Changing Agency Objectives and Goals Logic

When looking to make changes to the set of agency strategic objectives and performance goals ("objectives",) there continue to be issues in the logic checking the objectives list and also in comparing it to the metric objectives.

For example, when adding to the list of investment objectives where existing objectives are already in place, errors are generated if, in the same file, metrics are being re-assigned to the new objectives. This necessitates providing a second file with the metrics.

Additionally, in cases where the existing agency objective record is being changed from value 1 to value 2 and a new record is being created with value 1, an error is generated, apparently because the system adds the new record and determines there are now two records with value 1, before processing the update. There is no simple workaround for this (particularly where metrics are using these values.) We need to change the record IDs in our system to accomodate.

Another case that appears to have no workaround is where an investment has an objective with value 3 and a metric assigned to that objective. The investment determines that it wants to change value 3 to value 4, both for the investment and the metric. There appears to be no way to do this. Instead, a new record needs to be added for the investment and the metric assigned to it. Then, in a second file, the old record is deleted.

The general theme is that it appears that the logic for checking metrics could be improved. In particular, I would expect the system to process all investment objective adds and updates before providing an error that there is a duplicate record. Once that is complete, I would expect the system to process all metric adds and updates and determine if any metric objectives are invalid.

I know that it was discussed last year and not changed due to time constraints, but an option that may again be worth considering is moving to a simple list for the agency objectives and goals, similar to the Paperwork Reduction Act control numbers list. This would avoid the problem of managing record numbers, adds, and updates for a list that contains one element. As the majority of the issues we encounter with changing goals and objectives occur during the annual submission window, we could manage to continue working around the existing issues without a fix if something like this was planned for the BY20 submission.