Real Property: GSA Is Taking Steps to Improve Collection and Reporting of Repair and Alteration Projects' Information
Released: 2018-07-23T00:00:00

Letter

Background

GSA spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on needed repairs to the more than 1,600 federally owned buildings under its custody and control, which are occupied by a wide variety of federal tenant agencies. The agency’s R&A program provides repairs and alterations for buildings to ensure that they will protect both the government’s investment and the health and safety of buildings’ occupants, support the transfer of federal agencies from leased space, and be cost-effective.

GSA prioritizes capital and small R&A projects for selection differently. GSA gives priority to repairs to prevent deterioration and damage to buildings, their support systems, and operating equipment. GSA’s central office uses criteria based on agency-wide strategic goals to rank and prioritize projects for funding. According to GSA’s Fiscal Year 2019 Congressional Justification, the agency prioritizes R&A capital projects relative to a set of six criteria, each of which consider factors such as space consolidation, customer priorities, project urgency, facility conditions, historic status, and code compliance. For small R&A projects, GSA’s central office reviews those with estimated costs exceeding $250,000 and develops an “approved” list of projects for its regions using criteria similar to those used to prioritize capital projects. GSA’s small R&A projects primarily focus on building repairs and equipment and other replacement issues.

The Federal Buildings Fund (FBF), established by the Public Buildings Act Amendments of 1972 and administered by GSA, is the primary source of funds for all operating and capital costs associated with federal space—including repairs and alterations. GSA collects rent from tenant agencies, deposits it into FBF, and is appropriated obligational authority by Congress to fund real property acquisition, repairs and alterations, operation, maintenance, and disposal. As shown in figure 1, the amount of funding appropriated in obligational authority for R&A projects has steadily decreased since fiscal year 2014—and has been below the amount GSA requested each fiscal year. According to GSA officials, this decline in funding has contributed to the agency’s backlog of deferred maintenance. In fiscal year 2018, GSA requested more than $1.4 billion for R&A activities; $666 million in obligational authority was appropriated from the FBF to perform major and minor repairs and alterations. GSA has requested $909.7 million for R&A activities for fiscal year 2019.

GSA’s Public Buildings Service manages R&A projects through its central office in Washington, D.C., and 11 regional offices. GSA’s central office establishes programming, design, and construction standards and guidance, and provides technical backup, as needed. GSA officials in both the central and regional offices are involved in assessing the needs of federal facilities and guiding R&A project development and execution. Once a project is authorized and funded, GSA’s regional offices oversee the design and construction phases of the project, from the procurement of design through the management of construction until project closeout.

Further details of GSA’s R&A project design and construction delivery process are shown in figure 2.

GSA Collects Information on R&A Projects Electronically and Is Taking Steps to Improve the Collection of Small Project Information

Regional GSA Offices Collect Information on Capital and Small R&A Projects Electronically

In order to track projects, GSA has developed numerous systems that regional officials are required to use to collect information electronically on R&A projects. Each of these systems is used to collect different types of information, such as information on potential projects or funding details. These systems are used throughout the phases of GSA’s project design and construction delivery process, starting at the point that a potential project is first identified, and each system serves various management purposes, as noted in table 1.

While GSA uses all of these systems to collect information on R&A projects, ePM/ePMXpress is the system used to track a project’s progress because it supports and facilitates the tracking of project status and related performance reporting. GSA regional officials initially create records of capital projects in ePM early in the planning process—about 2 years before funding is requested from Congress—and for small projects in ePMXpress soon after they are authorized for initial funding. Once a project is entered into ePM/ePMXpress, GSA project team members (which include the project manager, other regional GSA staff, and may include external contractors) populate and update key types of project information at specific points in the project’s design and construction delivery process.

