A multi-criteria decision analysis approach for prioritization of performance metrics

The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993 requires federal agencies to establish objective, quantifiable goals describing the outcomes of agency programs. The purposes of the Act are fairly straightforward: to improve confidence, performance, accountability, feedback, decision making and management in federal agencies. However, implementation of the Act in different agencies has been complicated by several factors including a lack of expertise in strategic planning, difficulty reconciling multiple missions or divergent perspectives, a lack of structured approaches to engaging relevant stakeholder groups, and the presence of multiple confounding factors that obscure the relationship between agency efforts and outcomes. Currently, there is no reliable, structured approach to establishing GPRA metrics that can be transferred from one agency to the next. Successful case studies have largely resulted from ad hoc efforts within agencies with different degrees of expertise related to performance measurement, public or stakeholder participation, and decision support. Consequently, the requirements of the Act remain a source of concern to many federal agency managers. This paper hypothesizes that many of the challenges posed by the Act are characteristic of the types of problems that multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is appropriate for and proposes an MCDA framework for establishing a suite of GPRA metrics for gauging the effectiveness of oil spill response efforts. The key advantage of this framework is the visualization and quantification of the uncertainties involved in planning or decision-making processes and the potential to model multiple stakeholder responses. Moreover, we expect all MCDA approach to be generalizable to multiple agencies engaged in environmental protection missions and/or crisis response.