Your Dollars At Work

The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) is one of the most recent and comprehensive of a number of laws and executive orders directing federal agencies to join the "performance management revolution" already embraced by private industry and many local, state, and national governments. Performance management ensures that daily actions and expenditure of resources are guided by long- and short-term goal setting in pursuit of accomplishing an organization's primary mission, followed by performance measurement and evaluation.

Importantly, GPRA mandates that long-term and annual goals be results or outcomes rather than outputs (activities, products, or services) and that they be "objective, quantifiable, and measurable" so that performance can be adequately measured and reported, and progress on mission accomplishment assessed.