Achieving Project Management Success in the Federal Government

Chapter 2  

Fitting ProjectManagement into the Organization:Round Peg/Square Hole

There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.

—PRESIDENT LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON

The town of Parkersburg, West Virginia, sits at the confluence of the Little Kanawha and the Ohio rivers. This small, comfortable city of 35,000 is home to the Parkersburg High Big Reds, the Sentinel newspaper, and the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Public Debt. A glass and concrete building houses the bureau’s Administrative Resource Center (ARC), which provides administrative support services to other government agencies. ARC is one of those unusual quasi-governmental business units: a franchise department that is allowed to operate ...