- In connection with its fiscal 1995 budget submission, GAO stated, "We have decided to focus TQM efforts on four key areas improving communications with Congress on individual jobs, reducing rework of our products, improving internal communication and teamwork, and using technology more creatively to solve our problems." GAO's quality council recently identified a set of priority initiatives, beginning with developing a clear operational definition of "quality" applied to GAO work." While GAO has used the word "quality" heavily in its documents, it has not fully defined it. In its Quality Improvement Plan, GAO defines "quality management," "quality council," and "quality network, "42 but it does not either define a quality organization especially as applied to GAO or resolve larger questions of what GAO should be and the work it should do. Instead, the focus of GAO's quality management discussions has been on improving processes for preparing GAO work and communicating its findings. Clarifying and communicating the overall mission and roles as recommended by the panel will help GAO strengthen its relationship and credibility with Congress. GAO notes that the types of changes envisioned in the quality management process involving the way employees approach their operations and their work often take organizations five to ten years to accomplish." In the panel's view, it is important for GAO to identify major areas for improvement and begin to achieve visible changes as quickly as possible, so employees and outside observers can see evidence of progress in the short term. Many congressional concerns about GAO revolve around the quality of its specific work products. Perceptions of quality vary with the purpose of a work and its intended audience. For GAO's work, the dimensions of quality include: timeliness; clarity; objectivity; originality; depth; significance; accuracy and technical adequacy; and impact." GAO cannot give equal weight to all of these in every product. It must make trade-offs, for instance, between timeliness and other quality dimensions, between clarity and technical adequacy, and between originality and impact. 44 The one dimension of quality that GAO should never compromise is objectivity. GAO's mission includes the central roles of auditor and fact-gatherer, for which objectivity is a requisite. As noted above, the panel urges that GAO should not risk its reputation for objectivity by moving into policy advocacy. "GAO Management News, May 23-27, 1994, p. 2. Other priorities include: improving agencywide communication; supporting efforts to improve the timeliness of GAO's work, cut cycle time, and improve teamwork and communications within units; installing GAO's local area network; and developing a pay-for-performance system that reflects quality management principles. "Continuous Improvement, 1991, pp. 41-42. See also Continuous Improvement, 1993, pp. 31-32. 43 Continuous Improvement, 1991, citing interviews with Dr. Joseph M. Juran and W. Edwards Deming; see also Quality Management: Scoping Study, GAO/ACG-Ops-91-1, December 1990. "These points were highlighted in an interview with Sidney G. Winter, who cited "The Multiple Dimensions of Quality in GAO Products," Discussion Draft, GAO/OCE, October 7, 1991. RECOMMENDATION: GAO's quality management initiative should be built on the redefined mission and vision for GAO, and should be expanded to include considerations of what GAO does as well as how it does it. RECOMMENDATION: GAO should define more clearly the characteristics of quality work products and build them into standards, training, and project design. RECOMMENDATION: GAO managers should concentrate efforts on selecting and designing work to assure that its products are first-rate, well-documented, and grounded in fact. RECOMMENDATION: In addition to long-term improvements in work quality, work processes, and communications and relationships with Congress, GAO should also target significant, visible improvements that managers and employees can make in the near term to address employee and congressional concerns. Customer Focus A major emphasis of TQM adapted from private sector management is "customer focus." GAO defines its "customer focus" in the following way: "Understanding our customer's needs and expectations is the starting point for #45 The tension between meeting customer needs and maintaining objectivity and accuracy demands serious consideration. In interviews, GAO managers and planners cite executive agencies, nongovernmental groups, and taxpayers as "customers," but overwhelmingly emphasize "Congress as the customer." That 45 Continuous Improvement, 1991, p. 9. phrase is repeated extensively in GAO documents and discussions. While nongovernmental groups and executive agencies are important users of, and are affected by, GAO products and processes, Congress is the source of: basic legislative authorization under which GAO conducts self-initiated studies; and appropriations that determine the resources available to GAO. Congress is the primary user of GAO's work; GAO devotes a large share of its staff time and resources to responding to committees' and members' needs for information and analysis. Many members view GAO as an institution created to serve them and as an extension of available staff resources. GAO's capacity to gather facts, look independently at information, and evaluate programs -- and the trust and credibility arising from that independence have formed the basis of GAO's usefulness to Congress. While Congress largely defines GAO's mission, the phrase "Congress as customer" does not clarify how GAO should carry out its mission. Congressional staff who call upon GAO for research and reports generally do not view themselves as "customers." In fact, according to interviews conducted for this study and documented by GAO from its 1992 congressional survey, the word "customer" makes many congressional staff members uncomfortable. Normally, a customer is a source of demand for a product or service, with a price system to manage demand and monitor quality. Congress, however, consists of multiple potential sources of demand for GAO work -- none of whom pay directly for the work or even know its cost -- and they have nearly unlimited and highly diverse demands for information and analysis. And the interests of those requesters are often in conflict with each other. The major drawback of the phrase "Congress as customer" is that it does not help to identify GAO's primary roles and substantive functions. The phrase has created a perception among many interviewed for this study -- even frequent and supportive requesters of GAO work -- that GAO is overly willing to please the requesters, raising questions as to whether GAO conducts studies with an independent eye or whether, by contrast, it shapes the research with an eye toward satisfying the requester's policy or partisan interests. The panel found no evidence that GAO has been steering its research toward satisfying particular policy or partisan interests. The panel recommends, however, that GAO take additional steps to respond to the concerns that have been raised. While GAO has extensive standards and guidelines for procedures and outputs, including standards on supporting Congress, the materials refer to timeliness and frequent communications but do not provide substantive guidance to GAO staff on what it means to be "responsive" to congressional requesters in terms of the substance of the work." That term can have multiple meanings, with serious implications for "Policies/Procedures Manual, November 1992, Chapter 3, "Supporting the Congress." GAO's reputation for objectivity and credibility. Chapter VI takes a closer look at GAO's relations with Congress, including congressional members' and staffs' views of GAO, relations between congressional committees and GAO, Congress' use of GAO detailees, and congressional requests for GAO's work and assistance. RECOMMENDATION: As part of its overall quality management initiative, GAO should clarify the meaning of, and criteria for, being "responsive" to Congress, in order to give practical guidance to staff and provide assurance to Congress that GAO work will be objective, impartial, and independently derived. IV. GAO WORK PROCESSES Despite the diversity of tasks GAO performs, it tends to work in uniform patterns that produce reports in similar formats, writing styles, and approaches to expressing conclusions. While GAO leadership has made a commitment to quality management -- including continuous improvement in work products, reduced rework, and employee involvement -- GAO's quality control process remains hierarchical, expensive, time consuming, homogenizing, and uneven in its effectiveness. GAO's approach to audit and evaluation work focuses on formal processes, administrative procedures, and bureaucratic management techniques. The following sections describe how GAO generally conducts studies, as revealed in case studies and interviews made by the panel and project staff. Internal Design and Review of GAO Work GAO work originates in several ways, including congressional requests, statutory mandates, agency requests, and self-initiated proposals to carry out basic legislative responsibilities (BLRs). In fiscal year 1993, according to GAO's statistics, work requested by congressional committees or members or required in law took 80 percent of GAO staff-years of work; the remaining 20 percent of GAO staff-years went to self-initiated projects (BLRs). For the first quarter of fiscal year 1994, congressionally requested work dropped to 73 percent while the share accounted for by self-initiated work rose to 27 percent (see Table 4). TABLE 4 PERCENT OF GAO STAFF-YEARS SPENT ON CONGRESSIONALLY- |