U.S. Census Field Data Collection

Field Data Collection Project

The Field Data Collection Automation (FDCA) program is very important for the Census Bureau, because it deals with the systematic collection of information that is compiled into a very large report called the U.S. Census. The goal is to gather citizen information in a swift and organized manner all while driving down the cost of collection. The cost of implementation and the general cost of the census became over budget in the amount of $14.5 billion. Three billion dollars was meant for the purpose of handheld devices and $11 billion of it was meant for operational costs (Laudon & Laudon, 2011). Automating the census collection data will make data retrieval more efficient and reduce the financial load. When the execution of the project failed they increased the cost of implementation. Furthermore, the failure delayed implementation for another decade.

The main issues that needed to be handled are the lack of communication and poor documentation. The issue of poor handheld performance was first reported to the bureau in 2007, (Laudon & Laudon, 2011) field agents reported these issues and yet the Bureau did not have a policy and procedure manual set up in order to make adequate corrections. With no technology in place to record or evaluate the feedback given by the agents the issues reported were not documented, creating a big problem, because there was no way to follow up or resolve the issues at hand. This makes the information collected questionable as to the accuracy of the Census. There was also no project management team put into place in order to administer the changes that needed to be made.

In order to control the risk in this project I would have created a project management oversight team that would have set up policies and procedures for handheld performance, deadlines, intercommunication between the vendor and the bureau, and managed accountability with all parties involved....