| SUMMARY The
Public Building Service (PBS), one of three services within the General
Services Administration (GSA), provides work environments for over 1
million Federal employees nationwide. Created in 1949, PBS serves as a
builder, developer, and maintainer of Federally owned and leased
properties. PBS provides the full range of real estate services,
including brokerage, property management, construction, repair,
security services, disposal, and overall portfolio management for over
100 Federal agencies and commissions. The current portfolio of more
than 8,000 buildings and almost 300 million gross square feet includes
border stations, computer centers, Courthouses, laboratories, office
space, parking, and storage/warehousing facilities.
CHALLENGE
To manage the portfolio, GSA established 11 geographically
distributed regions, covering the entire United States. These regions
execute the capital construction and maintenance programs within their
regions. While this decentralization improved responsiveness within the
regions, it reduced the overall program visibility at the headquarters
level, increased the complexity of managing client relationships, and
increased the difficulty of presenting a coordinated program view to
oversight (congressional) committees.
HOW RGS HELPED
RGS provides design, development, implementation, and lifecycle
support for a Web-based Project Information Portal that enables
nationwide management of over $10 billion in Federal lease,
construction, and maintenance projects. To monitor program performance,
RGS designed the Project Information Portal to provide users with
instantaneous access to the information needed to make informed
business and investment decisions. Key features of this engagement
include:
- Requirements documentation using Goals/Questions/Metrics (GQM Top 10) methodology
- RUP rapid, iterative development cycle usage to build a reusable framework and reduce costs
- Technical solution implementation within GSA's current enterprise IT structure
- GSA
building management process improvement while reducing costs by
providing GSA managers across the US, a standardized data structure,
remote data collection and reporting
- Enterprise performance, status, and metrics-reporting deployment for projects within the capital construction program
- Legacy systems integration to provide unique information views
- Multi-level security integration with role-based access
- Functionality extension to include providing selected information to client agencies
RGS used a modified GQM methodology to work with senior
(headquarters) and middle (central office and regional) management;
operational (project management); and administrative (financial,
customer support) staff to define their "Top 10" questions. These
questions were then used to map operational, financial, and performance
information (both actual and baseline) at the project, regional, and
program levels. This map was then used to create the "data" model for
the portal, which identified the authoritative data source. Where
required, supporting systems were modified/created to collect
information that had not been previously collected. This "organization"
of performance (and related) information allowed all organizational
levels to use the portal as part of their daily business. The portal
was deployed in November 2001 and is used nationwide.
BENEFITS
RGS helped PBS establish the capability to continuously monitor the
real-time effectiveness and efficiency of PBS projects nationwide and
make comparisons of operations for like-kind projects to determine best
practices. As cited in GSA's 2004 Performance Plan, For tracking
construction and repairs and alterations project information, PBS uses
the Project Information Portal (PIP), a Web-based application. This
system links project managers, executives, and PBS in an integrated,
Web-enabled framework to track enterprise-wide information on the
current capital construction program. In addition, the portal has
allowed GSA to improve the quality of its underlying information
systems, simplify reporting, and reduce the cost to manage and track
capital construction projects within GSA PBS by a conservatively
estimated $1 million or more annually. |
