Government: Not Just Another IT Project
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
It’s easy to think of government IT projects as being no different than any other large-scale IT project, and it’s true that there are similarities between public and private sector. However, government brings its own set of challenges, and as project managers we need to be ready to deal with them. These aren’t necessarily unique to the public sector, but they do tend to have a different emphasis or degree of importance in government initiatives. In this article I’ll try and highlight three areas, both technical and non-technical, where a project manager has to be prepared to see the world just a little differently if they are to be successful on a government technology project.
Stakeholders
It doesn’t matter whether the project is a server upgrade or a brand new, customer facing website, government projects have a huge number of stakeholders--every tax paying citizen in the jurisdiction. While the server upgrade may not be as visible to Joe Public, all governments have some form of audit function, and unless we are dealing with extremely sensitive issues, those audit reports are published. I’m sure that only a small number of citizens read those reports, but I’m also sure that every media outlet looks at them and delights in reporting the more lurid details.
In addition to the large number of stakeholders, the impact…
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"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric." - Bertrand Russell |
