With the intended services defined, the second item on Gass’s agenda was to stabilize the unit’s current operations. Unlike Bosley, for whom standards and guidelines
had emerged as a by-product of other activities, she explicitly created standards and
guidelines for application development and project management. This required a substantial investment of her time but established consistency. Drawing on the processes,
tools, and resources identified by the internal value chain, her team defined the rules
and conditions for initiating, executing, and controlling application development and
other project activities. This framed discussions by setting negotiable and non-negotiable procedures to be observed by all parties. Standards were established for definition and formatting of data to enable applications to share information effectively;
coding technologies and methods to improve maintenance; project management
methodologies to enforce repeatable execution of project tasks; and training programs
to improve technical and operative competencies. Exceptions and justifications were
identified that would allow flexibility in the processes, with the provision that these
exceptions required appropriate negotiation and review to preserve the efficacy of the
entire process