Rising Star: Jessica Wong
Jessica Wong manages the Office of Personnel Management's USA Performance software, a web-based tool that helps agencies automate appraisals for Senior Executive Service and non-SES employees. The program seeks to give agencies a common software package to customize and ultimately automate performance management. More than 60 agencies have adopted the software to date.
As the product leader, Wong is responsible for the long-term vision and everyday particulars of USA Performance. Her colleagues say she has moved the software out of the transactional realm by maintaining a cadence of updates that steadily add functionality to the program while ensuring that the software adheres to all legal and regulatory requirements.
USA Performance is meant to be an umbrella-style product that can be tailored to the needs of different agencies, which take various approaches to performance management based on their employee populations and missions. Wong's team of business analysts, developers and testers must account for that wide range of approaches while also designing the web-based tool to support and encourage best practices.
Wong meets with customers on a regular basis to discuss any issues with the software and leads formal requirements-gathering sessions to gain a better understanding of how agencies conduct performance management. Her work has been essential to moving agencies away from inefficient paper-based performance management processes and toward an interoperable, governmentwide, web-based approach.