Lean and Green: Efficient and Effective

Remarks by Bruce I. Knight, Chief
Natural Resources Conservation Service, at the
NRCS National Efficiency Workshop
St. Louis, MO
July 17, 2006


Thank you, Dana (York). And thanks to Merlyn (Carlson), also, for those kind words and for explaining how PART and OMB work. It’s important that we all understand that.

Management expert Peter Drucker has said, “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”

NRCS, of course, wants to do both—focus on the right things and do them as efficiently as possible. You’re here because you’re part of the agency’s management team—at headquarters or at the state level and some of you at the local level. And management in this agency is about efficiency and effectiveness—maximizing our time, maximizing our budgets and getting the most conservation on the ground.

Efficiency and effectiveness must permeate everything we do, from the Chief’s office to the State Conservationist’s office to the DC’s office—it must be standard operating procedure.

As conservationists, we work hard to help our customers become good stewards of their land. To be a good steward, you need a good conservation plan. Everyone here knows the value of conservation planning as a tool for effective and efficient decisionmaking on the farm or ranch.

The same is true of planning on a watershed or area-wide basis. To effectively and efficiently manage our responsibilities in NRCS, we also need to do a good job with business planning. It’s both long-term planning and day-to-day operations management.

It’s scheduling visits and meetings to optimize results. Or not scheduling meetings when they don’t add value. You know, Central Regional Assistant Chief Merlin Bartz—our very own farmer from Iowa and Iowa Senator—says it takes a really good meeting to be better than no meeting at all!

Stewardship of NRCS Resources

So why are we doing this meeting? We’ve scheduled this workshop because we believe getting together and sharing ideas for efficiency is a wise use of our time and the public’s resources. The goal, of course, is to better serve all taxpayers, including our clients.

I think it’s appropriate that we’ve come to Missouri, the Show-Me state, for this meeting. It’s not good enough for us to do an outstanding job. We have to show taxpayers, customers, OMB, the oversight agencies, our partners and Congress that we’re effective and efficient in producing results.

We can’t just assert we’re doing a great job. We have to prove it definitively.
That’s why you hear me talk so much about transparency.

The more transparent our program priorities, our allocations process, our ranking criteria and our accomplishments are up front, the more clearly we can demonstrate results. And that’s critical.

Funding for agencies is a competitive process. Frankly, it’s a cutthroat competition and often a “zero sum” game.

We all know budget dollars are tight. When we get questions from OMB or Congress, they’re about what results we have to show for the taxpayer dollars we’ve invested.

Have we made the best possible use of those dollars and optimized the investment in conservation? And should we be trusted with additional funds?

We are constantly being evaluated. And not just against our performance last year or five years ago. We’re being compared—to FSA to Fish and Wildlife Service to EPA and to the private sector. Each agency has a different role and function and a slightly to significantly different clientele. But some of our goals are the same—improving water quality, for example. So the question becomes, which agency can most effectively improve water quality?

Merlyn Carlson talked about the PART process. Essentially, this is an effort to compare the effectiveness of various programs, across agencies, across departments. So, looking at PART scores would be one way to determine whether EQIP is more effective in improving water quality say than EPA 319, whether WHIP is more efficient in creating habitat for critical or endangered species than the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Partners in Wildlife.

As you know, we recently developed goals, objectives, priorities, an allocation formula and performance and efficiency measures for the Conservation Technical Assistance Program. We have a comprehensive policy manual.

Now, I’ve never heard anyone complain that we weren’t doing anything with our CTA money. The question we have to respond to is: Can we justify that everything we’re doing in CTA is the highest and best use of the taxpayers’ money targeted for conservation? Or as Betsy Croker called it, “the mystery of technical assistance.”

Last month I was at the National Association of Resource Conservation and Development Council’s conference and the associated NRCS workshop. We have a renewed vision and clearer goals for RC&D. Our goals are more specific and have a natural resource focus— everything we do should align with these goals.
That’s going to improve our PART score.

Our relationship with OMB has improved significantly over the past five years. We have consciously tried to cultivate a reputation of responsible spending.

OMB’s job is oversight—they’re the watchdog for the taxpayers, ensuring the sound investment of tax dollars. Consistent with the public trust given us by the Administration and Congress, it is imperative to watch our spending and make sure that every dollar is being used effectively and efficiently to buy as much conservation as possible.

