The government needs to develop proficient executives to head major IT projects, because a broad view of management is needed to when buying a complex IT system, experts said in a report released today.

“Every major acquisition should start with the full-time assignment of a single, knowledgeable and authoritative program manager who sees the project through to completion,” TechAmerica’s Commission on Government Technology Opportunities in the 21st Century writes in a report issued Oct. 25.

In the report the commission suggested ways the Obama administration can fix IT acquisition and management problems. The commission talked with 105 senior IT and acquisition executives and managers in government and the federal and commercial industries.

The commission said the pool of qualified managers is too small, and many managers today don’t have a broad view of the program and what else it affects. Managers often know either a lot about the technology or the mission the new technology supports.

“In actual practice, program managers come from one domain or the other and typically have very limited knowledge of the other side of the effort,” the commission wrote.

To build an ideal manager to lead a major IT project to success, federal officials should make program management a formal career track and establish a training academy, the report states.

Also, each major acquisition needs to have an outsider looking in, and an official should be conducting independent reviews to lessen the procurement’s risk. Otherwise, projects hit delays in their schedule and costs swell beyond expectations. The commission recommends making the reviewer a third party to the project, not affiliated with the agency or the prime contractor, the report said.

Better communication between stakeholders also is key. Among the IT leaders with experience in government, more than three-fourths of them cited better engagement, collaboration and communication between government and industry as an important part of an IT project’s success, more than any other topic.

The commission said the opposite is happening in today’s federal marketplace. Contractors and federal acquisition and management officials are being pushed farther away from each other for fear of conflicts of interest.

“The communication could give rise to perceived conflicts of interest or claims of unfair competitive advantages that may subject the participants to a bid protest,” the report states.

The commission said managing IT acquisitions and programs is one of the most serious management challenges facing federal officials, adding that, during the past 10 years, the government has invested more than $600 billion in IT systems. However, some major projects have had such problems with cost, schedule or performance that they have been canceled without being deployed.

— by Matthew Weigelt – Oct. 25, 2010 – Federal Computer Week

Remember your high-school algebra teacher’s advice? Break down the problem into smaller parts. And when you tried it, the algebra changed from a complex web of Xs and Ys into several simpler problems.

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra and his boss, Chief Performance Officer Jeffery Zients, are giving the same kind of advice to agency leaders. They want agencies to stop building complex, multiyear, multibillion-dollar overhauls of major IT systems and infrastructure. Instead, they say, agencies should start taking much smaller bites.

“For too long, we have witnessed runaway projects that waste billions of dollars and are years behind schedule,” Kundra told the CIO Council in September. “By the time these projects launch — if they launch at all — they are obsolete.” He recounted the government’s history of failed IT projects, which stretches back to 1968.

When a problem has been around for decades, it means a change in thinking will be tough. Kundra maintains that agencies are stuck in think-big mode. Officials often set course on a far-reaching project rather than accomplishing essential needs. In too many instances, agencies are left with substantial cost overruns, lengthy delays in planned deployments and poor functionality in the fast-moving IT world, he said.

He’s arguing for an upheaval of the classic procurement thinking, especially in the technology world.

For example, the way the Defense Department buys its land vehicles and fighter airplanes does not fit with IT projects. In instances such as the Hummer or F-35, DOD officials set out all the specific requirements from the start. The department wouldn’t want to add requirements after production began because it would cost a lot of money to interrupt the production line.

But that approach doesn’t work as well for DOD’s IT acquisition projects. About one-third of the department’s IT projects get canceled before completion, according to reports. “You buy the same old-fashioned way, you get the same old-fashioned results,” said Jeremy Grant, chief development officer at ASI Government, formerly Acquisition Solutions.

These days, the government buys so much IT and services that agencies must buy differently. IT changes so fast that it requires a fast procurement process to keep in step. By scaling back programs, agencies will realize savings and perhaps more successes, Kundra said.

Apple’s iPhone is a good example. Apple outlined an application programming interface for the phone, even without fully testing all aspects. The developers changed various aspects in subsequent versions of the API. With each version, software makers built their ideas on the platform.

Talking About a Revolution

To be sure, smaller procurements might not save the procurement world from buying problems. There’s an underlying procurement problem even when officials buy with small bites in mind, experts say. Put another way, they’ve also got to be able to do the simple math.

The acquisition workforce is overwhelmed, said Larry Allen, president of the Coalition for Government Procurement. “The approach sounds really good on acquisition letterhead, but in reality, it has a lot of issues,” he added.

Whether big or small, the procurement process takes time. Mega contracts can force contracting officers, program managers and others to take months or even a year to develop requirements so the project goes smoothly. But smaller procurements also take time, Allen said.

Contracting officers will have more contracts to award. Program managers will have more to manage. Then the contracting officer’s technical representative, who oversees the progress of an awarded contract, will have more to watch. Many small procurements will add to the pressure on COTRs, for whom the COTR role is often only part of their duties.

Agencies also face more transitions between contractors as the project advances. There’s the ever-present risk of bid protests with each contract award. If a new contractor comes aboard, the changeover will delay the project because the new awardee can’t begin work the next day. As the old and new contractors switch places, there’s the potential for failures in continuity. Agencies will need to get companies to talk to each other in a transition, or problems are inevitable.

“It becomes like a game of telephone,” Allen said. “Some things will get lost in translation.”

Allen warned that a company might not put everything it has into a project if there is a potential for it to lose its place in future parts of the project. A contractor might keep back some of its ideas because it might later have to hand over trade secrets or strategies to a competitor.

Those are the kinds of algebra problems that defy easy solutions and short cuts. Perhaps that’s why Kundra is also trying to raise the stakes for agency leaders by putting his message into a much larger context of change.

“We are in the midst of the Information Revolution,” Kundra told the CIO Council, so the government must change as well, he said, “creating a culture of accountability with a focus on execution.”

— by Matthew Weigelt – Oct. 21, 2010 – Federal Computer Week.