OverviewThe National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (or NIOSH) is the United States federal agency responsible for conducting research and making recommendations for the prevention of work-related injury and illness. NIOSH is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) within the US Department of Health and Human Services.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health is the only agency within the federal government with the responsibility for research into occupational safety and health. Being a leading research organization, it is imperative that NIOSH maintain an effective project planning and evaluation system. NIOSH and its partners develop and integrate research to prevent occupational injuries and illnesses for over 150 million U.S. workers.
NIOSH takes an active approach to IT, constantly looking for ways to improve its business through the intelligent application of technology. The organization relies largely on Microsoft products and solutions to achieve these goals.
Business Problem
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) uses project planning for all programs, in a given year, approximately 900 project proposals are submitted for consideration. NIOSH funds and manages approximately 700 projects each year. A NIOSH Project Planning & Management Application (NPPMA) has been developed as an end-to-end project planning and management application to assist NIOSH in the goal of implementing a solution for the organization to manage each program project life-cycle, from project planning to project management.
NIOSH requires IT life-cycle product development and implementation support for the rollout of NPPMA nationwide on ongoing software application support. This effort must be implemented with the least negative impact on the business flow of existing NIOSH Project Planning and Management efforts. The purpose of this task order is to provide IT life-cycle project application planning and integration support for each phase of the NIOSH NPPMA project implementation and management nationwide.
Solution
The NIOSH Project Planning and Management system (NPPM) provides NIOSH comprehensive project-level data on the various aspects of NIOSH’s research programs, including strategic goals, cross-cutting program areas, and detailed budget data. As NIOSH responds to ever changing reporting requirements such as GPRA, PART, and the CDC Health Protection Goals, NPPM must move from a fixed applications environment to a more flexible standards-based environment; thus allowing NIOSH to efficiently change their processes.
Its core features include the ability to:
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Real time reporting of project data
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Flexible form architecture that supports annual changes
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Easily supports data elements that change yearly
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Robust data entry and validation
Results
Today, more than 50 individuals use NPPM to analyze project data, register new projects, manage budgets, assign resources and measure research effectiveness. The system offers multiple benefits to both users and NIOSH staff.
For individual users, NPPM significantly reduce administrative burdens by eliminating time-consuming manual tasks. For example, the system:
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Eliminates the need for administrators to manually create research projects traditionally created on paper and entered into an outdated system.
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Eliminates the need for division managers to manually determine project budgets from numerous disconnected homegrown systems.
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Eliminates the need for financial analysts to manually administer budget requests using e-mail for communication and spreadsheets for tracking.
In addition, the portal has empowered NIOSH to obtain information for all project initiatives within the organization. The systems flexible architecture can easily evolve as NIOSH Guidance changes over time.
The NPPM modernization is a great example of a government IT success story. It furthers the aims of e-government by improving key internal government transactions and illustrates the excellence in application of information technology.
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