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FEDERAL SECTOR REPORT
October 2004
IN THIS ISSUE
Plan Ahead for IT Investment Success
Consulting Services
Home Page
(c) 2004 by the
P2C2
Group, Inc.
PLAN AHEAD
Don't relax in
October. If you are involved in the Capital Planning and Investment
Control (CPIC) process prescribed by OMB's Circular A-11, it's time to
plan how to be successful with your future federal budgets for
information technology (IT).
Sure, we all feel like relaxing after the September
deadlines for submitting proposed Exhibit 53s and Exhibit 300s to the
Office of Management and Budget (OMB). But there's no time to waste:
What you do next will affect your financial health, and a good first
step is to develop three "to do" lists:
- Defensive Actions, to avoid short-term problems and rude
crises
- Tactical Actions, to prepare for next year's federal
budget cycle 2007
- Strategic Actions, to align long-term capital investment
plans with your future vision for business, information, and technology
architecture.
Once
you have your lists, do a reality check with your management team and
stakeholders: Omissions? Right priorities? Resources for executing the
actions? Of course an even better idea is to call in a top-notch
consulting firm to facilitate the process and nail down follow-through.
Following are thought starters for your action lists, but
adapt, add, change, and modify to fit your situation:
Identify what you have promised to agency heads and OMB.
You may have made promises concerning short-term actions in Plan of
Action & Milestone (POA&M) tables, Exhibit 300s, EVMS
milestones, and PART reviews that include due dates during September -
December 2004. Make sure these happen on schedule, or you may have a
very unhappy Thanksgiving as you engage in the budget pass-back process.
Weaknesses in September's Exhibit 300s and 53s.
You may have serious weaknesses in your capital investment and IT
budget documents that could put you on OMB's "watch list." Weak
compliance with security requirements is a leading cause, but there are
other hot spots including performance-based contracting (acquisition
strategy) and Earned Value Management System (EVMS). Take immediate
action to strengthen any weaknesses, and you can spare yourself the
burden of taking the heat for watch-list projects.
Performance schedules for first quarter of the new
fiscal year. The performance of major federal IT investments are
subject to increased scrutiny. Make sure your IT projects start off the
new fiscal year on schedule and in budget. Accountability for
performance involves both the Agency and the contractor(s).
GAO and IG reports. Did oversight agencies spot
problems with your IT projects or investment management? If so, be
pro-active about resolving these issues.
CPIC schedule for investments. Sound CPIC planning
and management is a year-long process, as I've written repeatedly.
October is the time for all Agency IT projects to define a year-long
CPIC schedule:
- Initiate strategic planning and improve alignment with
the Enterprise Architecture
- Improve alignment of performance goals with output and
results measures
- Replace out-of-date alternatives analyses, and do market
research for a real-world cost benefits analysis
- Update or replace aging risk management or information
security plans
- Update the E-Gov plan
- Fine-tune EVMS
- Conduct operational analysis reviews for Steady State
investments
- Identify which contracts are due for initiation or
re-competition during the fiscal year, and make sure these are aligned
with performance-based contracting and EVMS
- Plan the full CPIC and SDLC drill for new investments.
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October is the beginning of your federal
fiscal year, and it's time to plan for IT success with:
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Defensive Actions
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Tactical Actions
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Strategic Actions
Don't wait for appropriations. The clock
is ticking now.
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Investment selection process for current and next
fiscal year. It's time to advance your Pre-Select CPIC
process--identifying business needs, considering non-technology as well
as IT solutions, conducting market research, and prioritizing
potential investments.
Performance measurement. An alarming number of
IT investments cannot quantify what they actually accomplish. Set up
metrics, and go way beyond IT process indicators. Simply stating 99.9%
uptime is not sufficient these days. Congress wants to know whether
that system was effective in supporting the agency mission that
improved citizen health, made air transportation more secure, or helped
students get loans for education.
Partnerships. OMB gives funding priority to
investments that use partnerships to cut costs or improve services to
citizens. However, truly effective partnerships require months or years
of planning. If you want a dynamite partnership for an investment that
will go to OMB next summer, you had better get to work now.
Competitive Sourcing. Much of the government's
business architecture is still rooted in the 20th century
and pre-date e-Gov and today's potential for efficiency. Either
conducting a formal A-76 study or completing an informal review has the
potential of achieving very large cost savings, which can pay for IT
modernization and e-Gov. The benefit of the A-76 paradigm is that it
forces agencies to update their business process--to define a Most
Efficient Organization (MEO). This alone can produce dramatic
breakthroughs, even if the resulting solution is not outsourced but
kept in-house within the government. Again, conducting competitive
sourcing reviews takes time, and you need to start work at the
beginning of the fiscal year.
Annual Enterprise-Level Plan for CPIC. Major IT
investments usually bubble up on a project-by-project basis, but
agencies need an enterprise-wide budget strategy for next summer's
budget cycle. Certain tools like Balanced Scorecard methodology,
ProSight,
and Expert Choice can
help, but the process takes time, fact finding, focus, and buy-in.
Re-imaging the role of IT in the enterprise.
You need a strategic plan that provides a detailed vision of the target
business, information, and technology architecture. What you need is
not the usual blah-blah document iterating platitudes, but a hard-core
roadmap that will redefine how government performs its mission and
serves its customers. It needs to be specific enough to guide a
long-term capital investment plan. It needs to lay out a framework for
redefining the organizational structure and processes that IT will
support. It needs to have long-term budget goals.
Linkage to enterprise strategic plans, performance
objectives. It is simply a portfolio of resource vehicles that
should drive the organization toward its goals and measurable
objectives. October is the time to begin laying out how IT spending is
tied to strategic plans and performance objectives.
Doing more with fewer dollars. It doesn't
take a rocket scientist to figure out that Congress will eventually be
forced to deal with the budget deficit and trim overall government
spending. Some programs will be budget winners and losers in the
process, but all programs will be held accountable to squeeze greater
results and more cost efficiency out of every dollar. October is a good
time to begin figuring out how you can measurably boost your
performance. To paraphrase, to those who have (investment results) will
be added; to them who do not will be taken away.
There you have it. October is the time to get started.
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Much of your budget success with IT depends on
planning now. Market research, public-private partnerships, and
competitive sourcing studies require months of preparation.
Send your resume for confidential review.
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The P2C2 Group is an independent consulting practice that
serves the Federal Sector in the areas of:
- Strategy
- Capital investments and budgets
- Acquisition
- Evaluation
- CIO program support
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HOME PAGE
Whew! It's been a wonderfully busy year, and a number of
successful projects have come to a successful conclusion. One of the
more satisfying aspects has been work for a broad cross-section of
federal agencies and programs, enabling the P2C2 Group to study
alternative methods for managing government programs and information
technology.
Best wishes,
Jim Kendrick
Technology
Management Consultant
4101 Denfeld
Avenue
Kensington, MD
20895
301-942-7985
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Keep in touch. Drop us a note with
comments about the newsletter and updates about what's going on in your
work in the Federal Sector.
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