes.
The USAID Procurement Executive issued guidance on best practices for streamlining assistance procedures, highlighting six innovative techniques to be employed in the assistance award process. In particular, it simplified technical evaluation and cost analysis methods that will result in a 15 to 20 percent reduction in certain
agreement award times. The guidance also reduced the number of technical merit criteria and limits budget reviews.
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Timely past performance data leads to improved technical evaluation panel reviews, which expedite the procurement process, helping to reduce PALT. USAID has significantly increased contractor past performance assessment reporting (CPARS) from 11 percent at the end of FY 2012 to 82 percent at the end of FY 2015.
USAID is also increasing its number of small businesses partners. Small businesses are vital to the U.S. economy and provide critical resources that contribute to the mission of USAID. In FY 2015, the Agency barely missed its target of obligating 10 percent of prime contract acquisition dollars to U.S. small businesses worldwide due to an increase in overall obligations and a similar amount of obligations to small businesses.
Stakeholder Collaboration and Audience Engagement:
USAID and the Department of State have made progress on enhancing stakeholder collaboration and audience engagement. USAID continues to support organizational change management around the new content collaboration platform MyUSAID.gov, including providing in-person training opportunities to the field and successfully rolling-out a curated content functionality that allows for the uniform posting of authoritative content. Making U.S. Government data accessible, discoverable, and usable by our partners and the
international community fuels entrepreneurship, innovation, scientific discovery, and enhanced development outcomes. To this end, USAID hosted a first-of-its-kind Open Data Hack-a-thon in April 2015, focusing on crime and violence in Latin America and the Caribbean. The projects participants developed illustrated how open data can help understand crime in the region, informing more responsive program design.
In October 2014, USAID released its first ever open data policy, requiring that all USAID-funded data be
submitted to the Development Data Library and released publicly to the greatest extent possible, while affording all protections for individual privacy, operational and national security, and other considerations allowable by law. Evaluation Reports are already available through the Development Experience Clearinghouse (DEC). Of the 236 project evaluations completed in FY 2015, 53 percent are already available online in the DEC as of January 8, 2016 and many more are expected to be posted online in the coming months.
USAID's Development Data Library, www.usaid.gov/data, currently contains 144 datasets available for public use and USAID updates it on an ongoing basis. The site also offers the public an opportunity to post questions or comments about the data on public forums. Moreover, stakeholders from around the globe are also using USAID’s open data to improve development outcomes. In Honduras, USAID partnered with the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment to better analyze the depth and flow of the river systems and make the data publicly available. This allows Hondurans to prepare for and mitigate flood and drought disasters.
Human Capital Management and Business Process Improvement:
The Department of State is on track to continue efforts to implement its respective human capital management strategies and regularly review existing business practices and processes to identify areas for improvement and innovation. The Department is creating to create a more diverse and representative employee population and strives to achieve an 80 percent fill rate of Language Designated Positions by employees who meet or exceed the language requirements.
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A Secure Diplomatic and Development Platform:
The Department of State is on track to complete a Master Plan revision by September 2014 and an
Environmental Impact Study by 2015 for the Foreign Affairs Security Training Center (FASTC). In addition to this effort, the Department moved 2,485 personnel into more secure, safe, and functional facilities in FY 2015, under the Capital Security Construction Program.
USAID is successfully implementing the Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12 requirement of Personal Identification Verification (PIV) usage across USAID. As of the end of calendar year 2015, USAID equipped 100 percent of Microsoft operating system desktops and laptops with PIV card readers inside Washington facilities.
In December 2015, the Agency required all USAID Washington personnel to log on using a PIV card, and will be activating mandatory PIV use across USAID desktop workstations and laptops worldwide in early 2016. USAID will require all staff to utilize a USAID PIV or PIV Alternative smart card for network logon access.