Program Management for India development in budget 2009

Program Management for nation building

As a citizen and as a business professional, it’s hard not to worry about the enormous development issues in this country. For me, it’s a challenge about thinking through the big picture. Here’s why you should be worried too: with the government spending over Rs.51,000 crore of taxpayer’s money on national projects, its time someone started asking the right questions:

• Where is the money going?
• How do we know if it’s doing any good?

The answers obviously lie in the realm of project monitoring whereby we get to review spending on projects and know if resources are achieving expected outcomes. Neelesh Mishra recently filed some important research in the Hindustan Times on the state of government projects and used rural development in Maharashtra as an case study for how money is allocated without outcomes being delivered. The essential facts are worth revisiting here:

• The same job or project is run by multiple agencies For example, road building projects are done under the Bharat Nirman project (for rural infrastructure), the prime minister’s rural roads project, the Members’ of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme; similar arrangements exist for state legislators and state-level road building programs.
• The monitoring budget constitutes a mere 0.4 percent of the total project spend. The international norm is 10-12 percent though international projects do tend to spend at least a minimum of 5-6 percent on project monitoring.
• The monitoring data that comes back is often questionable or unverifiable. Asset registers– lists of everything that exists under a project or department—are redundant in the annals of government bureaucracy. In spite of the fact that these are legally mandatory!

It’s good to know that our President, in her address to the parliament, has promised independent monitoring mechanisms at the district level. These will certainly help ensure transparency and public accountability. The question now is how these mechanisms are to be implemented and by whom.

The MBA Solution

The HT article puts forward the following recommendations:

• Build one sector (example road) into one program
• Build a common centralized monitoring cell with requisite office and hardware
• Hire MBAs as Program Officers working out of 566 rural districts + 11,000 smaller units
• Staff 12 data entry operators under each Officer equipped with necessary hardware
• Use of technology and creation of National Virtual Asset Registry using GPS and GIS technology

The author goes further in suggesting that

Each of the MBAs should have a staff of 12 data entry operators, all paid Rs 10,000 a month and equipped with either small point-and-shoot cameras or cell phones equipped with cameras.

Whereas I agree largely on the deployment of technology assets, I feel there are fundamental assumptions and issues here especially around an MBA’s capabilities to play this role.  The education currently provided to MBAs around the discipline of Project Management is absent in the academic curriculum.  Our outdated curriculums still look at the Project Management discipline as a scheduling and operational subject.
I have argued about this in my other postings. You can find them here and here.

Eye in the sky—looking through the PMO

At the organization level we need a Program Management Office with a primary role of monitoring and governance.   Moving to a Program Management approach would certainly yield the right results as opposed to merely managing multiple initiatives like a large project. The failure to understand of the difference between managing projects versus managing programs—along with related processes and tools—can lead to misunderstanding of both efforts and outcomes.
Furthermore, standardization of inputs to the monitoring process is required for an effective monitoring mechanism to work at the national level. So is plan development and coherent measures of success led by implementation of measurement plans. These will help enforce national standards around managing projects and help evolve solutions for developing standards around managing programs.

Of course, training and development of MBAs in the program management discipline will equip them to play the central role of Program officers. But picking up fresh MBAs who are under-equipped in the subject is equivalent to treating PM as a skill issue and not a management domain in itself.

The need of the hour is a new breed of project professionals and program officers willing to align and involve themselves with the rural community to establish the correct measures of social control at the grass-root level.
I cannot but restate my call for the awareness and recognition of Program management as a mandatory discipline for capacity building with MBAs as a starting point.