Openness vs. Project Management
Posted by Arjun ThomasAs reported on Nextgov.com
Two discussions of note occurred on Thursday during the Senate Budget Committee hearing where Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundraand other technology executives appeared.
First, Kundra said public, up-to-date information on federal IT projects would act as a strong force to keep information technology projects on schedule and on budget. He argued that in the past (in the Bush administration) the rationale behind the Office of Management and Budget making public information on projects on the so-called watch list didn’t make sense. No one knew what the problems were and, theoretically, they were allowed to fester in the darkness.
Karen Evans, Kundra’s predecessor, argued in 2008 that they didn’t make public the details of the troubled projects because federal managers would clam up about their problems if they knew OMB would publicize them. From a Nextgov article:
Evans, administrator of the office of e-government at OMB, said the watchdog agency chose not to release detailed information on high-risk projects because singling out agencies for problems tends to discourage them from providing accurate, in-depth data on their projects. Evans said OMB was more interested in helping agencies improve the management of the projects than chastising them.
“How much shame and embarrassment do you bring to an agency? We’re supposed to be helping them,” she said, adding that OMB was an agency designed to help the executive branch accomplish its mission, not operate as an auditor.
At the time, periodic Tech Insider blogger Robert Charette found the statement discouraging. He wrote, “OMB admits that government agencies will resort to what amounts to lying about the status of their troubled IT projects if the public spotlight is turned on.”
Two points: 1) Will federal managers begin to hold back details in their reports if they know they will be made public? And 2) exactly how will public scrutiny put pressure on federal managers to begin to manage better?
Mark Forman, who was Evans’ predecessor in the Bush administration and now with KPMG in Washington, always argued problems with IT projects could be traced back to a dearth of program and project management skills in the federal management ranks. Simple, managers just didn’t have the proper training to do the job. Not sure how openness will fix that problem.
Read the entire story here..
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