Sample PM day to day work
Project Management skill is very important in information management area. Let me paint a historical (early 2000) projet lead role where I was responsible for managing the E-governance project for the state of Maharashtra, India. Let me frankly state that, we had no defined project management process in place that adheres to PMBOK guidelines. The project processes and phases were more attached to the product development process itself. My schedule of work for a typical small sized project can be broken down as follows -
Project initiation and planning: This doesn’t happen every time. Depends on the availability of projects. On an average, the company used to get 1 medium sized project a year and 2-3 small sized projects (system enhancements, system integration etc) every year. Project initiation phase involves very informal meeting between the State IT director and other officials of respective state departments to discuss about the need to create a project to solve a problem. For eg: one such project was Online attendance management system, where, goal was to integrate swipe card data into intranet wide website to display attendance information of over 7000 employees. Project initiation involved preparation of government tender calling for competency in building such a system. Since our company had already built sufficient confidence among the project sponsors, the project selection process identified our company as the supplier. I used to spent at least 4-5 hours of meetings per day (for 3 weeks) with the department heads and the other vendor who was dealing with swipe card system. I prepared the initial project proposal that contained the project scope, WBS, resource estimates, cost estimates, and initial project plan. Later, project contract was signed on acceptance of base cost estimates and resource/time schedules.
Execution: During execution phase, my role was to develop detailed system specifications such as BRD, SRS and testing plans. Once that was done, it was handed over to the team of designers and developers who will then build and test the system. During this phase, I used to spent 2-3 hours (for 1 month and half) a day on generating specs and allocating work.
Controlling and monitoring: It was my responsibility to see that the requirements are completely satisfied by the specs and that the team develops an integrated system that would meet the goal of making the attendance information transparent across the state departments’ intranet. I used to conduct weekly heads up meeting on Wednesdays to know project progress and address any team building issues. The client wanted quick turn around time and we were using prototype based development. Since our team was working directly from client’s side (State IT dept.), the whole process of user interaction and system testing was user driven, means – the user was very demanding. My rest of the day’s hours – about 4-5 hours (for 2 months) was spent on this process. This process was going on throughout the product life cycle . i.e from project initiation to project closure. The only project documents that were generated during this phase was the daily and weekly project status reports, which I need to send to company headquarters.
Project Closure: Project closure involves final user acceptance testing and user sign off on each particular feature as defined on the BRD. There is a period of 2 weeks of successful production run, after which the project sign off document is signed. My involvement during this phase was 1-2 hours per day (final 3 weeks).
A rough estimate, thus for the 2 month project phase (for the above mentioned small sized project), can be roughly broken down as -
Project Initiation and planning : 75 hrs
Execution : 105 hrs
Controlling and Monitoring : 225 hrs
Project closure : 30 hrs
Categories: Business and Management, E-Governance, Information Management Tags:
Definition of E-Governance
The e-Government Act defines “electronic Government’ as “the use by the Government of web-based Internet applications and other information technologies, combined with processes that implement these technologies, to—‘‘(A) enhance the access to and delivery of Government information and services to the public, other agencies, and other Government entities; or ‘‘(B) bring about improvements in Government operations that may include effectiveness, efficiency, service quality, or transformation.”
In this article, we are trying to reflect on this definition of E-Governance, its effectiveness and whether it defines the real E-governance.
I am more or less in agreement to the definition provided by the E-Governance Act, in the light of the fact that there is always social shaping of technology and that a more to-the-point definition that focus on definite transformation, is not evident. I was looking at the second part of the definition and it says ‘may’ bring about transformation – are we not sure? – this ambiguity clearly reflects what Homburg explains in his chapters for this week – that application of ICT’s and its effect to improve the socio-political structure (eg: Government-To-Citizen) is severely hindered by the inherent institutional powers, rules, norms, procedures and policies.
Analyzing first part of the definition, I am happy to see that it points to one of the major goals of e-Government setup – i.e easy access to government information. This is one of the widely accepted and bench marked aspect of an e-governance system (even though Homburg strictly restricts any benchmarks due to localization aspects). The transparency factor of this definition piece is again controlled by localized structures.
So, in essence – I would say that the definition is clearly framed considering the similar points of socio-political impacts on ICTs as Homburg has derived. The definition, thus is in line with the truth / fact that e-Government setups are really shaped by inherent socio-political setups.
