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GCN Home > 07/07/03 issue

At the crux of collaborative projects: joint business cases

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

Agencies quickly found out how tough it is to meet the business case requirements the Office of Management and Budget laid out in its Circular A-11 guidance.

OMB this year exposed 771 out of more than 1,400 IT business cases as being at-risk for failing to meet certain requirements and then threw down the gauntlet: Fix the shortcomings or lose project funding, OMB said.

And now as OMB raises expectations for agencies to deliver joint business cases for the 2005 budget request, IT managers are finding the complexities surrounding collaboration even more complicated. Just ask John Marshall, CIO of the Agency for International Development.
Denis Gusty
Image: Olivier Douliery
GovBenefits project manager Denis Gusty says setting up a board of directors helped the project’s partner agencies take ownership of the effort.
When USAID and the State Department each submitted business cases to buy a new overseas financial system from the same vendor, OMB put the brakes on the efforts and instructed the agencies to collaborate.

“OMB asked us why we couldn’t deploy one system that both agencies could use,” Marshall said. “We studied the opportunities and found areas where we could collaborate, such as training, testing, user support services, hosting and licensing.”

The experience is not uncommon. OMB is directing agencies to use the newly released Business Reference Model to find partners that share business lines and look into putting together a joint business case. OMB also will apply a heavy hand after agencies submit their budget requests in September to look for additional areas for collaboration, administration officials have said.

Marshall said this first business case is just the beginning of joint projects between USAID and State.

“This is the wave of the future,” he said. “We are working on a joint enterprise architecture and I expect more joint business cases to come from that work.” After OMB insisted the two agencies work together, Marshall said a steering committee of USAID and State executives developed a joint strategic plan to make sure the system met each agency’s mission.

Relating the business case to each agency’s strategic plan is important to get off on the right foot, said Keith Kerr, a business case product manager for Robbins-Gioia LLC of Alexandria, Va. “Looking at the strategic plan helps identify what mission goals the project relates to,” he said.

William McVay, a former OMB senior policy analyst and business case guru, said agencies updated their Government Performance and Results Act strategic plans in April, which will help IT managers identify opportunities to collaborate.