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Government Leader home > news stories
09/19/05
Ounce of planning worth pound of cure in project management
By Trudy Walsh
Government Leader Staff
Too often, government projects careen off course and over budget. With their projects milling about like bumper cars in an arcade, agency leaders wonder where they went wrong.
Most likely, they went off track at the very beginning because of a lack of careful planning, said Stephen Hawald, a consultant with Robbins-Gioia LLC of Alexandria, Va., which provides program management services to government agencies. Hawald spoke this month at a symposium on best practices in program management in Washington.
As a possible remedy, Hawald offered process improvement, or what he called process refinement—an applied methodology that incorporates tools and techniques such as Six Sigma—as a way to measure defects and reduce errors to nearly zero.
Developed in 1986 by Motorola Corp. senior engineer Bill Smith to improve manufacturing quality, Six Sigma requires detailed planning in the early stages of a project. Many government agencies are mandating, piloting and migrating to Six Sigma, Hawald added.
Not just the flavor of the month, process improvement avoids “seat-of-the-pants” measures that involve spending large sums of money with little ultimate value, Hawald said.
To avoid process failure, agencies need to devote more time to up-front planning, he said. Otherwise, too much time is spent on wasted efforts and crisis-driven heroics. Some of the symptoms of process failure are late deliveries, last-minute crunches, spiraling costs and poor morale. “You’re always being surprised,” Hawald said.
Once agency officials realize a project is going off course, they rush to take action. Often they will implement new technology as a quick fix.
But without a solid operational process foundation in place first, this can cause even more “business pain,” Hawald said. A sense of disconnect can grow within the technology.
The quality review piece is too often slapped on at the end, when it’s too late, according to Hawald. This is the piece—the process—that should be scrutinized up front.
Hawald suggested agencies use free planning tools that are downloadable from the Internet, such as the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model for Integration (CMMI).
Applying CMMI, for example, the Education Department consolidated 12 data centers and saved more than $50 million per year.
Agencies also can benefit from commercial software tools such as SigmaFlow, which Hawald described as “TurboTax for process improvement, or process improvement on steroids.”
The Homeland Security Department’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP), for example, is working with Robbins-Gioia to implement the suite from SigmaFlow of Plano, Texas.
CBP is also using value-stream mapping, a paper-and-pencil tool that shows the flow of material and information as a product or service makes its way to the customer. In addition, the agency also is implementing Kaizen rapid improvement event methodology, a Japanese concept meaning “continuous improvement.” CBP uses Kaizen techniques to plan for short-term efforts or phases of larger efforts.
Such process tools are what get an agency out of the fire-fighting business and more into fire prevention, Hawald said.
“This is not just geeky people trying to save nickels and dimes,” he said. “You need people, process and tools to come together. The goal is to have continuous process improvement.”
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