The price of poor program management

Over the years, the Government Accountability Office’s High Risk List has included big IT projects that were ultimately abandoned due to a lack of disciplined, effective management, including:

• The Department of Homeland Security’s $1 billion Secure Border Initiative, a complex system involving many sensor and security technologies and a list of subcontractors. SBI was scrapped because it did not meet cost-effectiveness and viability standards. Along the way, members of the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and other federal officials had voiced mounting concerns about the program’s hefty management challenges and technology misfires.
• The Department of Veterans Affairs’ $609 million Financial and Logistics Integrated Technology Enterprise program. Intended for delivery by 2014, FLITE was terminated in October 2011 due to nagging management challenges. In 2009, a GAO report said the agency was “faced with significant challenges in implementing FLITE’s pilot systems as planned, while simultaneously working to fully establish program management capabilities.”
• The Office of Personnel Management’s Retirement Systems Modernization. The program was cancelled in 2011 after the agency had spent approximately $231 million on its third attempt to automate the processing of federal employees’ retirement claims. GAO said the effort was weak in “key management practices such as project management, risk management, organizational change management, system testing, cost estimating and progress reporting.”