We can think of government in many ways. It is a group of elected and appointed public officials who work for government departments and agencies. It is a set of laws, regulations and policies that help us govern as a people. It is the societal foundation for our democracy that gives us the freedoms that we treasure.
From a business perspective, though, we can think of government as a set of programs. And we can describe the purpose of government as the efficient and effective management of those programs to achieve established objectives and planned outcomes. In other words, good government can be thought of as the successful management of programs that benefit the people and businesses of this country.
Given that perspective, the question we must ask ourselves is: “Do we manage well?” Do we serve our fellow citizens well as stewards and managers of our country’s resources and capabilities?
The answer is easily found in reports issued by the Government Accountability Office, agency inspector generals and Congress. Those sources tell consistent stories of programs that are significantly over budget and late in delivering expected outcomes — all at a great cost to the taxpayers of this country.
The government is not alone. In a recent study of the private sector, the Standish Group reported that two-thirds of major technology projects run into trouble, take three times or longer to complete and cost three times as much to deliver. Worst of all, the projects deliver only 40 percent of the features promised.
What is perplexing about this legacy of mismanagement is that we seem to have what we need to avoid failure. We have a long history of lessons-learned and access to a proven and accepted business discipline called program management. So why do we continue to struggle and fail?
A legacy of mismanagement We fail because we don’t make good decisions. Here are several reasons for this.
Decision-support information and data is often inaccurate, biased, unhelpful, untimely and/or nonexistent.
No single office or individual, who is free of bias, is steadily and unrelentingly focused on the cost, schedule and performance objectives of the program.
Highly experienced and skilled program managers are in short supply on government and prime-contractor teams.
No one is currently responsible for fair and unbiased coordination of multiple entities, including contractors and subcontractors.
There is no readily available source to provide real-time, independent advice, assessments and evaluations of programperformance.
Contractor employees may have a bias caused by conflicts of interest.
Our decision-making is flawed by cognitive biases and organizational pressures to make a case to win investment dollars. Daniel Kahneman, a professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and a 2002 Nobel Prize winner in economics, argues that delusional optimism undermines executive decision-making.
The answer So how do we make good decisions? The answer is simple and begins with the roles we play.
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