Last week, OMB posted online the Management Watch List and High Risk List, which OMB officials use to monitor the planning and performance of key projects. The Management Watch List includes projects for which agencies have submitted business cases with apparent weaknesses. The High Risk List identifies projects that need special attention from the agencies’ senior executives in the course of their execution.

The bigger projects on those lists often are of equal interest to oversight groups, such as congressional committees and the Government Accountability Office. The documents should help them do a better job of tracking the progress of big-ticket programs — and OMB’s oversight of them.

That is what GAO had in mind earlier this month when it recommended that OMB share the lists with Congress. With those documents in hand, Congress and GAO can collaborate with OMB in overseeing troubled projects, said David Powner, GAO’s director of IT management issues.

“It’s hard to stay on top of 900 projects,” Powner said.

Agencies could notice the difference, observers said.

Publicizing the two lists puts pressure on agencies to fix projects that are performing poorly because it puts them under the microscope, said Renee Courtland, a former OMB official and now a senior associate at Dutko Government Markets.

“Some large departments have a bad habit of thumbing their nose at criticism that originates from the management side of OMB,” she said. “If this report generates enough negative attention from congressional appropriators, even those agencies will sit up and pay attention.”

David McClure, former vice president of e-government at the Council for Excellence in Government and now a research director at Gartner, said congressional appropriators can use the lists to ask agencies more carefully honed questions.

However, the lists lack OMB’s project analyses, which would have provided more clarity about why a given project made the list, he said.