High-risk agency IT projects fear the reaper

The Office of Management and Budget will begin identifying agency high-risk IT projects through a series of meetings--to be conducted from August 2 to August 18--during which Federal CIO Vivek Kundra will ask agency CIOs to demonstrate that project risks can be reduced to reasonable levels in order to justify further investment.

"What we've focused on is making sure that government is accountable to the American people in terms of how we spend taxpayer dollars when it comes to information technology projects," said Kundra.

In a July 28 press call, Kundra said the project assessments are in the spirit of a June OMB memo on the subject, which focuses on cutting duplicative or unnecessary programs in the fiscal 2010 and 2011 budgets and eliminating agency low-performing programs.

Projects that are of significant cost or schedule variance from the current baseline, are not meeting performance targets or mission objectives, have experienced frequent re-baselines or lack of essential executive sponsorship/leadership will be required to make drastic changes or discontinued, Kundra said.

"In order to justify future funding of [under-performing] projects, agencies will need to demonstrate that these projects will actually be able to deliver for the American people, making sure that we're setting the appropriate scope, defining clearer deliverables and putting in place strong governance structures with explicit, explicit, executive sponsorship. Projects that do not meet this criteria will not be continued," said Kundra.

Kundra is asking that agency CIOs identify their high-risk IT projects during assessment meetings. Agencies will then be asked to develop improvement plans for these projects and present improvement plans in TechStat sessions. OMB anticipates that 25 to 30 projects will be singled out across the Federal government and the list will be publically released on August 23.

In the memo, OMB said agencies' improvement plans should include:

• Major challenges and causes of variance from the project baseline;
• Summary of risks, mitigation strategies and clear accountability;
• Stronger contractor performance metrics and controls for existing contracts, and revised acquisition strategies for contracts expected to be executed within the next fiscal year that address the issues raised in the improvement plan;
• High-level schedule that articulates critical path items;
• Description of how the project's governance will be more rigorous because of the improvement plan and how they will improve both contract and program management oversight internally to ensure better performance; and
• Specific corrective actions to turn around the project.

OMB said it expects follow-up TechStat sessions to be conducted between September and November, at which time CIOs will brief OMB on the improvement plans, revised schedules and potential changes to budget requests. The sessions will inform fiscal 2012 budget requests and potential fiscal 2011 apportionments.

For more:
- listen to the press call
- view the OMB memo here. (.pdf) 
- read a June memo on federal financial systems management, a related memo on reforming federal IT management and the OMB Director's blog post on the June memos

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