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Government Leader home > June 2005 issue
June 2005; Vol. 1 No. 2
The Big Fix: Six Ways to Turn a Project Around
By Mary Mosquera
Another story on this topic is The Big Fix.
Finding the right model for effective management of the IRS’ Business Systems Modernization has been trial and error—mostly error—with years of project delays and spiking costs.
But once that model was in place, IRS had
its most successful run of major projects
brought to production.
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| | If you don’t have the right leadership with the right skills, the rest of the stuff becomes very difficult. —Todd Grams | |
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What changed? Senior IRS executives
focused on the areas that needed fixing first and
would improve the program the most, said IRS
CIO Todd Grams. They also instilled the discipline
to make sure that executives followed
through in the midst of a very complicated program
that had numerous problems.
“It could be very easy to get swamped by all
of them and try to make progress on all of
them,” Grams said. “They all wouldn’t have
had the same return.”
Here’s what the IRS did to get the program
moving in the right direction:
1 BUSINESS UNIT OWNERSHIP. Following
several evaluations two years ago, the IRS
found that its business units did not have a
significant enough role in the modernization
projects. IRS commissioner Mark Everson
named high-level business unit executives to
run projects that needed improvement.
Those executives’ performances are now, in
part, tied to the progress their modernization
projects make over the year.
The IRS also changed its governance structure,
adding an executive steering committee
for each component of modernization. The
committee chairmen are the business leaders
for the projects. The committees view milestone
exits, budgets and schedules.
2 SCALING DOWN PROJECTS. Each program
with the modernization effort is large and
complicated, and the IRS was trying to accomplish
too many of them. So officials scaled
down the program and broke it into parts. As
a result, the agency requested 37 percent less
in the 2005 budget than it spent in 2004 and
asked for the same amount for 2006.
“As our performance improves, and we can
prove that to the Office of Management and
Budget, Treasury and Congress, our expectation
is that we will be in much stronger position
to ask for growth in the program,” Grams said.
3 GETTING THE RIGHT TEAM. In reviewing the
skills of the executives running the projects,
the IRS realized it had assigned employees who
were exceptional in tax administration to run
the major modernization projects.
Modernization demands executives who have
experience in designing, developing and implementing
large, complex IT projects. But in the
IRS’ case, it also requires expertise in tax administration,
so it was
important to have
a balance of career
and outside people.
So the agency
adjusted its mix of
people from private
industry and
from the IRS on
large IT projects.
“If you don’t
have the right
leadership with the right skills, the rest of the
stuff becomes very difficult,” Grams said.
“Having the right team here will mean that a
lot of the other problems we have get solved,
because these folks know how to do this as a
business.”
4 FINDING MANAGERS who want to scale
“Mount Everest.” IRS has found it tough to
fill some project-management positions, but it’s
not for lack of applicants. Many job-seekers
from industry are looking for the big-time challenges
that large government projects pose.
“There’s a lot of interest in the IT community
for what I would call ‘climbing Everest,’ which is
what I hear from folks when I’m interviewing
them,” Grams said. “A lot of people have climbed
Everest in the private sector and now they’re
looking for something even greater to do.”
Still, a penchant for scaling IT Everests isn’t
everything. “We’re not going to rush and bring in somebody who isn’t going to be a
good match with this team,” Grams said.
In addition to having strong IT credentials
and industry experience, applicants
from outside have to be able to appreciate
the value that career IRS employees bring
to the team, he said.
“When folks come in from the private sector
and mistakenly believe that because they
did great in the private sector, they are now
here to educate and clean up the federal guys
who were just the bureaucrats who caused
the problems they inherited, they will not be
successful and they won’t last,” he added.
5 A TOUGH-MINDED STANCE on contract
management. In the crisis-driven environment
that enveloped BSM, there wasn’t a
lot of time to figure out how to improve contractor
performance, Grams said.
Mark Everson, who became IRS commissioner
in 2003, recognized the importance
of holding the contractors’ feet to the fire.
Early last year, he told Computer Sciences
Corp. that IRS would look for another
prime contractor for future modernization
work unless CSC improved its performance
appreciably on the Customer Account Data
Engine project. The IRS also renegotiated
its Integrated Financial Systems contract
so CSC shared financial risk.
Changing the nature of the contracts
from cost-reimbursement to performance-based
was instrumental in setting the program
on the right track and running on
schedule, Grams said.
6 LIFECYCLE APPROACH. Previously, IRS
executives would sign off prematurely
on exiting milestones—in this case, the
stages of software development—in a misguided
attempt to keep a project going,
Grams said. That’s changed.
“We don’t bring anything forward unless
we know we’re going to have a clean exit,”
said Rick Skorny, deputy associate CIO for
program management and a veteran of
five years with modernization.
Managers also conduct lessons-learned
reviews of all projects as part of the lifecycle
approach so as not to make the same
mistakes again, he said.
Another story on this topic is The Big Fix.
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