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FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
Originally Published September 15, 2004
Labor uses Web
for project reports
By Dibya Sarkar |
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- To keep track of contractors working for the Labor Department's
Employment and Training Administration, agency officials have
been using a Web-based system that allows users to list daily
activities and tasks they've completed for projects.
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- Project managers and others there have been using xpdoffice,
developed by xpdient Inc., a division of Scientific Systems and
Software International Corp., for at least the past 18 months.
Results include elimination of paperwork and significantly reduced
time spent on administrative duties, said Jim Coliton, a project
manager within the Web operations group of the ETA's performance,
results and technology office. A majority of the 100 employees
within that office are contractors, he added.
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- Before xpdoffice, Coliton, who is a contractor with the agency,
said he would spend about six hours a week getting a weekly status
report together for all the projects he oversees from the dozen
or so people who report to him. He characterized it as an informal
process.
- "They would type up something and send me a report once
a week about, 'This is what I did,'" he said. "Since
it's now done on a daily basis, I think the information is much
more accurate, and they're not glossing over things that they
might have before."
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- The program facilitates a more complete daily report on a
particular project or even several projects that contractors
might be working on and the number of hours they've charged in
that time period. He added he can even track others who may have
logged hours on a particular project, but he wouldn't even know
about their work until some time later.
"I've cut my work by about two-thirds because it's all electronic,"
he said. "I use their words of what they say they've done
instead of trying to read five different paper reports and collate
it in my own brain and retype it."
Labor officials implemented the application because of their
growing use of outside contractors. Coliton said it started as
a result of moving some contractors to an off-site facility.
There was some concern about how they would be tracked because
there wouldn't be face-to-face contact for a week or sometimes
two. He said they have people in four different locations all
using the Web to provide their daily updates.
- "I still have to trust that what they put in they've
actually done," he said. "But if at the end of the
week, they say they've done such and such, and I look and see
that that hasn't been done, I obviously have to go back and follow
up with them. But that, fortunately, has not been a problem that
I'm aware of."
Copyright © 2004, Federal Computer
Week. All Rights Reserved.
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