The US Government’s Stimulus Bill includes creation of an oversight (or “watchdog”) group called the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. Given the size of the proposed spend, I applaud the work that the RAT Board has been commissioned to do regarding the oversight and reporting on the $787 billion stimulus package. But I recognize that keeping track of - and providing transparency to - so many individual grants and their execution could be both time consuming and difficult to keep as clear as we all would like.
The governance role that the Board has is imperative in providing the US taxpayer with a simple, clear understanding of what has been proposed, what is funded, how those funded actions are proceeding and what the actual (as compared to projected) benefits are that have been accomplished.
Keeping such a large, diverse and dynamic catalog of grants in one or more mega spreadsheets or static presentation documents is infeasible, unless the Board expects to spend a significant portion of its $350 million oversight appropriation and a large portion of its staff's time over the next two years on manual processes of data collection, analysis and review. An alternative would be to hire someone to program a website and database from scratch (my estimate is that this option would be at a huge cost in time and money).
Instead, I would propose that the Board implement a portfolio management governance approach enabled by one of the off-the-shelf web based enterprise portfolio management tools already available. Such a tool can allow nationwide access to the information, enable grant recipients to easily (and publicly) report on their progress, and support RAT Board analysis (and communication) of where the spending is being made, how it is divided (for example between small businesses and large corporations, between public and private requestors, between education, employment and training) and what the REAL results are.
In addition to reporting what has happened, simple portfolio management processes and solutions also can be used to identify where there are issues of implementation and benefits realization. Instead of just reporting history, the RAT Board would be able to proactively identify trouble areas and provide support to improve the likelihood of success. The Board would be able to say: “what can we do to support this stimulus-supported effort in reaching its goals” instead of “why didn’t they succeed?” It would also be able to point out those instances where, despite best efforts, the objectives were not reached -and perhaps provide object lessons for improvements going forward.
The essence of portfolio governance processes supported by a simple automated portfolio management solution is that the Board could - in as little as 60-90 days - have a completely transparent catalog of all of the spending proposals put forward and actual grants made, including the proposed outcomes and benefits. Such a process and off-the-shelf system (in my experience with portfolio management implementations for Fortune 1000 organizations) is relatively inexpensive, simple to execute and simple to administer, as they have been designed to be managed by "business users" not computer programmers.
The Stimulus Package creates an opportunity on a grand scale to implement portfolio management tenets to support the level of oversight, transparency and analysis that the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board needs to be successful in its mission for the ultimate source of the funding – the US taxpayer.
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