ARCHIVED - Establishing the Baseline - Government-Wide Summary and Analysis of IT Project Practices

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4. Concluding Remarks

4.1 Next Steps

It is recommended that departments use the baseline to confirm departmental practice improvement initiatives and to justify future plans for implementing industry best practices. It is further recommended that the steps identified below, be performed in the very near future in order to benefit from the momentum already set in motion by the participants:

• Establish an "Improvement" Infrastructure. To support the plan, departments should put in place an organizational structure that includes the appropriate governance structure. Key resources should also be committed;
• Goals Setting Phase. Departments should establish clear goals for implementing best practices in the coming year. Workshop discussions indicated that in every department, plans exist and activities are taking place that will lead to improvements in the Key Practice Areas assessed. In some cases, this represents a specific attempt to align with the Enhanced Framework. In others, it is simply management recognition that change is necessary and the relationship to the Enhanced Framework is purely coincidental. In either case, these plans and activities can form the basis for improvement plans as called for in the Enhanced Framework II document and targets set out therein should be used as guidelines to identify key milestones; and
• Acting and Leveraging. Departments should then proceed with the implementation of best practices and their plans. Not surprisingly, different departments demonstrated strengths in a number of different Key Practice Areas. In some cases these strengths may be able to be leveraged between departments by sharing available guides, handbooks, procedures, tools, and other artifacts. TBS PMO will be assembling these artifacts to expand and enhance the Enhanced Framework solution set.

4.2 Recommendations

The process of establishing a baseline of the current state of project practices is only the first step in implementing sustainable improvements and best industry practices as they relate to the management and delivery of IT projects within the federal government. The purpose of the baseline is to stimulate departments to improve their ability to successfully manage and deliver IT projects. This baseline document provides a snapshot of how the government is doing with regards to the implementation of these practices.

Each department should now, as indicated during the workshops that led to these results, develop a detailed action plan to initiate improvement activities. Based on workshop results, it is expected that this initial action plan will contain a subset of departmental plans already developed and approved for the upcoming year. The plan should provide high-level information regarding the background, business justification, and goals of the improvement initiative(s); the key work elements; the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders; key milestones; and resources assigned to the improvement activities. Templates and examples can be provided by the PMO to departments for their respective plans.

Departments should re-assess their organizations and measure progress. The PMO will make available an electronic and improved version of the questionnaire used to determine this baseline. Departments will be able to repeat this process within their organization and, possibly, to extend it to other areas not covered during this first pass. In some cases participants were not able to respond to the questions in a fashion that fairly represented the whole department. This was particularly true in some departments with a decentralized IT management style. It became apparent, in fact, that some departments should have several baselines to represent the different practices in place in different areas, rather than one baseline to represent the whole. Departments should make that determination in consultation with their practice implementation groups.

Details on how to implement industry best practices were provided as part of the workshops in a document entitled SEI IDEAL^SM Model. This document is also available on the SEI Web Site (www.sei.cmu.edu). TBS PMO is also sponsoring special interest groups that are focusing on the implementation of best practices as discussed in this report. Departments should make use of these tools.

4.3 Conclusion

Information Technology is critical to delivering government programs and services more efficiently and effectively. Departments cannot afford project failures. They also cannot afford not to harvest the benefits of the technology they deploy. The workshop results confirm earlier studies and reviews by the TBS, the OAG, and the private sector that there are outstanding problems with project management practices. The baseline results for each department provide a useful insight into necessary improvements areas and an inherent basis for priority setting.

Implementing industry best practices is a significant step towards operational effectiveness and sound comptrollership currently strongly promoted within the government. The opportunity offered to senior managers to embrace proven solutions to a widely recognized problem is an opportunity not to be missed. This observation is especially relevant in light of the major "Year 2000" projects now under way.

The overall summary presented in this document and the individual department baseline reports can be a useful tool for setting the stage for significant improvement in the area of IT project management. It can provide a meaningful benchmark against which each department can measure its progress.

End Notes:

1. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, An Enhanced Framework for the Management of Information Technology Projects, Ottawa, Ontario, May 28, 1996.

2. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Enhanced Framework II: Solutions: Putting the Principles to Work, Ottawa, Ontario, March 1998.

3. The TBS review, documented in An Enhanced Framework for the Management of Information Technology Projects, identified deficiencies in IT project results. A number of OAG reviews, available on their web site at www.oag-bvg.gc.ca, also identified deficiencies. Private sector-led surveys conducted by the Standish Group in the United States and by KPMG in Canada also identified similar problems with IT project results. These reviews were conducted between 1995 and 1997.

4. Paulk, Mark C.; Curtis, Bill; Chrissis, Mary Beth; Weber, Charles V.; "Capability Maturity Model for Software, Version 1.1, CMU/SEI-93-TR-24"; Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, February 1993.

5. It should be noted that the S:PRIME process, available through the Applied Software Engineering Centre and GrafP Technologies Inc. and used in some departments, was also considered since it is also founded upon the CBA-IPI but is less resource-intensive. It too, however, has more of an impact on organizations than was felt possible to cope with at this time.

6. Brief definitions of the Key Process Areas are provided in Appendix 1.

7. Unless otherwise noted, answers to the questions were based on the participants' knowledge and experience in their current environment.

8. Readers should note the Requirements Management Key Process Area has been moved to facilitate the reading of the mapping results.

9. It should be noted that the processes used by the OAG to determine the main issues with the management and delivery of IT in the government are different than those used by the TBS to establish this baseline. Whereas the OAG follows a targeted approach with a focus on specific initiatives within the government, the TBS approach examines the implementation of the same practices but at the organizational level.

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