GSA’s central office first introduced ePM as a pilot project in 2009 and, to establish consistency in the information collected, issued minimum requirement guidelines for the project information to be input in the system in 2011. These guidelines require project team members to enter specific information on both capital and small projects into ePM. GSA introduced ePMXpress in late 2012, and it provides regional officials with a simplified interface to input and track small project information. This simplification is reflected in the types and amounts of information GSA requires project teams to collect in ePM compared to ePMXpress:

For capital projects in ePM, there are 42 modules such as project details, funding, contracts, and schedule data.

For small projects in ePMXpress, there are 7 modules—program information, project details, project team details, schedule, funding, project manager financials, and file manager information.

Within these modules, project team members are required to input specific baseline and actual milestone dates in ePM/ePMXpress for both small and capital projects, including when a project’s design is complete, when construction is authorized to begin, and when construction is substantially complete. Capital projects require 57 milestones, compared with up to 16 milestones for small projects.

See appendix II for additional information on the specific types of information that regional GSA officials are required to collect on their capital and small R&A projects.

GSA guidelines also encourage project team members to collect and record additional R&A project information in ePM/ePMXpress—beyond what is required for capital and small projects—as a best practice. Officials from GSA’s central office said storing additional information in this system encourages collaboration across both project teams and regions, promotes a project management culture that results in more efficiency, and allows GSA to more efficiently prepare reports for its customers. Officials from three of the four regional offices we contacted provided examples of project team members in their region inputting more information on their R&A projects than required by GSA’s central office.

For example, officials in one region said they have required their project team members to collect additional information on their projects that allow the region to monitor staff workload, forecast the number of future small projects that may be needed, and ensure that officials have sufficient resources available to oversee their region’s projects.

GSA Is Continuing Efforts to Improve Its Collection of Small R&A Project Information

According to GSA officials, they have seen improvements in the collection of capital R&A project information since first requiring regional offices to use ePM. Officials from GSA’s central office said that since ePM was first introduced in 2009, they have worked with regional officials to adjust the types of information that project team members must input to improve the completeness, timeliness, and usefulness of project information collected. As a result, GSA officials reported that project team members are now (1) consistently creating capital R&A projects in ePM and (2) regularly updating information on these projects in a complete and timely manner, throughout the agency’s project design and construction delivery process. Officials from GSA’s central office said they verify that the projects have been entered into ePM when regional officials request them for inclusion in GSA’s budget, a process that occurs during a project’s early planning stages. These officials added that once a capital project is funded, project team members are required to actively manage its details in ePM, providing regular updates through various reporting tools. Furthermore, they stated that, as few new capital projects are funded each year, each capital project is highly visible and subject to a degree of scrutiny that leads to the identification and correction of any errors in ePM. In addition, according to GSA officials, missing project information would be captured in regional performance reports. For these reasons, GSA officials said they do not develop reports on the creation of capital projects in ePM or the timeliness of updates made to these projects.

Project team members we interviewed said that having information on capital R&A projects in ePM is useful in a number of ways. For example, project team members from all four regions we interviewed said they find the “earned value” tool in ePM to be useful for project management. This tool uses schedule and budget information to forecast how a capital project is expected to progress and analyzes progress as new information is added. In addition, officials from two regions stated that ePM is a good tool for storing project documents for internal agency use, and officials from one of the regions said ePM offers a useful means to securely transmit capital project documents to both internal and external stakeholders.

GSA also reported improvements in the completeness and timeliness of updates to small projects’ information in ePMXpress in recent years. GSA conducts monthly checks to assess the number of small projects in ePMXpress with information that is either missing or out of date and issues reports to its regions summarizing the results of these checks. In May 2015, GSA issued an internal memorandum that reiterated its existing requirement that all small R&A projects be created in ePMXpress and updated in a complete and timely manner. In October 2016, GSA’s reports showed that, of all small R&A projects in ePMXpress, on average, 5 percent had schedule data errors and 7 percent had budget data errors. These rates varied across GSA’s regional offices, from 0 to 11 percent for schedule errors and 1 to 16 percent for budget errors. To reduce the rate of budget data errors, in 2017 GSA began using some contract award information available in EASi or FMIS to assess small projects’ performance, instead of relying on information input in ePMXpress. GSA’s central office officials said that they found the information in these systems to be more up to date. After GSA implemented this action, its September 2017 report showed that less than one percent of small R&A projects had errors in their schedule or budget data. Specifically, nine of GSA’s 11 regions had no small R&A projects with schedule errors, and 10 regions had no budget errors.

