Ensuring Tech Initiatives Deliver on Their Promise
07/18/2008
Mr. Fruman is Director of GTA's Enterprise Program Management Office.
Government business today requires agencies to leverage their budget dollars to the fullest. One typical approach to leverage budget and resources is through information technology (IT), but the promise of automation is coupled with great risk.
Based on the CHAOS 2007 report, published by the Standish Group, only 35% of projects meet their objectives, and 19% are failures that are shut down due to schedule delays or cost overruns. Unfortunately, by industry, government has the worst record, where 81% of projects do not deliver on their schedule, budget and functionality or fail outright.
While any organization would see these as sobering numbers, the good news is that failures are 40 percent less likely and project successes (all objectives met on time and within budget) are more than twice as likely to occur today versus 10 years ago. The primary reason for these improvements is in the use of disciplined project management practices and maturity.
GTA’s Enterprise Program Management Office (EPMO) is responsible for ensuring that critical enterprise technology initiatives deliver on their promises and objectives. Agencies have continued with technology initiatives that support their core businesses. Many of these initiatives will bring significant changes to
- Project Assurance provides guidance and counsel on the planning and execution of large, complex technology initiatives.
- Portfolio Management provides the enterprise and agencies with the means to identify, evaluate and prioritize technology initiatives to ensure the state gains the greatest value on the dollars invested.
- Knowledge Management provides the means to continually learn from our practices and experiences, recognizing that our capabilities need to evolve and improve.
Each of these areas functions differently but requires a coordinated effort between GTA and our agency partners. Project Assurance comes into play with our Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) engagements, which provide oversight for projects valued at $1 million or greater. We currently have more than 14 active IV&V engagements; six started in the last four months.
IV&V interlocks with the Enterprise Critical Project Review (ECPR) panel, which is a monthly review of eight to 10 of the most critical projects in the state of Georgia This review involves all the key parties on an agency’s project management team. These reviews, which take place at the highest levels in the agency and the state, ensure that business objectives and results are being delivered and that attention and focus are provided when needed. The panel review is just one part of portfolio management, which currently monitors over $300 million of project initiatives. Another essential part of portfolio management is the identification and tracking of IT initiatives through their life-cycle, which currently begins with the submittal of the Electronic Agency Project Request (eAPR).
Knowledge Management uses the outcomes of these two processes to develop new and better approaches to delivering technology projects and initiatives. These improvements become incorporated into policies, standards, guidelines, methodologies and practices. Many practices are shared through our training and classes. In 2008, Knowledge Management provided 15 project management training classes with more than 450 participants and an overall satisfaction rating of 98%. We have also published a new Project Management Glossary, revised the soon-to-be-published Technology Review Policy and Project Management Standard, and created a new Portfolio Management Policy and Standard and a new IV&V Standard. In fact, we have more than 20 new standards in the works to be published in 2008. We also formed a PMO forum where state PMO managers and directors can come together to share best practices.
During the first part of this year, we have experienced tremendous success in each of these areas. The second half of the year will bring a new level of maturity to the project management practices, with additional focus on the IT project management maturity framework. We will be introducing a project management maturity assessment tool, new standards and approaches for program management, a new approach for the delivery of project management training and a more comprehensive view of our portfolio of projects. In fact, the framework will drive our goal of improving enterprise effectiveness in project delivery by 10% by 2010, which roughly translates into about $40 million in increased value to the state.
All of these achievements are exciting. At the same time, they represent the hard work invested and the hard work ahead for the EPMO team and the state project management teams.