The Secretary of Commerce is legally required to (1) conduct the census on April 1 of the decennial year, (2) report the state population counts to the President for purposes of congressional apportionment by December 31 of the decennial year, and (3) send population tabulations to the states for purposes of redistricting no later than April 1 of the year following Census Day. The Bureau has defined over 40 different operations in its high-level requirements document, describing all of the planned operations and systems needed to meet these mandates. For the 2010 Census, the Bureau is using a comprehensive master schedule to integrate the work to be carried out in the dozens of operations. The schedule provides a high-level roadmap for Bureau executives and is used to alert executives to activities that are behind schedule or experiencing issues, allowing problems to be addressed so the census can continue to proceed on track. Staying on schedule is crucial to accomplishing all of the tasks involved in conducting the census. In fact, scheduling and planning are so important that the Bureau has already established a high-level schedule for planning the 2020 Census. While the schedule can be used to manage census operations at a high level and dictates major time allocations and deadlines, local census offices across the nation require more detailed plans to conduct enumeration that exceed the detail included in the master schedule. A successful census depends, in large part, on the field work carried out in these local census offices where employees on the ground in local communities build a list of where to count people and count people who do not return their census forms. As we have previously reported, the Bureau had initially planned to carry out major field data collection activities using hand held computing devices. Development and performance problems with the hand held device led the Secretary of Commerce in April 2008 to abandon using the device for most of its intended operations and resulted in the Bureau removing the NRFU operation from the 2008 Dress Rehearsal. As a result, the Bureau was not able to use the dress rehearsal as a comprehensive end-to-end test of the interoperability of all of its planned systems, and the Bureau has had to develop plans to support and conduct the affected operations on paper as it did for the 2000 Census. For the 2010 Census, the Bureau will manage remaining fieldwork activities with PBOCS. This system is intended to provide managers with essential real-time information, such as worker productivity and completion rates for field operations. It also allows managers in the field to assign or reassign cases among workers. If the system does not work as intended, it could hinder or delay field operations and introduce errors into files containing collected data. Another responsibility of field offices is implementing the quality control process established by the Bureau to ensure that correct information is collected by field staff and data are not falsified. To ensure data quality and consistency of quality control procedures, the Bureau will manage, track, match, and review answers provided during re-interview operations using its Census Matching Review and Coding System (Census MaRCS). This system is also to designate quality control assignments where selected households will be re-interviewed in order to determine that the original enumerator correctly conducted the interview. Census MaRCS is also to assist in identifying interviews where the data from the re-interview do not match the data from the original interview, indicating that a mistake has been made. Both PBOCS and Census MaRCS are key systems that have not been fully tested. Since 2005, we have reported concerns with the Bureau’s management and testing of key information technology systems. In March 2009, we reviewed the status of and plans for the testing of key 2010 Census systems. We reported that while the Bureau has made progress in conducting systems, integration, and end-to-end testing, critical testing against baseline requirements still remained to be performed before systems would be ready to support the 2010 Census and the planning for the testing needed much improvement. While the Bureau has made noteworthy progress in gearing up for the enumeration, with less than a year remaining until Census Day, uncertainties surround the Bureau’s overall readiness for 2010. The Bureau has implemented processes around its master schedule that comply with a number of scheduling process criteria that are important to maintaining a schedule that is a useful management tool. Such a schedule can provide a road map for systematic execution of a program and the means by which to gauge progress, identify and address potential problems, and promote accountability. We have documented the importance of adhering to these criteria and of implementing associated best practices in our GAO Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide. According to these criteria, a schedule should be comprehensive, with logically sequenced activities spanning the scope of work to be performed so that the full picture is available to managers; current, with the progress on ongoing activities updated regularly so that managers can readily know the status of the project; and controlled, with a documented process for changes to the schedule so that the integrity of the schedule is assured. The Bureau’s master schedule represents all 44 of the operations described by the broad requirements for the census in its 2010 Census Operational Plan. While the Bureau continues to add activities to its central schedule, by including