NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5·Control PM-13·high·Component: Program Management

What this control requires

Establish a workforce development and improvement program focused on security and privacy. The program should define the knowledge, skills, and abilities required for security and privacy duties, develop role-based training, and provide standards for measuring and building qualifications for security- and privacy-related roles. This program encourages career growth and the advancement of professionals in the security and privacy fields. This control supports the Governance capability within the Program Management family.
— NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, Control PM-13

In plain English

Establish a workforce development and improvement program focused on security and privacy. In practice, this means you can prove you policy management-level controls on a defined cadence.

Why it matters

SP 800-53 is the catalogue every U.S. federal authorisation (FedRAMP, FISMA, CMMC) and most regulated industries point at. A missing control surfaces as a Plan of Action & Milestones (POA&M) item that an Authorizing Official must approve before the Authority To Operate is granted or renewed.

This control is rated high. Auditors expect a named owner, a remediation SLA, and a tooling artefact that evidences continuous operation.

What an auditor looks for

A 3PAO (FedRAMP) or Independent Assessor (NIST RMF) tests against NIST SP 800-53A assessment procedures. For each control they expect a documented implementation that addresses every assessment objective (Examine, Interview, Test) and an implementation summary in the System Security Plan.

Within Program Management, the assessor will trace your implementation back to the catalogue reference (Control PM-13) and look for objective evidence on the latest two assessment cycles.

How to implement

Policy Management

Docs. Keep each policy in version-controlled Markdown alongside the code that implements it; ship a signed PDF snapshot at each annual review and link the SHA into the SoA.

Secure Development

Pipeline. Require code review, SAST (Semgrep / Snyk Code), SCA (Dependabot / Renovate), secret-scanning and IaC scanning in the merge pipeline.

Branch protection. Protected branches enforce reviews, signed commits and passing CI before merge; document the protection rules as the control evidence.

Operational checklist

  • Policy. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Security. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Control. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Privacy. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Risk. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Scope: management, privacy, capability, improvement, policy, privacy workforce, roles, security.

Evidence to collect

  • Policy Document. A signed and version-controlled policy / standard / procedure document.

Signed policy or standard documents the safeguard. Focus: Security And Privacy Workforce.

Common pitfalls

  • Policies that no engineer has read; the version in Confluence drifts from the version that's actually being enforced.
  • CI security checks set to warn-only; the merge button is faster than the security feedback.

How it maps to other frameworks

Computed from shared tags, control component and key-operation subjects — handy when you are reconciling controls across an audit.

Related controls in NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5

References

Topics: governance riskawareness trainingpolicy managementprivacy managementsecure developmentsecurity training