BY Michael Lisagor

In my experience, too many information technology projects promise the sky, but instead they exceed their budgets and schedules and disappoint users. Although there are many reasons for those failures, the lessons to be learned from them are rarely taught in classrooms, especially in the context of specific agency cultures and histories.

Training from the Program Management Institute (PMI) provides an essential foundation for government program managers (PMs), but it doesn’t necessarily prepare them to deal with many of the everyday problems that arise on most projects, especially as those challenges relate to their own organizational and contractual relationships.

Experienced PMs are too busy fighting their own forest fires to concentrate on transferring knowledge to newer managers. As experienced managers retire, lack of knowledge management will become even more pronounced and the effect potentially more devastating.

Do any of these everyday problems look familiar?

For several years, I’ve been exploring various ways to provide cost-effective, reality-based training to help PMs and contracting officers correct such everyday challenges. Together with the General Services Administration’s Federal Systems Integration and Management Center, I developed a one-day Reality-Based Risk Management assessment and customized training program to impart valuable lessons using a combination of role-playing scenarios, case studies and group exercises.

The idea was to offer a one-day workshop to help program managers mitigate future risks and increase the probability of project success.

The workshop teaches managers about these following five major IT program-risk activities using real-life examples drawn from their own organizations’ experiences:

• Risk planning.
• - Risk identification.
• Risk analysis.
• Risk mitigation.
• Risk monitoring, control and assessment.

The workshops have been verywell-received and other agencies have started having me implement them for their managers.

We must prevent the continued failure of so many IT programs and give auditors at the Government Accountability Office less to write about.

Lisagor offers his training on Celerity Works’ GSA MOBIS Schedule GS-10F-0380S at www.gsaadvantage.gov or www.celerityworks.com/risk-training.html. He is also the author of “The Enlightened Manager,” available at www.amazon.com.

Reach Lisagor at lisagor@celerityworks.com.