VA tests online score card for IT projects

The Veterans Affairs Department is testing an online score card designed to provide its own information technology workforce and the public with greater transparency into the performance of IT projects.

The Veterans Affairs IT Product Delivery Dashboard went live about a month ago but has not been publicized yet, said Roger Baker, VA's chief information officer. Internal IT staffers, who represent part of the site's target audience, are providing officials with feedback on it, VA spokeswoman Katie Roberts said.

"What we want to do is make sure that it's clear," she said of the score card system, which is currently displayed in PDF format. For example, "If I'm Employee A in the state of California, am I able to understand this? What does this mean to me?" Roughly a quarter of VA's 280,000 employees are IT workers. "We need to make sure that all of our employees know what's going on," Roberts said.

Since taking office in May, Baker has been clamping down on wasteful IT spending. In July, VA halted 45 technology projects that were either over budget or behind schedule. Baker's efforts took on a new urgency on Monday when the White House requested that Congress freeze VA's IT budget. Under the agency's 2011 budget request, funding would be capped at the fiscal 2010 level of $3.3 billion, which was a record sum for the department. W. Todd Grams, VA's acting assistant secretary for management, said at a briefing for reporters that the request reflects the department's strategy of extending greater oversight to project management.

"We're comfortable with this freeze while we take the time to make sure that when we commit to deliver a project or program, we are delivering it on budget, we are delivering it on time, and it has the functionality that our customers come to expect," Grams said.

"IT in general and the Veterans Affairs Department need to have the discipline to do more with less," Baker said in an interview with Nextgov.

The new VA site is intended to flesh out and supplement information summarized on the governmentwide IT dashboard, which tracks the progress of technology investments across agencies.

The VA dashboard provides monthly updates on the variance between projects' planned budgets and schedules and their actual progress. The information on the governmentwide dashboard is limited to capital asset plans that agencies submit annually to the Office of Management and Budget.

Right now, the VA site uses a traffic-light-style scheme to grade certain aspects of 82 projects the department monitors monthly. A red box indicates a project is more than 44 days behind schedule, while a green box means the project is either on track or less than 30 days behind.

"We don't know what the final dashboard will look like. As we move forward, we'll continue to ... develop the format," Roberts said.

On the grading system, if a box labeled Cost-Total is red, then that means the cost of the project is up more than 24 percent over the past six months -- an indication it might have to be suspended for further review, she explained.

The site also shows whether projects have been halted under VA's new project assessment method. Boxes in a column labeled PMAS, for Project Management Accountability System, are colored red for paused (meaning suspended), yellow for deferred (given one more chance to meet milestones) or green for cleared (approved). All the projects on the current dashboard, dated Dec. 31, 2009, are on track, according to the PMAS ratings. The 45 IT projects that the department suspended are not listed on the site because they already have undergone further review.

The new evaluation system temporarily stops projects that miss incremental six-month milestones to determine whether the department should spend more money to rejuvenate them or simply end them. VA has cut funding or ended at least 15 projects as a result of PMAS evaluations.

"I am more focused on PMAS than the Web site, I will admit," Baker said. The department plans to upgrade the site with more user-friendly navigation in the coming months.

Many state and local governments have adopted similar systems under the general rubric of performance contracting, in which metrics are included in contracts and agencies periodically monitor them to make sure workers are abiding by the provisions.

VA's performance contracting model is a good idea, said Philip Joyce, a public policy professor at The George Washington University who specializes in budgeting and performance measurement.

The tools available for rectifying wayward projects are rather blunt in the federal government, he said: "You either cancel the contract or you keep it going."

A logical next step would be for the government to tie metrics like those captured on the dashboard to employee compensation, Joyce noted. But the nature of IT project development and legal obstacles will prevent the government from implementing pay-for-performance anytime soon, he said.

The difficulty with performance pay is it is hard to identify a direct link between what any single IT employee is doing and the performance of a project, Joyce said.

"The compensation and bonuses in the federal government are still very rigid and hard to change," said Olga Grkavac, executive vice president for the public sector at industry group TechAmerica. "I'm sure government managers would welcome this flexibility, but I would assume Congress would have to approve these changes."