Designate Chief Operating Officers

2. Direct department and agency heads to designate chief operating
officers. (2)

To apply the principles of strategic and quality management and to lead
the way to the President's vision of 21st century government, the
President should direct department and agency heads to designate chief
operating officers (COO) for their organizations.(17) The chief
operating officer would be second-in-command to the agency head or chief
executive officer (CEO) and would report directly to the agency CEO. It
would be an additional responsibility for an existing position. This
would be either the deputy secretary or undersecretary with agencywide
management authority. The COO would have explicit line authority and
accountability for managing executive branch agencies. The
responsibility would not be assigned to someone in a staff role, such as
the chief-of-staff or assistant secretary for administrative management.
The COO would be responsible for:

Implementing the President's and agency head's goals and the agency's
mission;

Providing overall organization management to improve agency performance;

Assisting the agency head in promoting ongoing quality improvement,
strategic plans, and measuring results;

Overseeing agency-specific application of performance measures,
procurement reforms, personnel reductions, financial management
improvements, telecommunications and information technology policies,
and other governmentwide systems reforms adopted as a result of the NPR
recommendations;

Directing ongoing reengineering of the agency's administrative
processes; and

Reforming the agency's management practices by incorporating NPR
principles into day-to-day management.

Some agencies might find other approaches more appropriate for
designating a Chief Operating Officer:

An executive team as COO. COO responsibilities can be assigned to an
executive team reporting to the CEO. "An executive team is a group of
people who collectively take on the role of providing strategic,
operational, and institutional leadership for the organization."(18)
Members of the executive team are responsible for management of their
own units and for the organization as a whole. In this case the deputy
secretary or deputy agency head could serve as the executive team's
chairperson.

Two executives can share the COO role. A military officer and civilian
executive effectively exercised COO responsibilities (though without the
title) in the Naval Material Command, because of the civilian and
military composition of the workforce.(19) A shared COO responsibility
between a political appointee and a career executive might mitigate
agency anxieties that career executives should supervise political
appointees.

The agency head as CEO and COO. In small agencies, the CEO could also
act as the agency's COO.