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Special Study of FMD's Management of Project Delivery
November 17, 2011
This study provides a high-level review of the Facility Management Division's (FMD) capital project delivery on maintenance, rehabilitation, and parks projects. We found opportunities for improvement of its management practices. Overall, FMD's processes for developing initial project scope, schedule, and budget, lack rigor and compounded by the constraints of the county's budget development timelines, result in unrealistic or incomplete budget requests. FMD's former planning tools may result in over scheduling of project managers and some work processes are not consistently followed. Moreover, FMD lacks meaningful performance measures to adequately assess program results. Monitoring of project progress has often been conducted in an ad hoc manner without tracking project results to baseline plans.
Recent developments by FMD and the County offer opportunities to improve project delivery. These include use of new project management software, more stability in supervisory positions, new countywide guidelines for project management, and a new countywide finance and budget system in 2012. Collectively, these changes provide FMD new tools for applying standard procedures in developing more accurate initial project estimates and assessing project delivery performance. Our recommendations will compliment FMD and countywide efforts and result in improved management of project delivery through development of more meaningful performance measures and better budget formulation practices.
Audit Highlights
We found that FMD's development of initial project scope, schedule, and cost estimates lack rigor resulting in unrealistic or incomplete budget requests. We also found that workload planning methods may over-schedule project managers. As a result, projects planned for completion in the calendar year often carry over and require resources in the next year or beyond. FMD does very limited monitoring of budget versus actual project costs. Finally, FMD lacks meaningful performance measures for effective management of project delivery.
We make three recommendations to facilitate a more robust accountability framework for capital project delivery. First, ensure a more rigorous planning process focusing on establishing baseline scope, schedule, and budget. Second, establish meaningful performance measures. Third, develop and apply standards to ensure that estimates are consistent with best practice for appropriation requests.
In 2011, FMD was managing 141 active projects totaling more than $88 million. These projects include parks capital projects and facilities rehabilitation and care of county facilities. Effective delivery of projects results in benefits to county residents and efficient expenditure of county resources.
Recommendation Status
Of the 3 recommendations:
- DONE: 3
Recommendations have been fully implemented. Auditor will no longer monitor. - PROGRESS: 0
Recommendations are in progress or partially implemented. Auditor will continue to monitor. - OPEN: 0
Recommendations remain unresolved. Auditor will continue to monitor. - CLOSED: 0
Recommendation is no longer applicable. Auditor will no longer monitor.