IT projects at VA at risk, says GAO

Information technology management issues that caused the Veterans Affairs Department to spend $127 million on a failed outpatient scheduling application could harm a second attempt to create such a system.

The Government Accountability Office, in a report released June 28, says a "broad range of managerial weaknesses plagued the project from beginning to end" until the program, called the Scheduling Replacement Project, was canceled on Sept. 30, 2009. Now the department is starting over with an effort dubbed HealtheVet Scheduling, but has yet to institute management controls that would make a repeat performance of the failed project less likely, the report warns.

Among the management failures that sped the first effort along to oblivion was lack of an acquisition plan until four years after the VA contracted with the Southwest Research Institute to support the project. Also, the agency put together incomplete and vague requirements, submitted unreliable Earned Value Management reports and decided to conduct tests concurrently rather than incrementally, which resulted in software going through the testing process with unaddressed critical defects.

The VA initiated the Scheduling Replacement Project in 2000 as a commercial-off-the-shelf project, but the chief information officer of the Veterans Health Administration decided in April 2002 to develop a custom coded application. The CIO said that a commercial item solution would be too expensive, and would "make the department dependent on a vendor for a core business function," the GAO report states.

The report notes that the VA is establishing a new process for planning and managing IT projects--known as the Program Management Accountability System--but sounds a note of skepticism over it.

The VA has not demonstrated that PMAS "will be sufficiently robust to prevent or correct weakness" of the type that led to the scheduling program's failure, the report states.

For more:
- download the report, GAO-10-579 (.pdf)

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