By Philip D. Schall, Ph.D., CISSP, RDRP
First off, I would like to congratulate Director of Cybersecurity and Information Assurance at Army CIO/G-6, Nancy Kreidler on her recent retirement! As a self-proclaimed RMF nerd, I found one of her recent posts on LinkedIn humorous with the following lines “Step 1 – Retire. Step 2 – Recover. Step 3 – ?”. In RMF circles, Ms. Kreidler is most recently known as being the champion of a project titled RMF Sentinel AKA RMF 2.0 (not be confused with Ron Ross’s NIST RMF 2.0 initiative from 2017) which aimed to increase RMF efficiency and eliminate perceived RMF bottlenecks by leveraging threat-informed risk decisions.
For those who follow my articles/posts, you know that I often write about the common theme of DoD perceiving RMF as an inefficient/failed process. After being involved in thousands of RMF practitioners annually and my personal academic research being focused on im-proving RMF efficiency, I believe the best way to increase RMF efficiency is through delivering RMF training that was developed by RMF practitioners with the goals of getting students working RMF packages as efficiently and quickly as possible (practitioner focused training).
The Birth of RMF Project Management Advantage
During an internal BAI RMF Resource Center meeting in early 2022, the question was posed of what curriculum we may be missing that could help in sup-porting our mission of empowering and educating the future RMF workforce. During that meeting, the idea of enlisting our senior Project Management Professional (PMP) and RMF SME to develop a one-day RMF for DoD IT Supple-mental course targeted at leveraging project management best practices and BAI’s real-world RMF experience was proposed. A few months later, RMF Project Management Advantage was born!
Is RMF Project Management Advantage right for me? After chatting with our course developer, I can confidently say that RMF Project Management should appeal to a very broad audience. The audience for this course includes those with advanced and entry-level RMF experience looking to take a one-day course to brush up or learn new project managements skills and gain knowledge of project management principles.
We are tired of hearing that RMF is failing and inefficient. If you are interested in decreasing RMF implementation time and cost, this course is for you! Like RMF Sentinel, we are trying to do our part in making the RMF process more efficient without sacrificing security posture, and we are confident this one-day RMF project management intensive meets those needs!
RMF Project Management Advantage topics include:
- RMF Operation Order
- RACI Charts
- Self-Assessment Worksheet
- Understanding Common Controls
- RMF 5 Steps (as projects)
- Controls Implementation Worksheet
- RMF Project Plan
- Reporting RMF Project Progress
For additional information on RMF Project Management Advantage training, or to register for an upcoming class, please call BAI at 1-800-RMF-1903 (763-1903) or visit https://rmf.org/rmf-project-management-advantage/