Bibliography:1. Homburg V. (2008). Understanding E-Government -Information Systems in Public Administration. Routledge
Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
Categories: E-Governance, Information Management Tags:
Reason for federal agencies to be pro-active
OMB is now in action mode without clear instructions and expectations. IT project failures and its increased concern has taken OMB to a point where it has to prove measurable actions to the President.
The OMB director directs and CIO reacts – common theme that was seen in Memorandum. Agencies struggle to show results and response without clear instructions and expectations – another theme that was seen — Lesson learned – Agencies ***must be proactive in terms of harnessing cream out of ever changing technology and to constantly improve their processes in meeting federal goals with minimum cost and resource.
Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
Categories: E-Governance, Information Management Tags:
EHRI and its effect on federal agency performance
My vision is that agencies will become more proactive in establishing strong project management techniques and creating more live and actionable cost estimation and analysis techniques to create and sustain successful projects. This will also require adequate staffing at agencies that has the ability to make this happen. Initiatives such as EHRI are an indirect initiative from federal government to ensure that unbiased resource allocation leads to stable performance improvement and output.
Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
Categories: E-Governance Tags:
Re-baselining of IT projects – Factors that makes it difficult and some recommendations to address them
Before addressing the question, it would be beneficial if we understand what baselining and re-baselining is. Baselining is the common project management method where we lay down the cost and effort estimates and schedules based on assumptions that we have at hand. Once baseline is created, project plan is laid out based on this baseline. But as projects go ahead, due changes in assumptions, project requirements, due to poor project oversight and other changes, the original cost / effort estimates and schedule does not fall good and calls for modification of the same based on new assumptions. If projects are not re-baselined at this stage, they fail drastically and / or lead to huge cost overrun.
Federal IT projects are not different. The situation is more obvious due to outdated (quickly changing) technology, complex systems, processes & systems, poor project estimation/planning/control mechanisms and lack of expertise to push and pull clean project management practices that leads to weak risk / change management and over and above all – politics. These situations that lead to re-baselining further determine the factors that in turn make it difficult to re-baseline federal IT projects, which include –
1. Need for re-estimation and arriving at revised cost estimation based on detailed work breakdown structureThis is one of the major factors that make re-baselining difficult task and time consuming to get on track especially when agency is dealing with multi-billion projects which are too complex to start with. Greatest concern is to make all assumptions clear and realistic so that re-baselining is avoided in future. Immediate remedial action would be to spend considerable time to figure out what the actual need is and clearly define what individual components of work / task need to be executed to achieve the task. Expert advice should be sought for each major task to determine closest cost, effort and time.
2. Need for re-work on EVM formulas and calculation to adjust new cost and valueEarned Value Management (EVM) is the most widely used and federal standard to measure performance of an IT investment. Re-baselining causes the project team / agency to rebuild EVM formulas based on new cost, effort and value and this involves considerable cost, effort and risk management to ensure that the expected ROI is attained within reasonable time period for changed scenario. Once we arrive at clear work break down structure and have a clear idea of how work / task need to be executed and integrated to achieve the clear goal, EVM analysis and establishment should not be a problem.
3. Lack of credibility on the part of agency to have this oversight and take the responsibility to fix issues and propose the business case for re-baseliningThis issue would keep the agencies from announcing the fact that they have actually overrun the budget and are in grave need to rebaseline. The memorandum from CIO and OMB director urges agencies to announce for help and declare that they need to re-baseline based on an investment’s poor performance. OMB need to ensure that it provides appropriate support for the agencies and that it gives them a chance to correct any issues that would have lead to re-baseline. OMB need to clearly define the expectations that it needs to have in a re-baseline plan and to monitor its progress.
