Deepesh RammoorthyICT Project Manager ( PMP®AgilePM®Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM®))| Australian Red Cross Blood ServiceTarneit, Vic, Australia
What are some of the challenges you have come across managing projects in a Government Organization?
You may either have been employed by or run projects with them as suppliers Saving Changes...
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Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
I worked in goverment organizations for years as head count and as a provider. Let me say that: there is not special challenge when you compare to private sector. Most of the people think that the difference is all the politic game. But when you work in private sector you will find the same things like in goverment sector. It could depends on the country where you are. I have worked in Noth America countries, Latin America countries, Europe and some Asia countries. Saving Changes...
Eric SimmsSenior Program ManagerBaltimore, Maryland, United States
I’m writing this based on my experiences working as a US government contractor:
1. Lack of accountability. In the private sector an inefficient company will soon be driven out of business. However, most government agencies lack competition, so government Managers often lack the impetus to make their departments operate at their full potential.
2. Entrenched government employees. The difficulty of firing government employees means they have little external reason to personally invest themselves in a project’s success. Often employees at all levels are just counting down the last few years until they retire, so if the individual wants to contribute minimal effort to the project, there’s very little a Project Manager can do to stop them. Appealing to the individual’s supervisor probably won’t produce any results even if the supervisor is willing to confront the employee, which many aren’t.
Combined, these often result in project dates slipping severely, and forces a Project Manager to deal with problems that could easily have been avoided if things had been done properly. Saving Changes...
Anthony FoxPublic Safety Portfolio Project Manager| City of Virginia BeachChesapeake, Va, United States
Here are some of the challenges I have run into in both local and state level government:
1) No clear definition of roles and responsibilities. Depending on the environment/culture, certain employees play multiple roles and have a hard time letting another person fulfill a particular role on a project. The way around that is to get them to define the roles before the project kicks off.
2) As Eric mentioned above, entrenched government employees.
3) Resistance to change (which sort of plays into #2). If a process has been done one way by one person for X decades, it is very hard to get them to change that process even if you can prove that it will save them time/money.
4) Time constraint does not always apply to public sector like it does for the private sector. In the private sector, time = money. That is not always the case in the public sector, so project timelines get e x p a n d e d because the urge to move quickly is not there. Saving Changes...
