planning – Resource Library

In today’s competitive job market, firms prioritizing employee development hold a significant edge over those that don’t. This is because a comprehensive development program keeps employees engaged and motivated, thereby allowing companies to attract and retain top talent.

Kimberly Steide serves as Human Capital Planning and HR Stat Program Manager at the U.S. Department of Treasury. Here is our Federal Spotlight interview:

The government spends approximately $80 billion on Information Technology (IT) acquisitions. That equates to a lot of contract actions affecting the criticality of IT systems affecting our national health, security, and economy.

The likelihood that you will encounter procurements that have IT considerations at some point in your contracting career is high. So, how do you plan for these types of IT acquisitions, and how do you make decisions about your IT spending?

In just a couple weeks, I will be on my way to Italy for a two-week vacation! Che bella! When I was deciding where to go with my husband, I experienced a bit of work-related decision-making déjà vu. Every option we considered was very different from the next, but all were possibilities chosen based on the same exact set of data (number of vacation days available, budget, etc.).

I felt like I was back at the office working with a team, arguing about what decision to make, even though we’re usually reviewing the same data. The difficulty can be that different does not necessarily mean wrong in these situations.

One of the contributing factors to project and program failures within public organizations is the lack of organizational change management planning. This is well documented in Management Concepts recent report, “Successful Change Management Practices in the Public Sector.”

A common source of project failure over the past two decades has continued to be the management or mismanagement of project requirements. We are not going to discuss project failure, but only to show that a clear understanding of some of the management concepts for project requirements is crucial to the dismantling of this frightful statistic of poor performance. One such understanding is the difference between requirement verification and validation: a concept in its current state of confusion that in our experience continues to provide a level of misapplication of requirements, management techniques, and practices. This is especially true of Information Technology software-oriented projects.

Tag: planning