VIEWPOINTS

More Federal Project Management Attention

Michael O’Brochta, PMP
President, Zozer Inc.

USA

Introduction

The trend of giving increased attention to project management within the U.S. civilian federal government is continuing to intensify. Recent action by Congress and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has the potential for significant benefit for project management and project managers. This benefit will include increasing the number of employees involved with project and program management, providing the employees with additional opportunities for training and certification, providing more opportunities to perform project and program management, and providing more funding. The following provides a summary of the recent history in this area.

Looking Back

Looking back a few years, we can see the official expansion of the field of acquisition to officially include project and program management; and we can see the establishment of a certification program just for U.S. federal civilian project and program managers. Evidence of this trend can be seen in the Services Acquisition Reform Act of 2003 (SARA, P.L. 108-136); when, for the first time, the definition of the term acquisition was expanded to include “program and project managers.”

This significant expansion meant that civilian federal government program and project managers would now be subject to and benefit from actions taken to mature the acquisition workforce. As a consequence, OMB’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) issued Letter 05-01 dated April 15, 2005 authorizing the Federal Acquisition Institute (FAI) to form a cross-functional working group and develop recommendations for the “establishment of certification programs for program and project managers…” These actions resulted in …

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About the Author Michael O’Brochta Author Michael (Mike) O'Brochta, who has managed hundreds of projects during the past thirty years, is also an experienced line manager, author, lecturer, trainer and consultant. He holds a master's degree in project management, a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, and is certified as a PMP®. As senior project manager at the CIA, he led the project management and systems engineering training and certification program to mature practices agency-wide. Mr. O'Brochta's other current work includes the development of standards and courses for the new U.S. Federal Acquisition Certification for Program and Project Managers. He serves at the PMI corporate level on the Strategic Alignment and Reporting advisory committee and at the chapter level where he built and led the international PMIWDC Chapter-to-Chapter program; he is currently a member of the Leadership Institute Master Class. Mr. O’Brochta has written and presented papers at every PMI North American Global Congress during the past decade as well as at many international, and regional conferences. Topics that he is currently passionate about include how to get executives to act for project success and great project managers. Since his recent climb of another of the world’s seven summits, he has been exploring the relationship between project management and mountain climbing. Mike can be reached at mobrochta@zozerinc.com