The Integrated Financial Management Program (IFMP)

The mission of the IFM Program is to improve the financial, physical, and human resources management processes throughout NASA. The IFM Program at the agency level is reengineering NASA's business infrastructure and implementing enabling technologies to provide better management information for decision-making. The IFM Program consists of a series of module project implementations that ultimately will incorporate all of NASA's primary business processes under one umbrella agency-wide.

NASA has identified the following business reasons to make this sweeping change:

1. Provide timely, consistent, and reliable information for management decisions -- This involves getting the right information to the right people at the right level enabling them to make timely, informed decisions, and eliminating reconciliation to ensure that the financial and program decision data are the same.

2. Improve NASA's accountability and enable full cost management--By providing the ability to understand cost drivers and to relate cost to value by using full cost management and by enhancing the Agency's ability to manage institutional capabilities, the IFM System will enhance NASA's ability to provide business support to the mission.

3. Achieve efficiencies and operate effectively--Through the improved efficiencies of NASA's business processes, the Agency's accomplishments and products will be safer, less costly and greatly improved.

4. Exchange information with customers and stakeholders--By enabling the free flow of consistent, complete, and reliable information both internally and externally NASA will be able to communicate the cost effectiveness of its actions and achieve the highest level of data integrity and information.

5. Attract and retain a world-class workforce--Through state of the art systems, NASA will improve its ability to compete in commercial markets for a highly motivated and skilled workforce. Simultaneously, it will minimize employee frustration by allowing employees to focus on value-added functions and work in cross-functional teams.

A large team of dedicated civil servants and contractor personnel is aggressively meeting the IFMP implementation schedule at each center as shown below:

Click on image for larger view

Goddard's role in making IFMP a success has been exemplary. It led the first two IFMP implementation projects, Resume Management and Position Description Management, both of which came in on time and under budget. Resume Management, commonly known as NASA STARS, went live in November 2001. NASA STARS has since changed the way Human Resources offices fulfill their recruiting and staffing responsibilities, most notably by allowing the general public to apply for NASA jobs using an online resume builder and application process.

The second IFMP module, Position Description Management, focused on improving Human Resources processes by allowing managers to create and/or customize position descriptions online from drop-down menus, content pick-lists, and position description libraries.

The Program departed from its human resources focus for its third implementation of a web-based Travel Management module. The benefits of that system include electronic approval of travel documents and online access to accounting codes and expense items for document completion.

The IFMP implementation schedule for upcoming projects includes the Core Financial and Budget Formulation modules at Goddard. The Core Financial module is scheduled to go live at Goddard in June 2003 and will:

• Enable the 'One NASA' concept by providing an integrated and consolidated information source to facilitate data sharing across the Agency
• Provide the accounting and budgeting structure to enable Full Cost Management
• Provide the technical foundation to lead NASA into the world of e-government
• Facilitate the sharing of information across functions (i.e., accounting and procurement)
• Improve the timeliness of acquiring the goods and services needed to perform the mission of the Agency

The Budget Formulation module will follow soon after in August 2003. This module will:

• Establish standard and efficient processes to provide budget data for management analysis and reporting
• Implement a system to support the formulation of components of a full cost budget
• Provide an integrated and consolidated budget information source to facilitate the sharing of data

For more information on Goddard IFMP Implementations, go to Goddard's IFMP web site: http://ifmpinfo.gsfc.nasa.gov/.

This article is the first in a continuing series of articles in the Goddard News intended to report current events for IFMP. In addition to current event reporting the IFM Projects Office, Code 405, will also issue its first monthly IFMP Newsletter in January 2003 to report program-specific details at Goddard. Please let us know how we can meet your needs by contacting Chris Koenemann at either 301-286-1953 or mailto:koeneman@ifmp.nasa.gov. Thank you in advance for being an active participant in making IFMP a success at Goddard.