The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) needed a company to facilitate Earned Value Management (EVM) analysis and reporting of its major IT investments as directed by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB). In order to successfully report metrics to the OMB, expertise using EVM tools compliant with ANSI 748 standards was also required.

KeyLogic employees have assisted other federal agencies with these types of projects and are fully-versed in the operation of the necessary tools.  KeyLogic personnel and GSA staff integrated their skills and implemented a system to feed valuable data information about the agency’s investments back to the Project Managers and staffs so they may provide the OMB with the most current, appropriate data.

Challenge

The KeyLogic team had to fully assess the existing state network of hardware and software tools within the agency, review the current phase and status of GSA’s 25 major investments and resolve data consistency issues to design and quickly introduce an interim architecture for data collection and reporting. With 25 major investments managed in 8 different departments within the agency, coordination and buy-in by all areas was crucial to data integrity and timely updates, which provide necessary information about both individual projects and the portfolio as a whole.  The agency had purchased ANSI 748A-compliant software but needed the expertise to deploy and fully utilize its capabilities when providing required information to key personnel.

Solutions

KeyLogic employees worked closely with the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) to interface with Project Managers in the various offices of GSA, assess the tools they employed and build the appropriate interfaces for the central EV reporting system.  Additionally, the team developed, implemented and documented an interim process to collect the required project information on a monthly basis and upload it to the EVM analysis and reporting tool.  This interim process sufficiently provided required EVM measures until the appropriate tools for long-term solutions could be procured, configured and implemented.

Results

The interim and final EVM reporting systems provide reliable and highly-valuable Earned Value measures that allow both project staff and senior management to quickly and accurately understand the current status and progress of its IT investments.