Internal Revenue Service

In May 2009, the Strategy and Capital Planning Investment Office within the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) contracted with Vergys to address problems with its “Select, Control, and Evaluate” capital planning phases. Specifically, the IRS realized that the quality and strategic relevance of the performance measures varied greatly among major IT investments. Furthermore, the lessons learned from the Post Implementation Reviews (PIRs) and Operational Analysis (OA) Reviews that were used by only a small subset of projects were not fully integrated into the capital planning cycle. As part of the IRS analysis, our team:

• Reviewed and updated the performance measures for all major IT investments (20+);
• Researched the best practices and lessons learned from other civilian agencies’ capital planning and investment control processes; and
• Updated process documentation for PIRs and OAs based upon best practices from the Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) frameworks.

As a result of our efforts, we improved the internal Exhibit 300 scores for performance management. We developed a new process that reduced the time to complete a PIR or OA (from up to eighteen months to less than four months) and reduced the time to provide “Evaluate” feedback to the project team (within hours, as opposed to months). We also documented edits for the overall departmental capital planning programming guide.