Table initial robotization – Newspaper Kommersant No. 225 (7426) dated 05.12.2022

The government apparatus intends to give the White House project activities a new form through a clear regulation of the roles, functions, powers and responsibilities of its participants and robotization of the most routine aspects of work, including automatic monitoring of progress towards national goals within each project initiative and risk control for each track. The ecosystem being created and the robotization of part of the routine operations in this activity, as expected, will make it possible to unambiguously find out whether the goals have been achieved, whether the money has been allocated, whether the indicators have been achieved, whether the risks have been weighed, and whether the effects that the initiators of projects at all levels were counting on have been obtained. An important part of the new system will be providing feedback in the project environment, which should allow you to quickly review decisions that have turned out to be ineffective.

The government apparatus intends to completely replace the regulation on the project activities of the White House – the amendments to Decree No. 1288 of October 31, 2018 (the regulation on the project activities of the government) published on regulation.gov.ru de facto contain its new version. It has become an “evolutionary” development of the current system: the amendments significantly change the project management model of the government, fixing on a permanent basis new and pilot approaches to simplify procedures introduced in the spring of 2022 in the regime of “counter-sanction” acceleration of the government’s work (Decree No. 628 of April 9, see also “Kommersant” dated April 13). The document, as far as possible, rigidly fixes the “table of ranks of projects” – who and at what level projects can initiate, what goals they should serve, how they should be managed and evaluated, and what hierarchy they should be in, and also describes in detail the process of preparation, discussion and application ” a single request for changes” of national projects during their essential editing: the purpose of this change is to stop the “endless engineering” of top-level documents due to the fact that individual changes affect related ones. The new procedure involves first a “comprehensive” assessment of edits by all participants.

The “counter-sanction” experience was used to eliminate redundant procedures and approvals and expand the technical powers of the curators of national projects and projects of a lower rank – this reduces the time for meetings when editing them that do not affect the semantic part.

To this end, in particular, the White House will consider approved draft documents on which substantive objections have not been received on time, the head of the government apparatus, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko, said on Friday. In the new version of the provision, an example of such acceleration can be the transfer of public expert councils to an initiative mode of operation: they can submit an opinion on changes to projects, if necessary, but amendments can be made to documents without such an opinion.

The document assumes the use of several systems for supporting project activities, integrated into existing IT structures of state administration. Thus, on the basis of the management system of the Federal Treasury, a system of interaction between project offices with strict regulations has been deployed, and on the basis of the GAS “State Administration” – an analytical subsystem that will allow us to consider the results of national, federal, departmental and regional projects in sections that are of interest to the White House, and in including “going beyond” normative goal achievement and being interested in how the result fits into real life. As Kommersant was told in the apparatus of the Deputy Prime Minister, head of the government apparatus Dmitry Grigorenko, one of the examples is the ability not only to record the “construction” commissioning of the school and the fact of paying for it from the budget, but also to check whether the object has been transferred, whether the license has been obtained, is ready whether the school is accepting students in the “domestic” sense: “The system is being tested at seven schools, from 2023 we plan to extend it to the entire system for evaluating the results of national projects – the start of the provision of specific public services will be considered their achievement.”

A significant block of the new system will be risk and feedback management through the interaction of all project participants – from the regional ministry to the White House on one platform of the project environment. This will make it possible to promptly review inefficient decisions and reduce the area of ​​non-regulated gray areas. In detail, in the secretariat of Mr. Grigorenko, work with risks is described as “automated control over compliance with project deadlines and passing checkpoints. If there are backlogs, the system itself will highlight the risks of both the project itself and its results, on which other projects rely.” Also, the risk assessment will take into account the number of revisions of project passports – it is assumed that excessive activity in this direction indicates the possibility of not achieving goals. Automation will also affect the most routine processes of checking the correctness of filling in project passports – robots of the analytical subsystem of the State Autonomous System “Upravlenie” will also work on this first of all, sending messages to project administrators about the need to refine, correct and update passports.

Budget expenditures, investments, subsidies and tax incentives, as well as everything that may be required for its work, are directly entered into the project office toolkit. Among the new institutions for project work, the document mentions the Analytical Center under the Government – it will deal with risks, including managerial and “inter-project”, methodological support and presentation of ideas for their elimination and minimization in close conjunction with the government apparatus. In turn, ANO “National Priorities” will be responsible for organizing information support for the implementation of national projects and branding the results and assisting the regions in this work and sociological research.

The government apparatus expects that the new design will work from the beginning of 2023. The national program “Digital Economy” – its implementation will be described in a separate act of the government – and “federal and departmental projects containing exclusively the activities of the state armament program” will be withdrawn beyond its perimeter. It should be noted, however, that the “military” activity of the government, deployed at the request of the president, also became one of the “polygons” for testing protocols for accelerated interaction between government agencies to achieve concrete results, as well as a separate track for “counter-sanctions” documents, and the withdrawal of the “military” component beyond the limits of managing the system of national projects, will probably allow maintaining its transparency, which is critical for the very ideology of project management.

Oleg Sapozhkov