2002 Farm Bill Accomplishments

Even as we look for ways to be more efficient, I want you to know that I am really proud of all that we’ve accomplished together over the past four years. Since 2002, NRCS has provided assistance to one million farmers and ranchers. Together, we have applied conservation on more than 130 million acres of working farm and ranchland under EQIP alone. We’ve also helped farmers apply more than 14,000 Comprehensive Nutrient Management Plans.

We have been able to accomplish so much because we have a dedicated staff committed to getting conservation on the ground. And because we have streamlined many of our processes.

Streamlining Accomplishments

It’s taken me four years to understand the sensitivity that our agency has to the terms “streamlining” and “efficiency” that I use so freely. In the back of some people’s minds, these words are just euphemisms for RIFs—doing the same job with fewer people. I think you know by now that isn’t what I’m talking about at all.

I’m talking about accomplishing more with the same resources—not fewer resources. I’m talking about automation and technology. I’m talking about identifying things we’ve always done that maybe we don’t really need to do—reports we file that nobody really reads, and we shouldn’t bother with.

I think we’ve got an impressive record on streamlining over the past four years.

We’ve made significant improvements in the allocations process. It’s much more transparent and easily accessible to our customers (and by yourselves as line officers) now that we’ve put allocations on the web. We’re using transparent formulas that incorporate the natural resource base as well as resource concern factors to allocate funds to states to respond to national, state and local priorities.

We’re also getting the money out to states—and farmers—earlier thanks to an early apportionment from OMB—which means we are free to spend this summer in the field! In addition, we’re offering bonuses—that is, performance incentives—to those states that do an effective job of allocating funds and have a demand for more.

I think we’ve done a good job improving our allocations process, but I’d like an independent assessment. So we’ve solicited for an outside party to conduct an independent, objective review of our formulas and process. Our allocations process is continuing to evolve, and there are probably factors and data sources that we’re not aware of that an outside party might identify that could help us.

We’ve streamlined the payments process. By switching to an average cost and flat rate items for AMA, EQIP and WHIP, we’ll cut payment processing time by at least 30 percent by reducing the time we used to spend reviewing bills, invoices and receipts. Streamlining cost lists at the state level can result in a 20-percent cost savings.

We’ve also reduced paperwork for customers and employees through a common computer system in USDA Service Centers.

Another streamlining effort is our Rapid Watershed Assessment process, which helps us target conservation investments. As you know, a full-blown assessment could take up to five years and cost more than $250,000. An RWA, on the other hand, gives us a quick and inexpensive estimate of resource needs for perhaps $25,000 to $50,000.

In 2006, we’ve funded 36 grants for RWAs under the Cooperative Conservation Partnership Initiative for $3 million and expect assessments in 18 months or less.
We’re looking to these grantees to help us standardize and perfect the RWA process.

Under the 2002 farm bill, NRCS also has been heavily involved in rulemaking.
We’ve issued 14 new rules for our programs, and we have four more in progress.
This fiscal year alone we’ve published seven requests for proposals for
• Conservation Innovation Grants,
• the Cooperative Conservation Partnership Initiative
• the Grazing Lands Conservation Initiative, and
• the Wetlands Reserve Enhancement Program,
to name a few.

That’s a tremendous amount of rulemaking and competitive funding opportunities.

New Customer Tools

Over the past four years, we’ve also produced new tools to benefit our customers—like the Web Soil Survey. Launching that website last summer fulfilled a dream I had when I came to NRCS—that every landowner could access soil data from a home computer.

Thanks to Bill Puckett, his staff and the IT folks, that’s now possible. And it’s paying off in efficiency. Through the Web Soil Survey, we have distributed more soil survey information to more customers in the past year than we accomplished with our printed copies over the past 5 years.

Then there’s the Electronic Field Office Technical Guide—available to our own staff and to our customers. It’s localized and dynamic. It puts conservation information and scientific and technological resources at the fingertips of anyone who has access to a computer and the Internet.

Our staff also demonstrated creativity in developing the CSP Self-Assessment to enable potential participants to determine whether or not they qualified for CSP.
This innovative tool kept us within the 15-percent requirement for TA, reducing potential technical assistance costs by nearly $33 million from FY 2004 to FY 2007, based on projected participation rates.

Another real boon to our customers is our trio of three-click energy estimators—which have received more than 1.5 million hits from over 45,000 visitors. With the help of these computer programs, farmers are figuring out, based on their own inputs, whether they can save fuel and money by switching to no-till, adjusting their fertilizer applications or increasing irrigation efficiency. These estimators are helping our customers manage their costs and boost their incomes while saving energy, water and soil.

