Federal Manager's Daily Report

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A new report sites lessons that can be gleaned from the way internal agency support functions – such as IT, HR, procurement, financial management and others – have responded to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Without the support of those offices agencies “could not have met” the special challenges the pandemic has posed, such as the demands of new programs, the spike in telework that required a quick expansion of IT capacity and security protections, and hiring surges at agencies including the VA and the SBA, says a report from the Partnership for Public Service.

“The mission-support offices that most successfully met these challenges built on previous efforts to develop a customer-focused mindset, design customer-focused services and incorporate customer feedback,” it found.

It said that leaders of such functions should: test their assumptions about what their internal agency customers want; use multiple research techniques to understand the experience their customers have with them; identify how experiences differ among different customer segments; and use those insights to create tools such as customer journey maps that “can highlight specific examples of the pain points customers face and help staff generate solutions.”

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