About Project Management Information System (PMIS)

Project Management Information System (PMIS) is a servicewide intranet application within the National Park Service (NPS) to manage information about requests for project funding. It enables parks and NPS offices to submit project proposals to be reviewed, approved and prioritized at park units, regional directorates, and the Washington Office (WASO).

In response to a budget call for a particular NPS program for a specific fiscal year (FY), project proposals are submitted, reviewed, approved, prioritized and then formulated under an available funding source by utilizing PMIS. During formulation process for a budget call, a program manager at WASO or a budget officer at a regional directorate determines which project funding requests meet the eligibility criteria for the call to be considered as part of the NPS Budget for a specific FY.

PMIS is a centralized web-based relational database management system (RDBMS) hosted and maintained at the Information and Telecommunications Center (ITC) in WASO.

The concept behind PMIS was developed by a task force convened by Deputy Director Galvin and Comptroller Bruce Sheaffer in 1998. Presently, the task force is responsible for specifying and refining business rules and functional requirements for PMIS. See [Deputy Director Galvin's Memorandum] dated 23 June 1999.

The details for PMIS are as follows:

• PMIS 7.3 requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 (6.0 highly recommended) or higher browser.

• PMIS 7.3 requires Microsoft Office 2000 or 2002 (Office XP).

• A draft project must have the following sections defined to be eligible for park approval:

  • A project description, and justifications
  • A complete funding component with at least one cost estimate item
  • GPRA goals and corresponding percent values adding up to 100%
  • A valid primary asset type, and valid DOI ranking criteria with corresponding percent values adding up to 100% if project is facility
  • A valid project activity, or an asset
    
• Park-approved project must have either an activity, or an asset, or both defined to be eligible for prioritization. If facility, the project must also have a valid primary asset type, and valid DOI ranking criteria defined, and must also be specified as either historic or non-historic to be eligible for prioritization.

• Capital Asset Accounting Determination must be performed after project approval if a project meets any of the following conditions:

  • Project type is "Facility" AND "Historic".
  • Project type is "Pass-through".
  • Project type is "Facility" AND total project cost is greater than or equal to $100K AND it has one or more non-recurring funding components.
  • Project has one or more funding components eligible for Line Item Construction.

• Additional Criteria must be provided prior to submitting a funding component with no available funding source specified to justify the lack of available funding source.

• Data validation rules have been added to PMIS which will prevent users from entering an invalid Congressional District. Congressional Districts are now entered as a comma-delimited list of one or more four-character codes for states or five-character codes for regions. The four-character code is comprised of the state abbreviation and corresponding congressional district. Multiple districts associated with a project are entered as a comma-delimited list. Using a project in Shenandoah National Park as an example, information might appear as follows: ‘VA05, VA06, VA07, VA10'. In instances where there is only one congressional district for a state, the ‘at large' district will be represented by the state abbreviation and the code ‘AL'. For example, the single district for Montana would be entered as ‘MTAL'. When the park or program area is located in Washington DC or is a Servicewide project, Congressional District should be displayed as ‘US00'. Three digits rather than two, should be used for region-wide projects, so that the National Capital Region would be entered as ‘NCR00'.

• Grossing and escalation adjustments are done for Line Item Construction projects. Grossing and Escalation adjustments take effect at the time of formulation. Modifications have been made to the formulation, editing, and NeedsEdit functions to accommodate these changes. Detailed information on how escalation and grossing will be calculated in PMIS will be included in the WASO and/or LIC guidance.

• Any change in Cost Estimates and/or date of estimates of a component (after formulation) automatically triggers grossing and escalation updates. However, "Automatic Grossing" option must be enabled in order for the system to do grossing adjustments. Automatic Grossing is enabled by default.