NSF, HR, Transformation

Eureka! The National Science Foundation Discovers the Art and Science Behind its HR Transformation

When Joe Burt first stepped in to lead HR Management for the National Science Foundation in early 2003, he received a very complimentary note from one of his customer-colleagues. While pleased to hear that this senior executive, one of Joe's biggest customers, had received excellent customer service from his department, Joe had a growing feeling of unease. As he read about the executive's interaction with his staff, "I realized he was describing how he and other customers had to 'shop the model.' To perform a basic HR transaction he had shop three different places and do a lot of footwork," said Joe. While the customer was pleased, Joe was not.

Joe realized the traditional functional HR model had some significant limitations. "Sure we might make incremental improvements in some areas, but customer service would never dramatically improve," according to Joe, unless he started asking that most critical of questions: Why?

"Why do we do it that way? Why do customers have to go to all these different places? Why don't they have the ability to come to a single point of contact? For the first twelve months on the job, I asked 'why?' a lot," recalled Joe.

At the same time, big changes were afoot within the Foundation itself. At its core, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is a grant-making body operating for the public good. Charged by Congress to oversee disbursement of much of the nation's research support dollars, the Foundation was coming under increasing scrutiny. Where was all that money going? What results could the nation show for the grants it had provided?

Though Congress demanded more accountability, legislators weren't providing more resources. That meant the Foundation needed to find ways of tackling that old challenge: do more with less.

One thing Joe could count on was that additional resources, even if they were available, would not be coming his way. The Foundation needed every spare resource to fulfill its core mission. Joe didn't "grow up" in HR. An NSF-lifer, Joe spent most of his career in the other Divisions and Offices that support the Foundation's mission, and he came to HR with an acute focus on that core mission and business. Joe and his leadership team were determined to make sure HR was set up to succeed in its core mission of supporting the Foundation's work of keeping the US at the forefront of discovery.

Joe retained Federal Management Partners (FMP), a leading public sector HR consultancy, to conduct a workforce efficiency study. "The study revealed that from 2000 to 2004 the Foundation had improved productivity per person largely through automation," recounted Tim Barnhart of FMP. This had allowed the Foundation to consistently do more with less for many years. Unfortunately the technology-driven efficiency hit a wall in 2004. According to Tim, "Workload per person kept increasing, but efficiency remained flat." Technology alone could not continue delivering the level of productivity improvements the Foundation needed to keep pace with its growing workload.

To download the full article, click here.