at least all the activities described in these broad requirements, the Bureau is ensuring that it has a comprehensive schedule that will be less likely to miss critical interactions between operations. The Bureau ensured a complete scope of the schedule with input from stakeholders throughout the agency, with reviews of previous schedules, and building on a number of census tests during the decade. As a result, the schedule is the primary source for senior managers, on a weekly basis, to determine what census activity is ahead of or behind schedule and provides a resource for determining any impact to the overall project of delays in major activities. The Bureau has documented and implemented a formal process for keeping the data in the schedule current. Staff within each Bureau division are responsible for ensuring that schedule activities within their division have their status updated on a weekly basis. Staff update the actual start and finish dates, the percentage of an activity completed so far, and estimates of the time remaining to complete each activity in progress. The Bureau is recording status information on an average of more than 1,300 activities in the schedule ongoing during any given week, generating historical data that could provide valuable input to future schedule estimates. Finally, the Bureau has implemented a formal change control process that preserves a baseline of the schedule so that progress can be meaningfully measured. The Bureau’s criteria for justifying changes are clearly documented and require approval by a team of senior managers and acknowledgment of the impact by each affected team within the Bureau. Since the master schedule was baselined in May 2008, about 300 changes have been approved. Even corrections to the schedule for known errors, such as incorrect links between activities, must be approved through the change control process, helping to ensure the integrity of the schedule. In addition to these practices, the Bureau has positioned itself to monitor the schedule regularly to help ensure that the census is progressing and that work is being completed as planned. A central team of staff working with the schedule implements a process that begins with the weekly updates of the schedule status and involves subject matter experts from multiple divisions, and monitors and resolves schedule-related issues, resulting in a weekly briefing to the Deputy Director and the Director of the Census, which includes documented explanations for critical activities scheduled to start late. For example, the central team began reporting from the master schedule in March 2009 that the printing of questionnaires for a field operation to validate locations of group quarters in September and October 2009 might be running late. The schedule showed that late printing of the questionnaires would trigger their late delivery and the late assembly of job assistance kits needed to support the operation, and thus put the timeliness of the operation in danger. According to a Bureau official, the Bureau then addressed the issue by deciding to unlink the kit assembly from the questionnaire printing, allowing kits to begin assembly on time and having questionnaires delivered directly to field offices when they were ready, letting the operation begin on time. When we began analyzing the Bureau’s master schedule, we discovered a significant number of activities in the schedule that had either missing or inaccurate information describing their relationships with other activities in the schedule. We brought these to the Bureau’s attention, and the Bureau has begun systematically identifying such activities and correcting their information in the schedule. In accordance with scheduling best practices, activities in the schedule should be linked logically with relationships to other activities that precede or follow them, and they should be linked in the correct order. Since reports that the Bureau uses to manage the census depend on the schedule having been built properly, inconsistent adherence to these scheduling practices has occasionally created false alarms about the schedule and created unnecessary work for those who have had to resolve them. In our analysis of the Bureau’s schedule, we found that nearly all relationships between activities are generally in place in the schedule and some activities in the schedule do not need relationships. However, many activities appeared in the schedule missing one of their logical relationships. From January 2009 through August, an average of more than 1,200 of the more than 11,000 activities in the entire schedule were missing relationships to other activities from either their start or end dates. Each month, on average, over 1,100 of the over 6,100 as yet not completed activities were missing relationships. For example, within the Bureau’s master schedule, an activity listed for receiving finished materials from the NRFU re-interview operation appeared in the schedule with no relationship to subsequent activities, making it appear that any delays in its completion would have no impact on subsequent census activities. While the absence of such a relationship in the schedule does not imply that the Bureau would miss the potential impact of any delays in the completion of this activity, the incidence of a large number of such missing relationships can confound attempts to trace the chain of impacts that any delays may have throughout the schedule. Similarly, we found a small number of activities in the schedule that had been linked together in the wrong order, so that one activity might appear to finish before a necessary prior activity had been completed.