GSA has reported that the rate at which project team members initially create all of their small R&A projects in ePMXpress has also improved in recent years. Each month, officials from GSA’s central office take steps to verify that funded projects have been created in ePMXpress by manually reconciling information between ePMXpress and IRIS. GSA’s stated goal is to have 100 percent of small projects created in ePMXpress, and its guidelines require project team members to create all small projects in ePMXpress within 30 days of being approved for funding. We found that recent GSA reports on this reconciliation showed that the overall percentage of small projects having been created in the system has improved. At the beginning of fiscal years 2016, 2017, and 2018, nationwide compliance trended from 81 percent to 95 percent to 92 percent, respectively. In addition, the lowest percentage of small projects created in ePMXpress in any one individual region at the start of fiscal year 2016—61 percent—had improved to 88 percent by the outset of fiscal year 2017 and was 85 percent at the beginning of fiscal year 2018. At that time, the percentage of small projects created in ePMXpress ranged, by region, between 85 and 100 percent. GSA officials said they expect to find some small projects to be missing in ePMXpress because, in some cases, not enough time will have elapsed between the date of funding and the date of the reconciliation. GSA officials explained that they are continuing to take steps to emphasize the importance of having complete and timely information on all small R&A projects in ePMXpress to its regional offices. For example, to support the expectation that all small projects are created in ePMXpress, one official from GSA’s central office said monthly meetings are held with regional officials to discuss expectations for the completeness and quality of the project information.

Regional officials, including project team members, told us that ePMXpress is not useful to their work on small R&A projects, a situation that has limited the extent to which the officials use this tool, an outcome that can affect the completeness and timeliness of small project information. Specifically, officials from one region said that they view ePMXpress solely as a tracking tool for GSA’s central office, not as a project management tool. In addition, some regional officials said they do not find ePMXpress to be effective as a project management tool because ePMXpress does not allow them to collect information on useful project details, such as why schedules or cost estimates change during a project or why certain events happened. Project team members from three regions said that they continue to maintain offline “cuff records”— which allow them to customize their notes on why things happened during a project—because they are easier to access and update. Similarly, officials from all four regions we interviewed noted that the process of manually creating and updating all of their small projects in ePMXpress— of which there are hundreds each year—is time consuming. Furthermore, small R&A projects can often be started and completed in a short period of time, and can be completed before a project team is required to create a record in ePMXpress (within 30 days of a project’s approval). For this reason, officials from one region said that it is not useful to use ePMXpress for these projects. Officials in another region also reported that one of the functions that makes ePM useful for managing capital projects—that it can securely transmit documents outside of GSA—is not useful for small projects because they do not require as much interaction with external parties.

GSA has begun considering replacement systems for ePM/ePMXpress that GSA officials suggested could include the automated creation of projects upon project approval. As of March 2018, GSA had developed a statement of work to begin pursuing a replacement for ePM/ePMXpress. According to officials from the Office of GSA’s Chief Information Officer, the overall goals of a replacement include ensuring that it is easier for project team members to use than the current system. However, the capabilities of any such system are not currently known, nor are the ways in which a different system would affect the challenges reported by regional officials.

