The Agriculture Department spent much of the last year creating new automations to make human resources processes less burdensome.
These efforts built on work USDA has been doing since 2018, initially in the financial management area.
Brian Mohr, USDA’s the enterprise automation program manager, said the agency is now applying some 15 new automations to improve HR processes.
“One of the most impactful ones we built has to do with personnel action processing. That is essentially when I need to change my work schedule or I need to change my duty location. I need to do these things that have this well-defined business rules behind them and we put together the Standard Form 52 and that works its way through an agency customer relationship management (CRM) platform. All of the hard work is done on that document,” Mohr said on Ask the CIO. “At the end of the day, someone has to pick that document up and actually put it into our departmentwide personal management system called Empower. So what we did is we took 17 different nature of action codes and we built an automation that the entire department can leverage.”
Mohr said the automation goes through all the checks that used to be manual and makes sure all the proper signatures are in place before finalizing the documents.
Time savings are real
He said another agency built the Personnel Action Processing bot last summer to meet a specific need of managing retention incentives more efficiently.
“They built an automation that did this one single nature of action code for retention incentives that came up very early on with our conversation with the HR working group we stood up. We started with that one and said, ‘Okay, well, what if we were to just take this one and what else could we do to make this more robust?’” Mohr said. “One of the things we did is with the National Finance Center’s HR professionals called the mainframe before we even built this automation, was asked what other nature of actions are similar, using a similar screen and using the similar data elements. We got down to this list of about 17 of them and so that grew into two automations. The first one was about a group of 10 that were all right same screen in Empower and using the same data elements. Maybe one or two of those columns change and then we added seven that were a little bit more complex where you’re maybe bouncing between two screens and you need to collect a little bit more data.”
He said the Personnel Action Processing bot is saving about 12 minutes per action, and over the course of a year, the automation is expected to save almost 100,000 hours.
Another recent automation helps USDA employees manage grants through the SAM.gov platform.
“They’re getting grant applications in, as they’re reviewing grants by going to SAM.gov to look up these entities one-by-one, a lot of times. So what we did is we built an automation that, essentially, you can put thousands of unique entity identifiers (UEI) and the automation grabs the SAM.gov application programming interface (API) and returns the data,” Mohr said. “We just actually launched an updated version where the automation grabs 35 different data fields in about 20 minutes. We’ve seen over 3,000 records be checked, and that data for all those entities come back.”
New automations coming
Agriculture grant managers are using the automation as part of their pre-award process to do a couple of checks to make sure potential grantees make it past the first stage of eligibility verification.
Mohr said since May USDA has checked over 14,000 entities for eligibility for grants.
USDA’s oversight council set up the metrics of success for each automation based on quantitative data.
Mohr said some of the metrics focused on how much time it took to do a manual action today and how much time it takes with the automation. Other metrics focused on real dollar savings.
“We established an agreed upon dollar amount to put around these. We took the GS-12 rest of the United States salary rate and basically applied it to every automation. That was to give us a baseline of costs,” he said. “One of the things in the human resources workforce is there’s a lot of turnover in that workforce so to mitigate that, you’re, a lot of times, bringing on contractors. But in really talking with the human resource professionals, one of the reasons there’s turnover is there’s not a lot of training. So what this has allowed us to do is really start looking at our HR workforce and seeing, how do we bring them along on a journey and train them and keep them in house and not have that turnover? And then really, can we start bringing down our contractor cost as well.”
Going forward, Mohr said USDA is working on several new automations, including one for incident management for field staff.
“When they’re out there in the field doing incident management, they’re contracting for things like chainsaws, port-a-pottys and food, and they’re doing this a lot of times paper based because they’re out in an area where connectivity is not a thing. So what happens is all of these invoices come in and sometimes the individuals out there doing that contract work may have gotten the daily rate for, say, a porta-a-potty wrong or the contract number wrong, so you’ve got this potential for improper payments. One of the automations we’re actually in the process of building is going to ingest all of those invoices, and then it’s going to go and look and say, ‘Okay, you got the contract right, but you got the daily rate wrong for this item,’ and it’s going to correct that before we actually go and issue the payment,” he said.
A second new automation is focused on USDA’s environmental permitting documents and how employees make eligibility determinations instead of having to spend so much time keying in data.
Mohr said these automations also have helped USDA move faster to a DevSecOps or agile approach to development.
“I think one of the things we realized last year is because we were moving a lot faster than some of the other projects, folks weren’t used to the speed, and we’d get hampered down with things like system access, whether that’s for our developers or for the bots themselves,” he said. “This year, we’ve actually taken a much more traditional approach and really doing a kickoff for every meeting, making sure all the appropriate parties are at the table, making sure the security people that handle system access are there from day one and know that in two weeks, we’re going to need access here, rather than getting to that two week mark and having to go figure out who provides that system access, what paperwork involved with that system access?”
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