VA Delivering 9 out of 10 IT Projects on Time

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been re-engineering the way it manages its information technology projects, and it seems to have paid off. For fiscal 2011, VA managed to cross the finish line on 89 percent of its project milestones on time.

VA started its Performance Management and Accountability System (PMAS) in 2009. At that point, VA was up to schedule on fewer than 30 percent of its IT milestones. When fiscal year 2011 drew to a close, they were up to almost 90 percent, said Roger Baker, VA's assistant secretary for information and technology and chief information officer.

"That's a number that's far in excess of anything I've ever seen in a development organization before, either private sector or public sector," he said. "That's a government organization — one of the largest in the world. And to me, it's real example of a culture change."...