Operations, Management, and Information (OMI ) Chief John “Jack” Moakley won a 2006 bronze medal for his work as part of a national team that developed an electronic system for planning and budgeting. The new system, which is now being used throughout National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), is a response to changes Vice Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher, Jr. made when he took the reins of NOAA in 2001.

The admiral brought with him from the military a planning philosophy that was new to NOAA and a comprehensive planning tool called the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution System (PPBES).

Before Lautenbacher took the NOAA helm, the agency was a loose confederation of five semi-independent line offices that each did its own planning and budgeting. The admiral quickly changed the model, calling for “One NOAA,” a unified agency that uses themes or programs as the foundation for planning and budgeting rather than its line organization. In the new NOAA, people in NMFS working, for instance, on fish surveys are in the Ecosystem Observation Program, and they submit their plans and make budget requests to a program manager who also oversees, for instance, National Ocean Service (NOS) operations that focus on the effects of coastal habitat change fish, marine mammals, and protected species.

PPBES is a system for tracking all the plans and budgets and linking them to specific NOAA goals. The switch to PPBES accomplished two things almost immediately, according to Moakley.

“First, PPBES helped people understand what we do,” the OMI chief explained.  “It made it easier for our people to go to the Hill and explain our plans and our budget.”

Secondly, PPBES requires all NOAA financial centers to justify budget requests by tying them to agency-wide goals. “This forces NOAA managers to look at the big picture and to think about how what they are doing fits in with the big picture,” Moakley said.

The new planning system also caused a problem for line offices that had always organized their plans and budget requests around branches or some other administrative unit rather than around NOAA-wide goals. NMFS responded by establishing a national team to develop a planning and reporting system that would coordinate NMFS activities with the PPBES. Under the leadership of John Bortniak, the team spent a year-and-a-half designing a system.

“We began by asking, ‘What type of system would be useful to the Program Managers, and also useful to the local level managers who have to input the information,’” Moakley said.

The new system, the electronic Annual Operating Plan (eAOP), was in place for the 2006 budget year. Today all funds that come into the any lab or regional office in NMFS are entered in the eAOP where they are matched to NOAA programs and to specific activities within the program.

Moakley thanked Peg Donnelly and Ron Schlitz for their help in making sure the eAOP would work in the NEFSC.  

Moakley began his tenure as chief of OMI in 1999 while he was NOAA Corps employee. A former ship captain with a BA in mechanical engineering and a law degree from Howard University, Moakley spent 28 years with NOAA Corps before joining NOAA Fisheries Service in 2004. During that time, he served as the first captain of the R/V Gloria Michelle and as captain of the R/V Albatross IV.

Posted April 16, 2007