Avi Duvdevani played a pivotal role in New York City's technology history. He was a member of the team that created the city's first technology agency, the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, and served as the agency's acting commissioner. He helped establish the city's first telecommunications network, CityNet, and the city's presence on the Internet with an award-winning Web site. Duvdevani also spent weeks in the trenches working to restore the city's IT services following the Sept. 11 attacks.

As a 30-year veteran of public-sector IT management, Duvdevani certainly saw his share of public-sector IT challenges, but he was about to see the biggest when he became CIO of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) -- the largest real estate management organization in the United States.

NYCHA controls 12 percent of the rental apartments in New York City, which affects 8 percent of the city's population. The authority serves more than 174,000 families and 418,000 authorized residents, and has more than 15,000 employees.

NYCHA hasn't undergone reform since the mid-1990s, but when Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, it decided to launch a major reorganization and leverage its technology projects in that process. When Duvdevani became CIO in April 2003, it was up to him to ensure technology projects implemented by NYCHA were done so successfully.

"When I came to NYCHA, there seemed to be no real rhyme or reason to how technology was acquired, or what the drivers for such acquisitions might be," Duvdevani said. "When this organization decided to create a CIO position, it was an ideal opportunity to put in some processes and fill a void in IT governance."

NYCHA also was in the midst of an enormous ERP deployment. Duvdevani needed to infuse discipline into the authority's IT policy decisions quickly and effectively.

"Poor project management leads to project failure," he said. "A standard discipline would provide the resources and tools to improve the success of IT projects, and protect the enterprise's investment."


The Roadmap
Duvdevani's solution was creating an Enterprise IT Project Management Office (IT PMO) responsible for designing and implementing a project management discipline for all enterprisewide IT initiatives within NYCHA. The goal was to better manage authority IT projects, distribute project ownership and justification, establish a collaborative IT project management environment, leverage and share practices, and introduce innovation and change.

Duvdevani hired Helene Heller as senior director of project and information management. Heller and Duvdevani, who worked together on the city's e-government programs under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, are developing a roadmap for each "business," or division, within NYCHA to follow. This roadmap includes product delivery and project management processes, standards, best practices, and tools they hoped would enable NYCHA to raise performance levels and deliver positive financial impact.

"It's very important we make the right budget decisions considering the fiscal climate government is in today," said Heller. "When it comes to IT, there are a lot of competing priorities. We needed a process to help the decision-makers determine where to make the best use of IT dollars."

The project management roadmap will also include a suite of technology tools rooted in a set of templates that must be filled out by those undertaking IT projects. The templates guide project managers in identifying business needs, addressing governance responsibilities, building a business case to justify IT projects, and ensuring commitments are met and online collaboration tools are implemented effectively. The templates also help project managers identify metrics to track progress on a "management scorecard."

Key among these, Duvdevani said, is addressing governance responsibilities. The IT PMO requires the business owner, or initiator, of any new IT project to take a major role in managing the project. It also requires that person's executive -- their boss or the