In the meantime, GSA is continuing to emphasize the importance of using ePMXpress to create and capture information for all small R&A projects to its regional offices, as the agency is using the information to support both ongoing and new efforts. For example, creating and updating project information in a timely manner improves GSA’s ability to assess R&A projects’ performance at the individual, regional, and national levels, as discussed later in this report. In fiscal year 2018, GSA plans to use project information input in ePM/ePMXpress to support its efforts to improve communication with tenant agencies, and GSA guidelines state it will be important that project team members use ePMXpress throughout all project phases for their small projects and ensure that the required information is up to date. In addition, the overall amount of information that project team members are required to input will increase moving forward because GSA is now requiring staff to create additional small projects in ePMXpress in a shorter period of time. In March 2018, GSA both reduced the time that project teams have to create small projects in ePM/ePMXpress from 30 to 15 days and also began requiring that additional, non-R&A small projects be created in the system. GSA has estimated this will result in approximately 1,100 additional projects being created in ePMXpress each year.

GSA Uses Schedule and Budget Measures to Assess the Performance of R&A Projects and Is Taking Steps to Improve Reporting

GSA Uses Schedule- and Budget-Related Performance Measures to Assess R&A Projects

GSA’s central office assesses the performance of capital and small R&A projects across its regional offices by focusing primarily on schedule and budget-related measures. According to internal GSA guidelines on performance measures, measuring projects’ schedule and budget performance allows GSA to continuously improve the project delivery and accountability of its work in order to demonstrate good stewardship of its stakeholders’ limited funding.

GSA assesses the performance of R&A projects using a few key measures. First, GSA uses a “timely award” measure. According to internal GSA guidelines on performance measures, the “timely award” measure reflects the effectiveness of early planning by assessing the timeliness of the obligation of funds for construction contracts following a project’s initial authorization. This measure is based on schedule information that project team members input in ePM/ePMXpress and, as mentioned earlier, budget information from the FMIS and EASi systems to compare planned obligations, projected contract award amounts, and planned contract award dates to actual results. Specifically, GSA officials stated that a project’s performance relative to the timely award measure is determined based on the percentage of awards that are made within set timeframes. This measure varies slightly between capital and small projects; for example, a capital project is viewed as successful if 90 percent of its planned obligation dollars are awarded within 30 days of its planned “baseline” award dates set at a project’s outset, and partially successful if this awarding occurs within 45 days. Conversely, a small project is deemed successful if 85 percent of its planned obligation dollars are awarded within 30 days of its baseline award dates or within 10 percent of its estimated construction costs. If 80 percent of these funds are awarded within 45 days or 20 percent of estimated construction costs, a small project is considered partially successful with respect to this measure.

GSA also has two “project delivery” measures. Once construction begins, GSA uses information from ePM/ePMXpress, EASi, and FMIS to assess whether projects are delivered “on-schedule” and “on-budget” by comparing the alignment of a project’s (1) estimated baseline schedule and budget to its (2) actual schedule and budget. As shown in figure 3, GSA’s project-delivery measures focus on the time between the start of construction and substantial completion, which is the date on which a project is suitable for occupancy. GSA’s project delivery targets are to have 85 percent of R&A projects be completed within 10 percent of their baseline schedules, and 85 percent of them to have total costs within 10 percent of their baseline budgets. GSA reported that it uses these measures to understand how capital R&A projects contribute to its agency-wide strategic objective to establish GSA as a more effective provider of real estate services for all agencies. According to GSA officials, tracking the rate at which capital projects—including capital R&A projects—are completed on time and within budget helps regional officials manage project expectations with their customers.

GSA reported that most of its R&A projects met the agency’s overall timely-award and project-delivery performance targets in fiscal year 2017. For the timely award measure, GSA reported that in fiscal year 2017, 93 percent of capital projects had their planned obligation dollars awarded within 30 days of their baseline award dates and that 87 percent of small projects had awards made within 45 days of their baseline dates. For the project delivery measure, GSA reported that 99 percent of all capital projects completed on-schedule and 99 percent were on-budget in fiscal year 2017. In that same year, GSA reported that 88 percent of small R&A projects were on-schedule and 86 percent were on-budget. GSA arrived at these results by rolling up information on individual projects’ performance. Officials from GSA’s central office said that capital projects are typically completed on-schedule and on-budget at a higher rate than small projects because capital projects have a more comprehensive planning process and are often reviewed by third parties, and they said that this process tends to result in more accurate baseline estimates. These officials also said that, while GSA has assessed the performance of its capital projects for 14 years and its regional officials have grown familiar with measurement of these projects, the agency only began assessing small projects’ performance in the past 3 years and regional officials are still growing accustomed to the idea of measurement on projects with lesser costs.

