Bill would increase oversight of federal IT projects

A bipartisan bill introduced last week would require agencies to report to Congress when information technology projects are behind schedule or over budget, and would create a strike force within the Office of Management and Budget to help struggling endeavors.

Comment on this article in The Forum."What we've learned is that some agencies can't keep the expected cost of their investments down or deliver on time as promised," said Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del., one of the bill's sponsors, on the Senate floor on Thursday. "Nor do these agencies, in many cases, have qualified IT experts they can turn to before a project spirals out of control."

The 2008 Information Technology Investment Oversight Enhancement and Waste Prevention Act (S. 3384) would force agencies to think more deeply when establishing cost, schedule and performance baselines for major IT investments. Agencies would be held accountable for their initial projections; if a project varied more than 20 percent from the original baseline estimates according to the standards of earned value management, the chief information officer would be required to notify the head of the agency within two weeks, who would then need to inform the appropriate congressional committee.

"Many agencies today simply rewrite their plans when they run into trouble," Carper said. "They don't tell Congress that anything is wrong and the troubled projects just keep getting funded year in and year out."

If a project varied more than 40 percent from the original baseline, then OMB would have to determine if there were other ways to meet the objectives, or if the agency should pull the plug on the project altogether.

Agencies that needed help managing IT investments would be able to turn to the IT strike force, which would be made up of experienced people from inside and outside government. The teams would be small -- two or three people -- and would include specialists in areas such as earned value management, defining requirements, and managing cost and schedule delays.

Witnesses at the July 31 Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services and International Security hearing where the bill was announced applauded the effort.

"This is a very comprehensive attack at trying to address some long-standing problems," said Norm Brown, executive director of the Center for Program Transformation and a witness at the hearing. "It's been a long time since anyone's tried to deal with this."

Brown said the bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine; Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.; and Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., indicates that lawmakers are taking a more active interest in the execution phase of large IT projects when previously they had focused on planning.

Brown supported the idea of cutting programs that do not meet cost, schedule and performance objectives. He suggested some sort of formal program termination process that agencies could use to end troubled projects without losing face. He added that no agency would be likely to cancel critical programs for cost reasons, but other projects might be worth ending once their cost outpaced their usefulness.

Earned value management is a useful tool for raising the visibility of progress on IT projects, Brown said, but does not provide a complete picture of the status of an investment. He said the government also should collect information on risk management, product integration and defect containment to accurately gauge how well an agency's programs are being run.