Bibliography
1. usaspending.gov (2010). Federal IT Dashboard. Retrieved on 02nd November from http://it.usaspending.gov/
2. os.doc.gov (2010). US. DoC, Office of CIO – IT Investment Performance Management Policy. Retrieved on 02nd November from http://ocio.os.doc.gov/ITPolicyandPrograms/Policy___Standards/PROD01_004949
3. Whitehouse.gov (2010). Reforming the Federal Government’s Efforts to Manage Information Technology Projects. Retrieved on 02nd November from http://www.whitehouse.gov//sites/default/files/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m_10-25.pdf
4. Whitehouse.gov (2010). Information Technology Investment Baseline Management Policy. Retrieved on 02nd November from http://www.whitehouse.gov//sites/default/files/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m10-27.pdf
5. Whitehouse.gov (2010). Immediate Review of Financial Systems IT Projects. Retrieved on 02nd November from http://www.whitehouse.gov//sites/default/files/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m-10-26.pdf
6. Whitehouse.gov (2010). Sharing Data While Protecting Privacy. Retrieved on 02nd November from http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/2011/m11-02.pdf
7. Whitehouse.gov (2010). Pilot Projects for the Partnership Fund for Program Integrity Innovation. Retrieved on 02nd November from http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/2011/m11-01.pdf
Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
Categories: Business and Management, E-Governance, Enterprise Architecture, Finance Management, Information Architecture, Information Management, Knowledge Management, Process Improvement, Reengineering Tags:
Where are federal IT initiatives heading – Success or Failure – Lessons learned
GAO Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide is very extensive and gives us clear details of federal IT initiatives. The guide, together with OMB circular and IT dashboard web site gave some important hints towards how concerned and vigilant is US government in reviewing and evaluating Federal IT projects. The Cost estimating guide highlights customized methods to cost analysis, estimation and management techniques that “sound” no room for error in estimation and planning process. The IT capital planning process molded into Enterprise Architecture based frameworks “seems” to ensure that expected value is attained for the invested money.
Now, with all these measuring and driving models & techniques in place, the real question is if they contribute to success as expected. We need to remember that all these IT initiatives are nothing but normal IT projects that follows a typical project life cycle and need to be planned and executed confirming to standard project governance structures. Federal IT dashboard includes some interesting snapshots of federal IT projects status. It is shocking to note that about 52% of 2010-2011 IT projects (271 that need attention and 55 that have significant concern) are marked ‘under concern’ and were under OMB watch list. Also it was disturbing to note that for most of the critical projects there are budget overruns and there were significant failures and federal CIO has terminated many of these projects – This shows that there is significant issue in project governance of federal IT initiatives and this adversely affects the efficiency of overall review and evaluation methods to the extent that projects fails.
I believe that the problem lies in inadequate control over project complexity in terms of cost, duration and effort. Projects that are underestimated should be caught and terminated early rather than causing budget overruns. Projects that has additional level of complexity needs to be closely monitored by CIO to avoid politics and scope creep. Politics should never drive IT projects. The lesson thus learned is – Current methods used by the US government for reviewing and evaluating Federal IT initiatives would contribute to the successful implementation of such initiatives only if project monitoring and control methods are not taken over by bad planning, politics and/or personal interests to skew results for monetary gains.
Bibliography
1. Whitehouse.gov (2010). OMB Circular A-11, Section 7, Supplement to Part 300. Retrieved from http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/a11_current_year/s300.pdf on October 27th, 2010.
2. GAO.Gov (2009). GAO Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide. GAO-09-3SP
3. usaspending.gov (2010). Federal IT Dashboard. Portfolio and Trends Analysis
Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
Categories: Business and Management, E-Governance, Enterprise Architecture, Information Management, Process Improvement Tags:
Ideals of Openness, transparency Vs confidentaility, secrecy
There is great effect of privacy / individual rights on true e-Government implementations. As always, the core goals of e-Governance initiatives are to bring about openness and transparency in governance. In many different ways global governments strive to be transparent and thus be more approachable and open in its dealings with citizens.
Individual rights such as privacy has great impact on e-Government systems usage. The Privacy Act of 1974 and its wide usage in interpreting privacy rights has always put US government in a very cautious situation to be extra careful when dealing with vast amounts of citizen data (personal, health etc) that is collected via e-Government systems. The more open and transparent the e-Government systems want to be, the more the systems are vulnerable to privacy threats (the article on creation of FEHBP database is a very recent example for this tensed situation). Private and confidential information about citizens such as personally identifiable information and health information need to be protected and should not be open to public. At the same this information need to be made available to the required individuals within 30 days of grant of request. Thus, the privacy issue is a double edged sword that has close contact with ideals of openness and transparency.