GSA officials are able to adjust the baseline schedule milestones and cost estimates against which the agency assesses performance when circumstances requiring additional time or funding arise during a project’s construction phase. According to an internal GSA document detailing requirements related to performance measures and reporting for capital projects, it is more difficult to change baseline milestones for a capital project than to adjust the dates for a small project because once a capital project’s baselines are input in ePM, they can only be altered through an adjudication process involving GSA’s central office. As described by officials in one GSA region, this process focuses on determining whether the reasons provided to support a request are strong enough to justify a baseline change. If such a change is approved by the central office, actual performance will then be compared against adjusted baseline milestone dates or cost estimates. GSA officials stated that, although there is no such adjudication process for small projects, any changes to schedule or budget baselines must be approved by regional management or, in some cases, officials from the central office depending on the context of the change.

The brief nature of some small R&A projects may affect the entry of their information and the interpretation of the reported performance. For example, we found that all eight of the small projects we reviewed had either missing baseline dates or baseline and actual milestone dates that matched exactly in the system. When asked why this may occur, officials from one region explained that small R&A projects with short durations can sometimes be completed before a project team is required to create the project’s record in ePMXpress. This can result in either missing data or baseline and completion dates simply being entered in a single session. Officials from GSA’s central office said that they rely on regional officials to input accurate information throughout the course of a project, as baselines are set and actual milestones are either met or exceeded.

GSA Reports on R&A Projects’ Performance at Regional and National Levels and Is Introducing New Reporting Intended to Create a Consistent Understanding of Performance

GSA’s central office produces regional and national reports and provides them to their regional offices to facilitate internal discussion on R&A projects’ performance. Specifically, GSA shares the reports containing regional and overall results of its timely award measure, project delivery measures, and the previously discussed reconciliation measure to encourage conversations among senior GSA leadership and regional management. For example, one report compares projects’ actual progress with baseline milestones using the project delivery measures to assess the accuracy of teams’ planning. GSA also shares R&A project delivery measure results with the Office of Management and Budget when compiling its annual performance reports.

Regional officials varied in the extent to which they viewed R&A performance reports as useful, and some regions have developed their own approaches to understanding projects’ performance. For example, officials in all four GSA regions we interviewed said that some reports distributed by the central office are not specific to their information needs. Officials from one of these regions described one report as having little value because it is difficult to understand what message the report is intended to convey. Officials from another region said they do not find a particular report to be useful because—in addition to the timely award measure that GSA emphasizes in working to understand R&A project performance—it also includes less prominent milestones in identifying whether a project is on schedule. These officials said that while their region focuses on significant milestones like a project’s contract award date (“timely award” measure) to assess progress, the report often flags projects as being behind schedule based on less critical interim milestones that can be done concurrently with other tasks, such as submitting a document for legal review. When regional officials have not found the reports shared by GSA’s central office to be useful, some said they rely on varying sources of information to understand performance. For example, officials from one region we interviewed said they use raw data, made available by the central office, to create reports that they feel offer a more complete picture of performance in their region and highlight projects that may be at risk. Similarly, officials from another region said they create custom consolidated reports to discuss projects and obtain an overall impression of the information available, track and assign workloads, and assess any relevant trends emerging across projects.

Officials from GSA’s central office said they are aware that some regions have not found R&A performance reports to be useful. These officials 1) acknowledged that the extent of information and features that ePM/ePMXpress offers is less than some regions have told them they need to manage their projects and 2) said updating these reports only once or twice per month is not often enough for some regions. The officials added that some regions’ opting to rely on other sources of information has contributed to an inconsistent understanding of R&A projects’ performance across the agency. GSA has been conducting outreach to its regional offices to better understand what information regions find useful to understanding their projects’ performance. GSA’s plan for this outreach states that one of its aims is to ensure that regions clearly understand the purpose, outcome, and value of new reports being developed. According to this plan, GSA intends to assess the effectiveness of its outreach by gathering feedback from regional officials and reviewing analytics on usage of the reports developed.

