Three feds round up management awards
At the General Services Administration's Roundup '99 being held here, the cadre of trained project managers in government selected three of their number for special performance awards.
WILLIAMSBURG, Va.—At the General Services Administration's Roundup '99 being held here, the cadre of trained project managers in government selected three of their number for special performance awards.
The highest honor, the 1999 Trail Boss of the Year Award, went to Lt. Col. William Cox, deputy director of the Functional Information Special Projects Office at the Air Force's Standard Systems Group, for his work in rescuing three large manpower and readiness databases and getting the systems back on schedule.
Jerry Bennis, Defense Message System program manager at the Defense Information Systems Agency received a special achievement award for his work in putting the Defense Message System back on track. The Pentagon conceived DMS a decade ago as a replacement for its aging Automatic Digital Network message system and as a departmentwide e-mail system designed to serve up to 2 million users, including tactical commands operating in the field. But DMS development experienced numerous problems and was scaled back.
Craig Webster, project manager of the Y2K Project Office at Public Works Canada, also received a special achievement award for building Year 2000 readiness in the Canadian government.
The Trail Boss program was started in 1988 to train government executives to manage large, complex acquisition projects. Since that time, hundreds of executives, including many federal CIOs and their deputies have gone through the two-week training course. Each year at the Roundup, graduates of the program gather for a week of continuing education on project management issues.