The sheer size and breadth of Centrelink's operations has always meant project management there is a Herculean effort. Taking a new approach to its people and project scheduling has improved the situation dramatically -- but change hasn't been easy, as David Braue explains.
Snapshot
source: Centrelink
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Centrelink administers $63 billion in annual benefits to 6.4 million customers serviced through more than 140 government social support programs including unemployment benefits, sole carer pensions, disaster relief and many others.
It's well known that driving cultural change through an organisation can be extremely difficult -- but in an organisation the size of Centrelink, which is managing more than 120 projects worth $186 million this year -- the magnitude of the problem increases dramatically.
For the past nine years, Centrelink has been working on ways to improve management of its massive IT spend, and an ongoing enterprise project portfolio management (PPM) initiative for Centrelink has in recent years delivered major improvements in resource scheduling. Years down the track, however, Centrelink is still wrestling with the challenge of driving change and consistency throughout its massive structure.
PPM is the latest in a series of project management initiatives that stretch back to the 1997-8 financial year, when Centrelink -- a 25,000-strong Department of Human Services agency that manages some $63 billion in social support payments through over 100 different programs -- recognised the need to formalise the way it ran increasingly expensive, complex and mission-critical IT projects.
That year, the introduction of Primavera Systems' Project Planner and SureTrak Project Manager system was a shot in the arm for the newly established Centrelink Project Office (CPO), which was created as a centre of gravity for the agency's massive IT development and project management practice. CPO was complemented in 1998-9 with the formation of an investment decision-making body, and by the end of 2000 Centrelink had added further structure to its process revitalisation by introducing account management support.
Towards a new project view
With so many projects are going on at once, matching the skills and availability of technical staff with the projects that needed them was a full-time effort managed by more than two dozen dedicated employees. Those employees worked with project managers to track project progress so they could anticipate when skilled application developers, testers, debuggers and other staff would become available for other projects.
Although narrowly focused tools like Microsoft Project offered a view of the resources assigned to projects, scheduling staff still had to keep on top of competing demands for resources between different projects. In many cases, they had little choice but to rely on approximations from project managers who were themselves scheduling their projects on little more than gut feel.
The result was, as Jonathan Toze, manager for enterprise scheduling with Centrelink, puts it, "essentially inappropriate planning" that was regularly causing resource conflicts. Staff were often double-booked or simply unavailable for complex projects plagued by frequent scope changes and deadline slippage.
Those problems soon motivated the project office's staff to look into PPM -- a top-down approach in which resource scheduling is managed using a holistic view that stretches across the breadth of the project portfolio rather than myopically focusing on individual projects.
Recognising the need for change, in 2002-3 Centrelink considered how a push towards PPM, and related initiatives that could improve its project management culture and supporting systems. A partnership with the University of New England laid the foundation for a professional development diploma in program management that Centrelink project managers are encouraged to undertake, while technical staff worked to evaluate PPM solutions and introduce the technology across the organisation.
"As an organisation, our standard of [scheduling] maturity was at a zero level," says Toze. "An effort was made to improve the management of our investment decision making, and to gain some visibility of the work commitments and formal decision making. This change represented a significant change to the way Centrelink undertook its investment decision making, and it has been undergoing a maturing process ever since."
Jonathan Toze, Centrelink
During the 2003-4 financial year, the team introduced the Primavera TeamPlay collaborative project management system. This environment allowed Centrelink to structure its program management efforts around specific job roles, making it easier to split responsibilities among staff and to juggle the many competing demands on available resources.
As it was progressively implemented throughout Centrelink, the organisation gradually came to apply best-practice rigour to many of its biggest pain points: investment decision making modelling, portfolio governance, resource planning and management, benefits planning and management, change management and the construction of a formal competency framework to guide and measure its activities.
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