The development of organizational project management capabilities involves incorporating leading global practices, standardization and common performance standards, which ultimately drives transparency and governance via existing resources. Specifically, organizational project management ties an organization’s projects to its business strategy ensuring that those projects are not just executed provisionally, but rather supporting specific business objectives. Organizational project management provides the framework for the federal government to align policy development to its overall implementation for all aspects of government operations.

Organizational project management can reduce government agencies costs by 20-30 percent. Making a significant change in organizational project management is essentially about three things—people, policy and process.

People

Ensuring that well-qualified personnel are recruited and retained in management positions is crucial. It’s important to promote and protect the project management workforce with training and support to maximize its ability to carry out an agency’s mission. A straightforward, cost effective way to accomplish this is by establishing dedicated career path and job classification for project and program managers.

Policy

Standardized practices will add to the agility of the government. Standardizing policy approaches to project and program management will increase transparency, flexibility and the ability to oversee programs. It also allows the government to identify problems and develop responses, as well as more effectively focus on the unknown.

Process

A defined set of standards and leading practices can help alleviate some of the complexities program-managers face, especially when managing the emerging popularity of complex vehicles such as public-private partnerships, national defense programs and IT systems. Government organizations continue to increase their understanding of the value of formalized program management practices and support the development of competency in this area to ensure policy implementation via programs is accomplished as intended.

One of the most essential, and simple, ways to make the government a more efficient steward of taxpayer funds is by instilling organizational project management practices already proven in both the private and public sectors.

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