MANAGEMENT GOAL: Achieve Organizational Excellence

Introduction

Fulfillment of the USPTO's mission and accomplishment of our goals, objectives and initiatives require strong leadership and collaborative management, which begin with the senior executive team. While our strategic goals focused on our core mission, this management goal focuses on the organizational excellence that is a prerequisite for achieving those goals and objectives.

Organizational excellence is a shared responsibility among the senior executives, and is focused on sound resource management, solid workforce planning, and effective use of information technology. Collectively, the leadership of the USPTO is responsible for core management activities that result in:

• Becoming an employer of choice with a culture of high performance through the implementation of the USPTO's Human Capital Plan;
  
• Ensuring responsible management of fiscal resources; and
  
• Providing the information technology expertise and systems to ensure that electronic processing is safe, secure, accurate and continually available to employees, applicants, and stakeholders.

Challenges/Opportunities

• In order to create a predictable and orderly operating environment that will provide certainty to applicants and enable cost-effective decision making, we must secure long-term funding stability and the flexibility to adjust fees.
  
• It is critical to accurately project fee-paid inputs to ensure that fee collections cover the cost of operations, and enable us to implement a workforce-staffing plan capable of meeting future-year demands.

Operating under annual appropriation of funds makes it difficult to ensure adequate investment to meet demands for our services. We must make optimal use of "no-year" appropriations by accelerating or delaying investment decisions, while making sure that exercising such discretion does not lead appropriators or stakeholders to faulty conclusions about the cost of operations.

To quickly respond to changing workloads and deliver the services our applicants and others demand, the USPTO must use the most effective personnel practices, technologies, flexibilities, and management techniques to continually maintain and develop an appropriately sized, skilled, and diverse staff.

Organizational health is directly related to effective communication — among employees and between employees and our external community. Our challenge is to enhance communications at every level of the organization.

To support core mission activities, the USPTO must simplify and standardize its systems and fully integrate them to operate better and more efficiently.

The USPTO must continuously recruit a large number of highly qualified patent examiners in a growing economy.

Our Strategic Response

We will develop an enterprise-wide approach to providing reliable and consistent information for decision-making purposes; recruit, hire, develop, and retain employees with competencies for accomplishing our mission; enhance the capabilities of our corporate systems, processes and services; and improve the quality, cost-effectiveness, timeliness and user friendliness of IT solutions.

Objective #1:  Function as true business partners across the organization to achieve superior enterprise performance and provide strategic leadership.

Initiatives

Implement the agency's Strategic Human Capital Plan, as follows:

• Close competency gaps (capacity and capability) in mission-critical occupations to meet current and future needs
  
• Enhance the performance management and reward system to effectively differentiate between high and low performance and link individual, team and organizational goals
  
• Ensure that leaders and managers effectively (1) manage people, (2) maintain continuity of leadership, (3) sustain a learning environment, and (4) provide a means to share critical knowledge
  
• Ensure effective resource stewardship by:
  • Developing a means to display integrated executive management information – strategic, financial, performance, and operational – to monitor the "health" of the USPTO
  • Developing enterprise-wide management analysis expertise
  • Exploring whether, consistent with overall governmental goals, the USPTO has the best fiscal and other legal authorities to fulfill its mission

Objective #2:  Ensure operational excellence in enterprise-wide management processes.

Initiatives

• Enhance the capabilities of financial systems and processes by:
  • Establishing an enterprise-wide approach for financial management
  • Establishing methods for more accurate and timely predictions of application filings, workloads, and revenues
  • Providing an automated operating environment for conducting financial management business with the USPTO
    
• Improve human resource processes and services
  
• Improve the quality, cost-effectiveness, and timeliness of IT solutions by:
  • Simplifying IT systems and support infrastructure
  • Improving existing business area tools and capabilities

Objective #3:  Dramatically simplify on-line access to, and availability of, USPTO information and data.

Initiative

• Improve accessibility to USPTO information by:
  • Expanding searchable information
  • Providing streamlined access to information
  • Increasing system capabilities for access to information
  • Implementing secure IP office information exchange
  • Improving search engine capabilities
  • Developing and deploying a "search aggregator"

Performance Measures

• Closed competency/skills gaps for mission-critical occupations, on both capacity (numbers hired) and capability (quality) dimensions
  
• 95 percent of supervisors, managers and executives will have performance plans in place that link to agency mission, goals and/or outcomes
  
• Percentage availability of critical systems
  
• Information technology expense as a percentage of revenue
  
• Maximize and/or obtain new funding flexibilities
  
• Process cost as a percent of revenue (efficiency)
  
• Revenue actual versus plan and percent error in revenue forecasts (effectiveness)

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