As outreach to regions continues, GSA has begun to introduce what officials describe as “self-service dashboard” reports to present a consolidated view of R&A project information, with the intent of promoting a consistent understanding of performance across the agency. According to GSA’s outreach plan for one of the forthcoming dashboards, GSA intends for these new reports to improve the transparency and timeliness of information on R&A projects, increase accountability, help identify information gaps and redundancies, and expand knowledge sharing across the agency. Even with these dashboards, GSA officials acknowledge that some regional offices may also continue to rely on other sources of information but added that the near real-time nature and ability to filter information offered by the dashboards will allow regional officials to do more with the information that their project teams input on their projects than in the past.

Specifically, GSA recently introduced a Capital Program Information Dashboard, which is an interactive, online presentation of information on all capital projects—including R&A projects—that is updated as often as daily, in some cases, using information from ePM, IRIS, FMIS, and other sources. The overall Capital Program Information Dashboard consists of a series of dashboards that present project information in a number of ways. For example, the National Summary Dashboard is comprised of three sections:

Program Measures Performance: This section provides a national and regional view of schedule and budget performance for capital projects, using the 85 percent fiscal year 2018 target as a reference line to show how each region is performing.

Program Award Performance: This section provides a national and regional view of capital projects’ performance with regard to GSA’s timely award measure, displaying comparisons of actual contract award dates and original baseline dates.

Program Summary: This section provides a national and regional view of capital projects, both by dollars appropriated and by the number of projects, for categories including: active projects, projects declared substantially complete within the current fiscal year, and overall combined totals. This section displays these values at a regional level in chart form and by state in an interactive map.

At the same time that GSA introduced regional and national-focused dashboard reports on capital projects, it also introduced (1) a Project Details Dashboard for capital projects that provides project-level information by region and state and (2) a Project Award Performance Dashboard that provides capital project-level information for planned awards; this dashboard can be filtered by fiscal year, program, vendor, project name, and contract type or number. Both of these dashboards have multiple sections; for example, the Project Award Performance Dashboard includes sections that focus on performance relative to the project delivery and timely award measures, highlight capital projects that may require adjustments to their schedule or budget baselines, and detail reasons for requested changes to baselines.

In April 2018, GSA also launched a draft version of a dashboard for small projects that it expects to give regional officials direct access to up-to-date information on their small R&A projects. Similar to the Capital Project Information Dashboard, the Small Project Dashboard will integrate information from systems including ePMXpress, IRIS, EASi, and FMIS. GSA’s plan for implementation states that this dashboard will present regional officials with a consolidated view of program and project information that includes status updates on timely-award and project- delivery measures. GSA expects that this dashboard, which is to be finalized before the end of fiscal year 2018, will offer “near real-time access” to small project information and reports to facilitate program management and data-driven decision-making. Finally, GSA officials said the agency is also planning to introduce a dashboard that will provide its customer agencies with up-to-date information in 2018. GSA expects this report to remove the delay between the inputting of project information and its accessibility to all parties involved, making the information more transparent both internally and externally.

GSA’s ability to assess and understand the performance of R&A projects will continue to rely on project team members’ entry of information as it finalizes its set of dashboard reports. GSA documentation on the introduction of the Small Projects Dashboard states that because ePM/ePMXpress will continue to serve as a key source of schedule information, regional officials’ regular input of R&A project information will be needed to make the dashboards meaningful. This documentation also suggests that regional officials consider entering additional project information, beyond what is required, so it will be available to them in the dashboards. Officials from GSA’s central office acknowledge that their ongoing outreach to the regional offices emphasizes the importance of complete and timely information—as discussed earlier—to the agency’s ability to comprehensively understand R&A projects’ performance.

