Managing large government IT projects? Don’t do it alone. A good general trusts his lieutenants.

If you get significant funding, resist the urge to buy more technology, you should first spend some of it on a manager with experience in government software projects. Otherwise you will find yourself getting mired down in areas which are non-technical, and you won’t be able to focus on design, programming and advocacy.

If you don’t get sufficient funding, resist the urge to promise too much on a tight budget. Managing expectations is just as important as managing resources when it comes to the overall success of the project.

I’ve worked in the public and federal sectors for several years now, and I have had to do too much project planning and management on my own. The process is different in government work than it is in the private sector. Coming from the startup and tech innovation sector, I found that many of my assumptions were wrong. In government projects, things take (much) longer, money goes through painful bureaucratic delays before being freed up, and it is much harder to get someone to make executive decisions and see that they are enforced.

A good project manager with government project experience will know to break the project into smaller parts, remove dependencies, and make a project more parallelizable so that you don’t end up with a team of people waiting for a critical milestone. Also, they will be able to do resource management and expenditure tracking better from 50,000 feet than you can from the ground.

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