Management Improvements

In addition to the new tools we’ve made available to our customers, we’ve improved our own business tools so we can be more effective managers. We’ve improved ProTracts to more efficiently track contracts, reducing the time for contract development by about 35 percent. For EQIP alone, we estimate that ProTracts has saved us nearly $25 million that it would have cost to create and manage the increased workload from 2003 to 2005.

Customer Service ToolKit has helped us automate conservation planning, enabling our field staff to develop a conservation plan 40 percent faster than completing plans manually. Both Toolkit and ProTracts have increased the quality of conservation plans as well.

We’re looking at some additional refinements for our business tools—part of our effort to consolidate the gains this year. Our goal is to integrate them seamlessly so that conservation planning, contract development, payments and reporting results all work together.

Over the past year, the whole agency has had an opportunity to participate in planning for the future—developing a far-reaching strategic plan that focuses both on our traditional resource concerns as well as emerging issues. Now the Strategic Planning Implementation Team has taken on the task of ensuring that we put the plan into practice. They’ve been busy with communications, working on the balanced scorecard and integrating the strategic plan with our business planning.

We’ve also put together a Human Capital Strategic Plan to address the coming retirement wave. We began with an employee survey. Thanks to a lot of hard work, we now have a handle on the changes we can expect in our workforce and a strategy to respond that focuses on priorities for the next 12 months as well as goals and objectives for the next five years.

Improvements in Progress

I am really proud of all the improvements we’ve made in our tools and processes.
Of course, there are a number of efforts to streamline and improve our processes that we’re still working on.

We’ve got several teams looking at options for one cost-share program and one easement program. You’ll be hearing more later in this workshop about next steps.

Seven states piloted a conservation planning signup this year using a self-assessment process, which offered a number of pluses—saving time for NRCS field staff and increasing the commitment from the landowner to following through to implement the plan.

Another effort underway is developing and refining the automated application evaluation and ranking tool for cost-share programs. This tool will save time, reduce errors and help make the evaluation and ranking process more user-friendly, transparent and understandable. Our current projections suggest that this tool will result in time savings of 30 to 35 percent.

I hope each of you have already taken the employee survey on our National Headquarters of the Future Initiative and have encouraged your staff to complete it as well. We’re looking for streamlining ideas that will clarify roles and functions, improve business processes and eliminate unnecessary workload. NHQ exists to serve our state field staff, and we want to do that as effectively and efficiently as possible.

This year we’re also phasing in remote monitoring for easements. Our easement portfolio now stands at more than 10,000, and on-the-ground monitoring and technical assistance requires about 12.5 hours per easement. Remote monitoring—using new high resolution aerial imagery—will help cut our costs by reducing the need for on-site compliance monitoring, freeing up field staff.

Your Challenge

Whew! That’s a long list of significant projects we’ve completed or are working on to improve the way we do business. But, of course, there’s more that we can do. And that’s why we’re all here in St. Louis.

Over the next few days, your challenge is to find the next generation of efficiencies, the next round of money-saving ideas that enable us to put more dollars into conservation.

Let me tell you about my frame of reference when I consider budget requests. I think about the average EQIP contract—that’s now running about $18,550. So every new pickup truck equals one EQIP contract.

People will say to me, Chief, there’s this great meeting—we’re just asking for $10,000 in support. But there’s always more to it than that. If we help sponsor a conference, we’ll also send our exhibit booth and people with it and then there are NRCS staff who want to attend the conference. Before you know it, the $10,000 investment has become a $100,000 investment—and that’s five-plus EQIP contracts or other opportunities foregone.

Is this meeting worth it? We must ask that question. And we must ask other questions. Do we really need updates on software so often—the latest, the brightest and the best?

On the other hand, investing in upgrading ProTracts cost hundreds of thousands—but has saved tens of millions. Buying AutoCad in bulk instead of through individual purchases saved us $780,000—and that’s three more watershed surveys—or 15 to 30 RWAs.

So as you consider funding requests in your own office, I urge you to think about EQIP contracts and whether the expenditure you are considering is worth what it costs in terms of conservation on the ground. I encourage you to think about training for employees—an investment that will pay dividends in the future as opposed to a pickup truck that depreciates in value quickly.

Conclusion

You know, Nike’s done well with its promotional theme: Just do it!
But for NRCS, just doing it doesn’t cut it. We want to do it better, faster and cheaper. That’s why we’re here.

I know you’ve got great ideas. Let’s take this time to spark them, share them and refine them and then work together to implement the best strategies—to serve our customers and the public more effectively and more efficiently.