Agency Comments

We provided a draft of this report to GSA for comment. An official in GSA’s Audit Management Division told us in an email that the agency had no comments on the draft report.

We will send copies of this report to appropriate congressional committees and the Administrator of the General Services Administration. In addition, we will make copies available to others upon request, and the report will be available at no charge on the GAO website at http://www.gao.gov.

If you or your staff have any questions about this report, please contact me at 202-512-2834 or rectanusl@gao.gov. Contact points for our Offices of Congressional Relations and Public Affairs may be found on the last page of this report. GAO staff who made key contributions to this report are listed in appendix III.

Appendix I: Objectives, Scope, and Methodology

Our objectives were to discuss how GSA (1) collects information on repair and alteration (R&A) projects and (2) assesses the performance of R&A projects. The scope of the work focused on R&A projects from two R&A program funding streams: “capital” R&A projects (those with costs greater than $3.095 million) and “small” R&A projects (those with costs less than or equal to $3.095 million and greater than $25,000); we did not include projects related to new building construction projects or reimbursable work authorization projects, which are those performed by GSA but funded by other federal agencies to improve or renovate federal facilities. We collected information on systems supporting GSA’s management of its R&A projects, including its Electronic Project Management (ePM/ePMXpress) system, Pegasys, Financial Management Information System (FMIS), Inventory Reporting Information System (IRIS), and Enterprise Acquisition Solution integrated (EASi) system. Despite some discussions of the accounting systems involved with R&A projects, this review did not involve a financial audit of the R&A program. We also reviewed our prior work and reports from the GSA’s Office of Inspector General to obtain background information and identify any existing audit findings on the R&A program that might be relevant for our objectives.

To determine how GSA collects information on individual R&A projects, we reviewed documentation related to the R&A program, both provided to us by GSA and found on the agency’s web site. In addition, we reviewed GSA reports of the rates at which regional officials have created and updated information on their small projects in a timely and complete manner in ePMXpress. By reviewing reports generated by GSA’s central office—which are (1) based on their manual reconciliation of information between ePMXpress and IRIS and (2) based on the GSA identified errors in on-budget and on-schedule data in ePMXpress, EASi, and FMIS—we were able to assess the variance between regions in the extent to which project team members created their small R&A projects in ePMXpress— and subsequently updated this information as projects move forward— between 2015 and 2017. We reviewed the information in these reports to identify potential trends in regions’ complete and timely entry of R&A project information and interviewed GSA officials about the sources of information used to generate the reports and steps officials take to ensure its accuracy. However, we did not independently verify the accuracy of the data contained in these reports.

We also selected 12 R&A projects using GSA’s central office data from October 2013 through August 2017 to understand how information is input into the systems by regional officials, how it is used by officials from GSA’s central office and selected regional offices, and whether there are any issues affecting the information’s completeness or timeliness. We selected the 2013 to 2017 time frame because this time period represents the period after GSA officials said that they began tracking small projects in the system used to collect information on project status, and the period represents the most recent data available at the time of our selection. For our project selection, we obtained data from GSA central office for all R&A projects that existed but not were closed out as of the beginning of fiscal year 2014 or had been added since the beginning of fiscal year 2014. We reviewed documentation on the collection of the data and analyzed the data for missing information and found the data to be sufficiently reliable for the purpose of selecting projects to understand how R&A project information is input by regional officials and how it is used across GSA.

