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Strategic Objective

Build an increasingly diverse, engaged, and high-performing workforce

Strategic Objective

Build an increasingly diverse, engaged, and high-performing workforce by fostering excellence in recruitment, training, leadership, and management of human capital.

Lead Office: Co-leads: Offices of Budget, Finance, and Award Management (BFA) and Information and Resource Management (IRM)

Themes:

Management

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Overview
Progress Update

Overview

Progress Update

Program directors (PDs), including permanent and rotator staff, are the largest and highest-turnover segment of NSF’s workforce. The Strategic Review of this goal and objective considered the changes in the PD job duties and workforce over the last 15 years and examined factors impacting recruitment, selection, and retention of PDs. The Strategic Review utilized an array of qualitative and quantitative evidence to support the key findings and recommended actions summarized below.

1. What qualities does NSF seek in program directors?

Although each directorate seeks a slightly different combination of skills when recruiting program directors, most include skillsets that fall into three categories: 1) technical expertise, 2) management skills (the ability to get things done), and 3) a collaborative mindset. The team noted the increasing importance of non-technical skills in the timeframe considered.

2. How has the program director job changed over the past 15 years?

Recruitment and retention of program directors is correlated to the changes in the program director job duties over the past 15 years. These changes include increasingly large and complex workloads without proportional staffing changes (proposals up 65 percent, staffing up only 20 percent), use of increasingly complex electronic systems and communications, travel restrictions, salary and performance award constraints, multi-directorate solicitations, and reduced participation in the Independent Research Development (IR/D) program. In addition, the interrelationship between the delays in receiving appropriations, GPRA dwell time goals, time-consuming compliance checking, and end-of-year close-out pressures add to workload concerns.

3. What are the factors impacting recruitment, selection, and retention of a high-performing program director workforce?

Nineteen percent of NSF’s STEM workforce was eligible to retire at the end of FY 2014, with eligibility projected to grow to 32 percent by FY 2018. It is expected that a significant fraction of these people will choose to retire at the time of or prior to NSF’s move to Alexandria. In the 2014 FEVS results, the STEM workforce reported having unreasonable workload levels more often than any other NSF job family. The team identified a range of professional, personal, and environmental/logistical factors that affect recruitment and retention in both positive and negative ways. The time it takes to recruit program directors, particularly rotators, has increased significantly in recent years, making it particularly important to prioritize actions NSF can take to strengthen our ability to recruit and retain staff.

Opportunities for Action or Improvement
• Develop mechanisms to better manage individual workload and minimize disparities in workload.
• Implement exit and stay interviews as necessary to identify trends.

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Strategic Goals

Strategic Goal:

Excel as a Federal Science Agency

Statement:

Excel as a Federal Science Agency

Strategic Objectives

Use effective methods and innovative solutions to achieve excellence in accomplishing the agency’s mission

Statement:

Use effective methods and innovative solutions to achieve excellence in accomplishing the agency’s mission

Description:

NSF can accomplish our mission only when our operational and administrative enterprise functions work seamlessly with the front-line organizations they support. A wide range of services--including human resources; performance management; information technology (IT); financial, procurement, and administrative support--provide the wherewithal for the agency’s program staff and leadership to make critical investments in science, research, engineering, and education.

The agency uses three key strategies to achieve organizational excellence: openness, inclusion, and effectiveness. Openness and inclusion are achieved when we conduct business in a transparent, collaborative, and participatory manner with all stakeholders. Continuous, clear communication with all parties is a hallmark of openness and inclusion. An organization is effective when all business processes work to optimize administrative efficiencies, provide business intelligence for data-driven decision making, and enable organizational agility.

An essential mechanism that NSF uses to accomplish our mission is the competitive merit review of research proposals. We have developed a strong business and operations model that is emulated around the world. This model uses frontline U.S. researchers who have the best sense of where opportunities for major advances lie to evaluate proposals for original research. NSF accepts proposals in a manner that represents an open portal for new ideas in all fields, including interdisciplinary proposals. Whether they are submitted in response to open funding opportunities or for formal targeted solicitations, the proposals undergo merit review, with the subject matter experts (peers) assessing the intellectual merits and broader impacts of the proposed research. This merit review may take many forms, but all are designed to provide NSF program officers with the information they need to make award recommendations from among the (usually) large number of high-quality possibilities. The agency’s IT systems are critical to the process, facilitating the flow of proposals through the merit review, award, and oversight processes. External members of the research community periodically assess the quality of the merit review process as a means of accountability for NSF management and staff. Construction and operation of large scientific instruments and infrastructure efforts present added challenges. NSF requires extensive project execution plans, including detailed work scope, milestone schedules, and risk management; progress is monitored continually by NSF staff using extensive Earned Value Management (EVM) data, supplemented by in-depth external reviews conducted at least once a year.

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Build an increasingly diverse, engaged, and high-performing workforce

Statement:

Build an increasingly diverse, engaged, and high-performing workforce by fostering excellence in recruitment, training, leadership, and management of human capital.

Description:

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Agency Priority Goals

FY 14-15: Optimize the Award Process to Level Workload

Statement:

Improve agency and awardee efficiency by leveling the award of grants across the fiscal year. By September 30, 2015, meet targets to level distribution of awards across the fiscal year and subsequently improve awardee capacity to effectively manage research funding.

Description:

NSF typically awards half of its nearly 20,000 funded grant actions in the 4th quarter due to the fact that almost 75 percent of proposals and funding requests are recommended for award during the last half of the fiscal year. This unbalanced award workload is largely a result of clustered proposal deadlines, as well as due to annual budget delays, uncertainties of final allocations, and program practice of making funding decisions late in the fiscal year. Issuing such a high volume of awards in a compressed time period during the end of the fiscal year not only strains NSF’s workforce, and other resources such as IT business systems and space for conducting review panels, but also increases risk and places added stress on awardee capabilities coinciding with these peak workload periods.

Adopting strategies that address calendar management, operating procedures, and potential IT improvements should result in improved efficiencies that mitigate the negative impacts of the current imbalanced award distribution for both NSF and the nation’s scientific research community, supporting NSF’s strategic goal to excel as a federal science agency. Spreading proposal deadlines and leveling issuance of awards in a more balanced approach across the fiscal year would provide for more optimal utilization of limited resources to administer and manage research funding and therefore improve award compliance and overall stewardship of federal research dollars. Realizing improved efficiency in the administration of federally sponsored scientific research would also help to further reduce administrative burden and enable research to be initiated and executed more efficiently across the research community.

Implementation of this goal will require the full support of all program directorates and offices that make funding recommendations to NSF awarding divisions. Implementation teams will be established in each program directorate and office to develop approaches that consider the full proposal cycle and are sensible for each program area (e.g., polar programs may need to time funding solicitation deadlines and subsequent recommendations in a manner that accommodates the logistical concerns associated with operating in an extreme weather environment). NSF’s Office of Budget, Finance and Award Management (BFA) divisions will support the program directorates and offices in this effort by working with each of the implementation teams to suggest options for consideration, to foster pilot approaches, and to assist in the clearance process which impacts the release and timing of proposal solicitation deadlines.

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