GOVERNANCE: Company Needs a Comprehensive Framework to Successfully Manage its Commitments to the Gateway Program

Our objective for this report was to assess the extent to which the company has a program management framework to govern how it will complete its current and future work across the Gateway projects.

While the company has started hiring staff and building a schedule, among other things, to manage the volume of work it will soon encounter on Gateway, we found that the company has not fully developed a thorough program management framework that describes the processes its departments will follow and the tools they will use to manage the program now and in the years ahead. The company is facing three challenges on Gateway without this framework. First, although Amtrak has recently added staff to the Gateway program team, it has been overtasked because the company has not assessed the resources that the team and departments providing major support to Gateway need to manage current and future work. Second, while the company has some mechanisms in place to update certain key stakeholders, it has not determined how it will collect and provide comprehensive and consolidated information on the program’s overall status—including budget and schedule—to all internal company stakeholders with responsibilities for Gateway. Third, although the company has assessed risks to individual projects in coordination with its partners, it has not assessed the broader program-wide risks it may face managing its Gateway commitments, such as potential impacts to other company acquisitions or projects.

To build a thorough program management framework for Gateway, we recommended that the company (1) build out its program management plan, (2) assess its current and future resource needs, (3) implement communication protocols to manage how it will generate, collect and distribute program information to internal company stakeholders, and (4) develop a process to identify and mitigate its program risks.