To arrive at these 12 projects, we selected projects from regions that had one or more capital R&A projects categorized as having been substantially completed between October 2013 and August 2017, as most regions undertake few capital projects in a given year. We initially identified seven GSA regions that had substantially completed at least one capital project during this timeframe and narrowed this number to four regions—GSA regions 5, 6, 7 and 9—which had varying degrees of performance based on our initial review of GSA reports containing schedule and budget metrics. Specifically, to ensure that we were not selecting four comparable regions, we selected two regions that surpassed GSA performance targets and two regions that did not surpass their performance targets. In addition, we gave preference to regions in proximity to our field offices’ locations to minimize costs associated with site visits. Within each of the four selected regions, we identified the sole capital R&A project that was substantially completed between October 2013 and August 2017, for a total of four capital projects. We then selected two small projects—those with the highest and lowest “Estimated Cost of Construction at Award” and had been active between October 2013 and August 2017—for a total of eight small projects (see table 2 for list of selected projects).

We conducted interviews with regional officials from these four regions— visiting two of the four regions that were located near our field offices. During those interviews, we discussed data entry processes and posed questions both specific to the region’s selected projects and the R&A program more broadly. During interviews with both GSA’s central and regional offices, we asked officials to explain how the IRIS, ePM/ePMXpress, EASi, and any other systems are used throughout the planning and execution of R&A projects. Specifically, we reviewed and discussed processes related to project information collection in general with regional officials and specific project detail, budget, and schedule information with the project team members who input information on the selected capital and small projects into these systems; for example, we raised questions about instances in which baseline and actual dates matched for some projects. Information on the projects we selected is not generalizable to all R&A projects, and the views of the regional officials interviewed are not generalizable to all of GSA’s regional offices.

To determine how GSA assesses the performance of its R&A projects, we requested and reviewed documentation from GSA on the extent to which the agency evaluates the performance of its R&A projects and inquired about the project information systems used to produce related performance reports. In addition to the documents provided by GSA, we used publicly available annual reports and budget justifications detailing GSA’s overall goals and mission and the ways in which GSA has stated that the R&A program supports these aims. After an initial review of documents provided by GSA, we identified and requested specific internal guidance and guidelines, information on the criteria used to select individual R&A projects for funding, and reports related to both capital and small projects’ performance. We used information contained in some of these reports to identify the performance metrics GSA has established for assessing R&A projects’ performance and to assess overall regional performance relative to these metrics, as reported by GSA. We did not independently verify the accuracy of the on-schedule and on-budget figures reported by GSA, a methodological consideration that was beyond the scope of this review; our focus was on how GSA assesses the performance of R&A projects—not on the results of their assessments. We also interviewed officials from GSA’s central office and the four regional offices to discuss the agency’s assessment of R&A projects’ performance and the performance reports provided to regional officials. Furthermore, we reviewed information about GSA’s plans to introduce new “dashboard” reports and outreach that officials from GSA’s central office had conducted to understand regional officials’ reporting needs. Finally, we interviewed these central-office officials and officials from the selected regional offices described above to discuss the use and usefulness of the performance reports.

We conducted this performance audit from May 2017 to July 2018 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives.

Appendix II: General Services Administration’s Capital and Small Project Data-Entry Requirements for ePM and ePMXpress

The tables below show the details and differences in the General Services Administration’s (GSA) data entry requirements for capital projects in ePM and small projects in ePMXpress. Although some of the ePM modules may not be applicable for every project, there are mandatory fields and functions in each that drive GSA’s metrics, measures, and standardized reports. Table 3 identifies the elements required, by GSA’s fiscal year 2018 measures, for capital projects and indicates whether each is used in a key performance indicator.

Table 4 identifies the small-project data entry requirements for ePMXpress, as required for fiscal year 2018 measures, and whether they are used in a key performance indicator.

Table 5 contains a list of standard project milestones that must be maintained by GSA project managers in the ePM and ePMXpress schedule modules, as identified in table 3 for capital projects and table 4 for small projects.

Appendix III: GAO Contact and Staff Acknowledgments

Contact

Acknowledgements

In addition to the contact named above, Nancy Lueke, Assistant Director; Chad Williams, Analyst-in-Charge; Terence Lam; Les Locke; Cynthia Nelson; Josh Ormond; Amy Rosewarne; Kelly Rubin; James Sweetman, Jr.; and Crystal Wesco made key contributions to this report.