Posted on Controlling Scope, Government Stuff

45 IT Projects put on hold at Veterans Administration (VA)


Honey stop the car! Is that PM governance and portfolio decisions based on project performance happening in the …Federal Government?

I’m almost at a loss for words.

The New CIO at the VA, Roger Baker, is now holding IT projects to milestones and stopping projects when they don’t make the milestones.  He claimed he would do it when he started in June.

The Eliott Ness of Project Management?

The Eliott Ness of Project Management?

Holding true to his word he’s put 45 IT projects on hold.  This has implications beyond just the VA, because I believe other Gov OCIOs will follow suit.

My initial thoughts are:

  • I’m glad to see project assessments that lead to definitive and clear actions to get projects back on track.
  • I think this will reverberate in other agencies.
  • The time out will be crucial to see where the project failures are occuring.
  • From initial articles it seems that Decision Making Failures may be a common cause of failure.   From my own observations I also think that this action will also uncover Project Discipline failures within contracting firms.
  • This action will be successful to the extent that the VA can put processes in place to mitigate for these failures.  In other words, stopping and starting is not good enough.  They have to Stop – FIX- Start and of course….measure.
  • Visualization  is the new black.  This tool http://it.usaspending.gov/ helped make the decision.

    • This is starting to look like Vivek Kundra’s vision writ real to take a Wall Street mentality to Projects as in ‘buy, hold, sell’.

    “First, apply the efficiency of the stock market to IT governance. In an environment of shrinking budgets and growing citizen expectations of government, evaluating the performance and promise of IT projects continuously and accurately is critical. With the Wall Street model, we can make fast and sound decisions to “buy,” “hold” or “sell” an IT project — that is, invest more financial resources or change management to improve performance, maintain the current resource level or cancel a failing initiative”

    Read more on the ExecutiveBiz blog

    Looking forward to your comments.

    5 thoughts on “45 IT Projects put on hold at Veterans Administration (VA)”

    1. I would say that it is a good idea depending on the criticality of the projects itself. In order for the govt. to stop wasting money, they should take a hard look and see why the projects are not making the milestones that the team has agreed to. I would also like to point out that there may be valid reasons why milestones are not hiting their target dates… Many times, I have experienced milestone delays due to many other initiatives out of the project teams control that causes bottlenecks. In my world, I work on many system projects which has limited IT resources. So depending on the number of resources, size and complexity of the projects, upper management needs to take a holistic view of the entire project portfolio and see if resources are available to handle the work load without conflict and minimize risk to existing business operations.

      If this is not the case, then management will need to take a hard look to see where things may have been missed during the planning phase. If a hard date was preconcieved without analysis, then it is out of the project teams hands and mgt. will need to revisit the decision that was made on behalf of the overall project.

      Jon

    2. Jon,
      Agreed.
      I’ve been victim to the hard date without proper respect for actual estimates. A lot of times, sponsors don’t want to hear how long its going to take to really get something done.

      There are so many variables that are working against projects within fed gov contracting. For example, the structure of contracts themselves sometime parodoxically prevent the project from fufilling its mission.

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