It's Time to Fund Your Real Property Programs

Have you done what's required to ensure funding for the achievements you promised in your real property asset management plan and your three-year rolling timelines?

The Federal FY 2008 budget will be presented in 2007. At this point, it is appropriate to ask whether the issue of real property asset management is getting funding support and visibility. If not, the three-year rolling timelines proposed by affected agencies will be at risk.

Until FY 2005, only preliminary work was accomplished in compliance with EO 13327 and the President's Management Agenda (PMA) - that is, development of an Asset Management Plan (AMP). In FY 2006, Departments and agencies began development of three-year rolling timelines for achievements related to compliance. Budget, however, was a continuing problem. No organization had done (or had the opportunity to do) the budgetary work to identify and defend funding required to act on its AMP.

The three-year rolling timeline is not about tasks and duties. Rather, it's about results, and the measurement of these results on an ongoing basis.

Getting to "Green" in Current Status with the PMA means proving that the AMP is being used in day-to-day decisions. The way to demonstrate the use of the AMP is in implementation of each agency's three-year rolling timeline.

There's a strong case to be made that real property can be connected to other aspects of the President's Management Agenda.

For example, VISTA can connect its expertise in real property to human capital requirements, budget and performance integration, and eGovernment. Better real property is the rising tide that lifts all boats: If you do well on real property asset management, your performance in almost every other PMA initiative (with the exception of faith-based initiatives) goes up accordingly.

The converse of that is not true: If you do better in human capital management, for example, that does not guarantee that you will do better in real property management.

In short, better performance in real property has a carry-over effect to other PMA initiatives. By viewing real property compliance as a stand-alone initiative, agencies are potentially doing a disservice to their organization's performance overall.

For Federal financial and operations executives in particular, this inter-relationship among real property and other PMA initiatives is a simple but important thing to keep in mind.

• If compliance with PMA initiatives overall is improved by a thorough understanding and management of real property, and
• If financial and operations executives are evaluated on the basis of their compliance with PMA initiatives overall, then
• It is in the best interest of virtually all Federal executives to understand real property thoroughly and manage it aggressively.

Don't wait until it's too late to fund your real property asset management initiatives. You may find that the solutions created as a result will help your agency create meaningful outcomes, establish substantial performance metrics and track results - for better program, budgetary and stewardship decisions.


David Baxa
President and CEO
VISTA