"It's great to be among my fellow Performance Management Geeks." An apropos opening by Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) at the 2011 Performance Symposium presented by the Department of Defense with the Performance Improvement Council. Senator Warner was one of many influential speakers who delivered high impact presentations to an audience of Lean Six Sigma Black Belts, Performance Improvement Officers and every other flavor of performance management professional that you will find across the federal government. As a proud member of the Performance Management Geeks club I wanted to capture some of the key messages and takeaways from the symposium and share them here.

The agenda was far too rich to attend every session and the presentation formats were too varied to capture all of the key messages. That said, I will strive to use this site to share the experience of the conference and some of the main lessons offered by the speakers at the symposium. First, let me say that Mark Cutler's post in this blog is 100% accurate – a conference location does matter! The main ballroom at the National Conference Center with two large screens was the perfect venue for high profile speakers and 400-500 attendees. Mr. J.D. Sicilia was the Chairman of the proceedings who colorfully provided context, information and humor throughout the session. He was the first to acknowledge the insurmountable challenge of navigating the honeycomb of a facility. Why was there no person dressed in a fork telling us the way to the dining room? Fortunately, all presentations and networking sessions were nearby and easy to find.

Elizabeth McGrath, Chief Management Officer for the Secretary of Defense kicked off the session by setting the context which pervaded the event. "We are in a fiscal crisis. We will look at everything to increase effectiveness and efficiency." How do we take the costs out of the system? What can we automate or streamline? And most important for this session, how can we track if we are capturing the efficiencies and better understand the impact our efforts are having. Ms. McGrath emphasized that the Department of Defense (DoD) and all Federal agencies must first remain true to the mission. As industry focuses on profit we must focus on the mission. We must ensure the enterprise have what it needs to achieve the mission. With the mission at the core we must then establish a performance culture.

Ms. McGrath emphasized two principles that will foster a performance culture:

1. Performance Management is a change management process. Again, we were reminded that "change would be easy without people" ? and that we as leaders must have the courage it takes to step up to the changes we are facing. Doing nothing is easy and we are not in a position to take the easy way out.

2. Performance is tracked to inform conversations. Do we have clear goals and are people aligned? How are we planning on reaching that goal? How will we know when we are successful? We need a strategy, initiatives and measures to achieve the mission.

Ms. McGrath ended on a positive note by stressing that positive change is infectious (unfortunately, her example of giving up donuts for health reasons was somewhat lost on me). It was this commitment to mission, courage to change and cross-agency cooperation that led to the turnaround of the Clearance Process which has since been removed from the GAO High Risk list. GAO High Risk List