Kost And Howard Summary

Kost and Howard (2014)
Purpose. This article discusses why the government seems always to have problems with technology.
Authority. John Kost is a Group Vice President in Gartner Research, where he leads the team of analysts providing research for chief executives and has written many articles on business process and improvement. Rick Howard is a Research Vice President and government research Agenda Manager at Gartner, where he focuses on public-sector IT solutions, management practices, and technology trends.
Accuracy. This article is published by The Gartner Group, a well know and respected information technology leader in research and as a consulting company to other businesses.
Relevance. This article discusses why public-sector project
This article is relevant to the discussion of large-scale government IT projects and how to use an established process for on-time projects.
Currency. This article was published in 2014 and meets the currency requirements of this project. Main point. The 10 main points presented by Miller et al., (2014) were:
1. A project manager's time is mostly spent in meetings and managing people. However, the focus should be on the project. Resolving project roadblocks and risk is where the focus should be for the project manager (Miller et al., 2014, para. 5).
2. A full understanding of the project deliverable for the whole team is required so that each team member understands how their part of the project interfaces with all the other parts of the project. With detailed requirements in place, then the project can be planned, and a solid project scope comes together (Miller, K., et al., 2014, para. 9).
3. Change control is essential to the project to ensure that scope creep does not become a pattern while working on the project. If changes are not validated against the original scope, then the project will soon be out of control with cost overruns, schedule slippage, or the project may be canceled (Miller, K., et al., 2014, para.
In 2015, a list of projects with risk or already in trouble was sent to Capitol Hill and reported during a press conference. Moreover, of course, the huge elephant in the room was the troubled Healthcare.gov project which had a very rocky start in October 2013. This project exposed problems that have plagued the federal government regarding IT projects for years past (Moore et al., 2015, para. 5).
4. What wrong with Healthcare.gov can be summed up to two basic causes. Ineffective planning and oversight along with a project charter that seems to bend with the wind, thus causing the scope to have to be flexible along with vendor miss-management (Moore et al., 2015, p. 6).
5. Future IT projects are slated to come online, including the 2020 Census, the On-again, off-again joint effort between the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration for a common electronic healthcare system for veterans. The Pentagon is working on a major overhaul of their accounting system and has already had cost increase estimates over 1 billion double since 2012 (Moore et al., 2015, para.