Chief Operating Officer Job Description

A Chief Operating Officer in the public sector runs the internal machinery of a government: the departments, budgets, contracts, staff and systems that turn an elected official's or a board's agenda into services residents actually receive. The agency head, mayor or county manager sets direction and answers to voters or commissioners. The COO makes sure the garbage trucks roll, the permit queue moves, the payroll clears and the capital projects stay on schedule. The Bureau of Labor Statistics groups the title with chief executives and describes COOs as executives who manage a specific part of the organization; in government that part is daily operations across many departments at once.

Federal law spells out the job in plain terms. Under 31 U.S.C. 1123, at each agency the deputy head of agency, or equivalent, is the Chief Operating Officer and is responsible for improving the management and performance of the agency. The statute asks the COO to provide overall organization management through strategic and performance planning, measurement and regular assessment of progress, to advise the agency head on planning and reporting requirements, to oversee efforts to improve management functions, and to coordinate with the chief financial officer, chief human capital officer, chief acquisition officer, chief information officer and other line of business chiefs. Performance.gov describes the rhythm that follows: agency leaders select approximately four to five priority goals every two years and review performance on a quarterly basis, and once a year they conduct a strategic review of progress on the mission.

City and county versions of the post are written by each government. Chattanooga's classification specification has its COO taking direction from the mayor and supervising the fire chief, the city finance officer, the chief HR officer, the city attorney, a deputy COO and the administrators of several departments, including public works. In Bernalillo County, New Mexico, the COO sits on the County Manager's executive staff, acts as a liaison to deputy county managers and department directors, and represents the County Manager in meetings with commissioners and elected officials.

A working week mixes the routine with the urgent. Monday might be a budget-to-actual review with the finance director, flagging departments that are spending ahead of their appropriation. Tuesday brings a procurement decision on a fleet maintenance contract and a call with the union president about overtime rules. Midweek the COO chairs the capital projects meeting, pushes a stalled software rollout in the clerk's office, and drafts the operations section of a council briefing. Then a water main breaks or a server goes down, and the COO is the one coordinating public works, communications and the emergency manager until service is back. Through all of it the COO keeps a dashboard of service measures, because the council and the public will ask whether things are getting better, and the answer has to come with numbers.

Published class specifications give the clearest picture of the minimum bar. Bernalillo County asks for a bachelor's degree in public administration, business administration or a related field, ten years of work experience in general management or project management, and four years in a managerial position, while allowing an equivalent combination of education and experience. Chattanooga sets a similar floor: a bachelor's degree in public administration, business administration, finance or a related field and ten years of progressively responsible experience in public sector operations and management.

Those are minimums. As a rough guide, people who land the job have already run something large inside government: a public works or utilities department, a budget office, a deputy city or county manager portfolio, a state division, or a federal component. As guidance, a graduate degree such as a Master of Public Administration, an MBA or a law degree can round out that record, though it does not substitute for having run an operation.

What the job tests

• Public budgeting: reading an adopted budget, tracking spending against appropriations, preparing midyear amendments and explaining variances to a finance committee.
• Procurement law and contract management: competitive bidding thresholds, sole-source justifications, change orders and vendor performance reviews.
• Labor relations: collective bargaining agreements, grievance procedures, civil service rules and the discipline process for represented employees.
• Performance management: choosing a small set of service measures, publishing them, and running regular reviews with department heads.
• Technology governance: approving system replacements, managing cybersecurity risk, and setting rules for how staff use AI tools.
• Open government: public records and open meetings laws, which shape how decisions get documented and discussed.

Credentials worth knowing

No license is required to serve as a COO. Several credentials signal readiness. The International City/County Management Association (ICMA) awards the ICMA Credentialed Manager (ICMA-CM) designation to professional local government managers through a peer review process that weighs education, experience and ongoing professional development. The Certified Public Manager (CPM) designation is awarded to public sector middle managers who complete a program, run by a public agency or university, that is accredited by the National Certified Public Manager Consortium. Finance-heavy COOs may hold the Certified Government Financial Manager (CGFM), a certification awarded by AGA.

How candidates stand out

Bring evidence of results achieved under public rules: a backlog cleared without new headcount, a contract rebid that fixed a failing service, a labor agreement settled without a strike. Be ready to explain each one plainly to a council and to reporters, since the COO speaks for operations in both settings.

BLS does not report government COOs separately, so the closest projection is for top executives as a group. The Occupational Outlook Handbook projects overall employment of top executives to grow 5 percent from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all occupations, with about 304,100 openings for top executives each year on average over the decade. BLS expects many of those openings to come from the need to replace workers who transfer to different occupations or exit the labor force.

In government, openings for an operations chief follow leadership turnover. A new mayor, county executive or cabinet secretary may bring in a new COO, and a charter change can create or retitle the post. That makes timing unpredictable and puts a premium on a reputation that travels between jurisdictions.

The federal side changed in 2025. GAO's June 2026 update on workforce changes reports that executive orders in 2025 aimed to reduce the federal workforce and restrict hiring in many areas, and that the number of federal employees declined across all major agencies in 2025. Nearly 378,000 employees separated during the period GAO reviewed and about 127,000 were hired. For a deputy secretary serving as an agency's COO, that smaller workforce is the one the agency's performance goals now rest on, and staffing plans, contract support and process redesign are the tools at hand.

Technology is the other big shift. GAO found that the total number of AI use cases federal agencies reported nearly doubled, from 571 in 2023 to 1,110 in 2024, while generative AI use cases rose about nine-fold, from 32 to 282. Each new use case is something an operations executive has to approve, fund, staff and monitor, and agencies that deploy generative AI report challenges such as complying with federal policies. City and county COOs who oversee a technology department face the same approval questions for local pilots and the contracts behind them.

The skills that hold up across these shifts are durable ones: reading a budget closely, running a performance review that changes decisions, negotiating with unions and vendors, and explaining tradeoffs to elected officials in plain language. Experience doing that in more than one setting, say a city and a state agency, or a utility and a county, gives a candidate a record that applies in either place.

For people already in the pipeline, the practical steps are concrete. Take a deputy role that includes budget authority. Run at least one cross-department project end to end. Learn the procurement and personnel rules well enough to move quickly inside them. Build relationships with finance, legal and IT directors before a crisis requires them. And keep a written record of measurable results, because the next appointing official will ask for it.

Dear Members of the Search Committee,

I am applying for the position of Chief Operating Officer for the City of Riverbend. For the past six years I have served as Deputy County Manager for Operations in Harlan County, where I oversee public works, fleet, facilities, information technology and the county's 311 center, and report directly to the County Manager.

When I took the role, our 311 center was answering roughly half its calls within the target time and residents had stopped trusting it. I did not start with new software. I started by sitting in the call center for two weeks, then rewrote the routing rules with the supervisors, moved two vacant positions from a back-office unit into the queue, and published our answer times every Monday. Within a year the center was meeting its target most weeks, and the commissioners now quote those reports in their own newsletters.

I have also learned how much of this job happens in the budget office and at the bargaining table. I rebuilt our fleet replacement schedule with the finance director so that the county stopped paying for emergency repairs on trucks past their useful life, and I sat at the table for two contract cycles with our largest employee union. Both experiences taught me that operational fixes stick only when finance, labor and department heads agree on the numbers.

Riverbend's interest in consolidating permitting across three departments is the kind of project I would want to lead. I have done a smaller version of it in Harlan County and would bring both the lessons and the mistakes to the work.

Thank you for considering my application. I would welcome the chance to talk with the committee about how I would approach the first ninety days.

Sincerely,

Jordan Ellis