There are many issues surrounding protecting national security and there is sufficient information that is considered part of national defense and safety. Examples of VA issue when millions of VA employees records where leaked, cyber-warfare conducted by various groups that leads to constant hacking of national information structures and unauthenticated usage & exposure of national security related data is a grave threat to national security. The document describing National Protection Plan and its implications was of great interest to me (reading it in its entirety) as it highlights the tension that we go through as related to how open and transparent we should be at the same time protecting our national information infrastructures and systems from security threats. The protection plan is just a plan; federal government still has to arrive at clear action oriented plan as to control the information creation, manipulation, storage and exchange between government systems and agencies, between agencies and citizens and between government and citizens (and / or global citizens).
Obama is indeed targeting establishing open, transparent, participatory and collaborative e-Government setup, but is putting privacy, confidentiality, secrecy and security at risk – unless there is concrete action plans to protect privacy and security. This situation leads us to the truth that – ideals of openness and transparency, on the one hand, and confidentiality and secrecy on the other are not mutually exclusive.
Bibliography
1. U.S. Senate (Feb, 2000), Cyber Attacks: The National Protection Plan and its Privacy Implications, S. Hrg. 106-889, http://www.loc.gov/law/find/hearings/pdf/00076638986.pdf. (Accessed 10/20/2010)
2. U.S. President, Open Government Initiative, http://www.whitehouse.gov/open. (Accessed 10/20/2010)
3. Rosenberg, A. (March, 2010) “Employee health database could net major cost savings, OPM report says”, Government Executive, http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0310/033010ar2.htm?oref=rellink. (Accessed 10/21/2010)
4. OMB (2006) Memorandum M-06-15, Safeguarding Personally Identifiable Information, http://www.cio.gov/Documents/Safeguarding_Personally_Identifiable_Information.pdf. (Accessed 10/21/2010)
5. Long, E. (10/05/2010) “FEHBP database raises privacy concerns”, nextgov, http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20101005_2133.php. (Accessed 10/21/2010)
6. Federal Trade Commission (June 1998) Privacy Online: A Report to Congress, http://www.ftc.gov/reports/privacy3/toc.shtm. (Accessed 10/21/2010)
7. Department of Justice (2010), Overview of the Privacy Act of 1974, http://www.justice.gov/opcl/1974privacyact-overview.htm. (Accessed 10/21/2010)
Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
Categories: E-Governance, Information Management, Internet Usage, Legal Issues in Information Management, Money Management, Organizational Change, Process Improvement Tags:
Effect of customer satisfaction on funding of e-Government initiatives
From experience of Congress itself, it should be maintained that funding of e-government projects are driven by customer satisfaction. Is this correct? I believe this is correct based on concepts that is already learned since past weeks and from this week’s learning. The main reason being – any e-Government initiative is targeted and centered on participatory democracy where citizen (as the customer of the services) has a greater role in policy and decision making. Citizens are the ones who utilize the e-Government services and need to be satisfied and motivated to use a particular type of e-Government service model/technology.
As Homburg states e-Government needs to be ‘responsive to societal needs’ – means it has to satisfy the customer’s (citizen’s) current and changing information/services consumption needs. As he aspires a participative democracy, the resulting technology funding needs to be made to support interaction and collaboration that leads to sufficient acceptance of service delivery medium and technology. Customer orientation is essential and is important success factor for any type of informational, consultative or participatory e-Government model, which calls for more demand driven services rather than supply oriented services.
e-Government systems have grown to such a level where it has given power to the customers to hold their representatives accountable of their votes and choices by their active participation in policy making and collaborative functioning. Service delivery and eDemocracy mediums such as e-Voting and e-Deliberation requires that users/customers need to be motivated in order to realize maximum usage with least margin of error and inviting customers to actively participate in democratic process. Customers – including Cyber citizens or Pragmatic citizens – form more than half of total citizens who care about usage of e-Government services. These customers are highly motivated and prone to be more confident in using those technologies if the inherent service models are user friendly, intuitive and leading towards greater e-Democratic setup where his voice is heard and feedback received in a timely manner. To this end, customer satisfaction is an adequate criterion for funding of e-Government initiatives.
Bibliography
1. Homburg V. (2008). Understanding E-Government -Information Systems in Public Administration. Chapters 5,6. Routledge
2.Shark A.R., Toporkoff S. (2008). Beyond e-Government & e-Democracy – A Global Perspective. Ch. 3, 16,18, 19, 21, 22. Public Technology Institure & ITEMS International
Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
Categories: E-Governance, Money Management, Process Improvement Tags:
Is there a conflict between the support of individual rights and the use of e-government for transformational purposes? Why or why not?
