Panel: Program managers, techies must cooperate

To make information technology projects work, federal program managers and techies should get to know the demands of each other's jobs, two former federal executives said Wednesday.

Speaking at the Government Technology Leadership Institute in Washington, former General Services Administration executive Bob Woods said program managers should describe to technology experts what mission they want to accomplish, but respect the techies' ability to choose the right technology. In other words, program managers are responsible for determining what needs to be accomplished; technology managers are responsible for determining how.

Otherwise, if you're a program manager, "you may wind up with what you asked for, but not what you need," said Woods, now a private sector executive at Rockville, Md.-based ACS Government Solutions Group.

Conversely, techies should get out from behind their computers and learn about the mission of their agencies, said Woods, who also worked at the Federal Aviation Administration. Though he was a techie at FAA, Woods spent a few afternoons a week in the control tower at Washington's National Airport learning first-hand about program managers' needs while working on an IT project for them.

Renny DiPentima, a former technology executive at the Social Security Administration, now at Fairfax, Va.-based SRA International, described the working relationship he had with the chief program manager at Social Security. The program manager explained her business needs to DiPentima, who would find the technology to meet them. DiPentima said projects fail when technology is separated from business practices.

The importance of getting program managers and techies to collaborate is not lost on most federal executives. Difficulties in numerous large-scale federal technology projects over the past couple decades, from the Internal Revenue Service to the Health Care Financing Administration to the Federal Aviation Administration, have in part been blamed on tensions between techies and program managers.

DiPentima said federal executives should create teams of people from various segments of an agency to work collaboratively on designing and implementing technology projects.

"I have never seen a successful system occur that wasn't brought together by a team," DiPentima said. "But I've seen unmotivated non-team people make a great system fail."