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Project Management and the Do Not Call Registry: The Government's Big IT Success

By Alice Dragoon

June 01, 2004 — CIO — It was a quintessential D.C. summer morning, hot, humid, sticky. But among the small crowd assembled in the Rose Garden, no one had more reason to sweat than Stephen Warren. As President Bush stepped through the Oval Office doors just after 8:30 a.m. on June 27, 2003, to announce the official launch of the Do Not Call (DNC) Registry, the CIO of the Federal Trade Commission was listening anxiously to the earpiece of his cell phone. Warren needed to make sure that the system, which had launched at 12:01 that morning, didn’t crash while handling the surge of early bird requests. It’s not a good career move, after all, to make a liar of the president. The sweat trickled slowly down Warren’s back as the number of registrants kept climbing, but the system held steady as the commander in chief reached the podium.

"Unwanted telemarketing calls are intrusive, they are annoying, and they’re all too common. When Americans are sitting down to dinner, or a parent is reading to his or her child, the last thing they need is a call from a stranger with a sales pitch," said Bush, whose words aired live on Today and The Early Show.

Spurred on by the publicity, consumers began flocking to www.donotcall.gov and calling the toll-free number to place their phone numbers on the Do Not Call list. Within 72 hours, consumers signed up more than 10 million phone numbers, making it a federal offense for telemarketers to disrupt their dinner hour, or indeed call at any hour of the day or night.

Not many IT projects are tackled at lightning speed under the glare of national media attention. Fewer still involve a courtroom drama that shuts them down three months after going live. Yet, despite these challenges, the Do Not Call registry delivered on its ultimate goal: giving consumers a painless way of preventing unwanted phone calls. This is the story of how the FTC pulled off one of the most successful IT projects in the history of government. Using such strategies as splitting the project into manageable phases, creating a performance-based contract and lining up a vendor before Congress came through with funding, Warren and his staff got the consumer registry up and running in fewer than 100 days.

"We view the Do Not Call Registry as one of the most successful privacy protections in the United States," says Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.

 

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