Based on my reflection on E-Governance reference materials and experience, I am concluding that e-government initiatives cannot be truly transformational unless the socio-political environment is favorable and open-minded to bring about highly participatory democracy with high level of citizen involvement through innovative technology usage. Two forces are in play that hinders transformation – narrow mindedness of political powers to establish highly interactive e-government mediums and/or the citizen’s lack of exposure to a particular medium of innovative technology due to its unavailability or fear of attack towards his individual rights of privacy and security. The first force factor is very obvious in the way almost all government setups works. Effect of individual rights on supporting /hindering e-government transformation is rather not very obvious – but could be easily analyzed and a decision point can be reached.
The issue of conflict comes into picture when socio-political setups transform into the 4th stage of ‘Interactive Democracy’ as West coins the ultimate and desired stage of e-government setup. In this stage of e-government setup, there would be high level interaction where lot of personal feedbacks, opinion and other personal information is being exchanged, stored, processed and analyzed that has high potential of being accounted for in variety of decision within the administrative processes. This raises huge privacy and security concerns for common citizens – their personal information being trapped in isles of information systems. Only way to gain confidence in promoting the usage towards transformation would be to implement means to protect privacy and security during information exchange. Again, this would happen only if political system truly focuses on transformation.
Another dimension of individual rights issue is availability of technology for all common citizens to access the e-government services – commonly called digital divide. The more the transformation without proper citizen exposure to technology, the greater would be the digital divide and its effect on this particular dimension of individual right. Political systems should take steps to reduce these divisions and make the public receptive to the new technology so that transformation would have some meaning.
Analyzing the above two dimensions of individual rights, usage of e-government for transformational purposes seems to conflict with individual rights of privacy/security AND right to be exposed to latest technology. The conflict appears to be present not due to voicing citizens, but due to the lack of implementation of appropriate steps at administrative level to handle privacy/security concerns and to reduce digital divide.
Bibliography:
1. West D. M. (2005). Digital Government – Technology and public sector performance. Princeton University Press.
Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
Categories: E-Governance, Enterprise Architecture, Information Architecture, Information Management, Knowledge Management, Legal Issues in Information Management, Organizational Change, Process Improvement, Reengineering Tags:
e-Government transformation in Maharashtra, India
The scalar transformation of e-government implementation models in the state of Maharashtra, India, took place exactly as West pictures as billboard, partial service delivery and Portal stage (with major focus on service delivery). The e-government initiative took its shape during late nineties with my employer being appointed as the Apex consultant to the state government to implement all its e-government initiatives including G2G and G2C interactions.
The initial focus was bringing improvements within the government systems (building transversal systems as Shark puts it) and creating intra-department WAN network (satellite based). So the initial focus on implementing e-government initiatives was to build the base for the administrative back office systems to improve existing bureaucratic processes and how departments interacted between themselves to improve their efficiency. During this stage, the initial billboard based, citizen facing website was published which included static information about government, its official and their contacts, major announcements, major government resolutions (GRs), tenders and other relevant information – all downloadable as html/pdf/doc format.
During the time period from 2002-2006, saw a combined era of service delivery and portal stage where the internal transversal systems were integrated with the new e-government portal and more citizen involvement and service delivery was implemented. For example the Document Journey Management System (DJMS, which now manages inter and intra-department work flow) was integrated to the portal so that citizens can directly make avail of particular services and post their feedbacks and grievances. The information posted on the website is delivered to the DJMS system at the same instant via XML data exchange and the department official is notified of the change in document status and seeks for action in the document journey to the next level of hierarchy.
I would say that the socio-political and cultural aspects of the state have a great impact on the level of transformation that occurred throughout the period of 7-8 years until its current state. The major positive impacts were from government grants to support renewed IT infrastructure and opening of separate IT department for state headquartered at Churchgate, Mumbai. The IT department had separate IT secretary, Under Secretary and Director to just look after IT. Their goal was to make Maharashtra the leader in e-governance within the country and at the same time utilize state of the art technology to link government with citizens. Political power and ability to shape technology usage is high, but is rather competing with other states to ponder innovative technologies. This competition has played a major role in creating specific benchmarks and level of competency in e-government expertise across the states and there is constant support from central government for all IT initiatives.
Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
Categories: E-Governance, Information Management, Process Improvement, Strategic Planning Tags: