by Christina Magriples | Nov 9, 2023
About the Engagement
In June 2013, following the occurrences of Hurricanes Irene and Lee, and Superstorm Sandy, a state-level disaster recovery organization was created to focus on recovery and rebuilding efforts for effective areas of New York State. The agency’s aid focused on four areas: housing recovery, small business, community reconstruction and infrastructure.
Business Problem
The agency’s division for organizational systems & performance is responsible for delivering agency-wide technical needs from infrastructure and software to maintenance and technical support. As the agency matured and needs became increasingly complex and intertwined, there was a need to create stronger and more disciplined portfolio management, project management and business analysis capabilities and support the agency in critical technical decisions.
Challenges
The common challenge across the agency was a lack of centralized strategies, techniques, and frameworks which presented unique complexities. Examples of these include varying customer service and support strategies for both staff and applications, varying frameworks and processes (or the lack thereof) resulting in missing quality assurance and quality control procedures for critical applications and departments, and maintaining varying agile, hybrid-agile and waterfall software development lifecycle approaches, since multiple systems, or lack of, were used daily, but were not maintained appropriately.
Project Impacts and Outcomes
The engagement team provided agency-tailored technical portfolio, project management, business analysis and quality assurance services, including strategy, training, coaching and hands-on delivery. By the end of the project, the duties of the staff were defined and understood. Project Managers and Business Analysts were maintaining a consistent hybrid-agile framework, leading to on-time and prioritized software delivery, which resulted in high levels of quality assurance, thorough and comprehensive testing, and ensured applications were delivered bug-free to the end users. Customer service and communication were consistent and very well received by other departments. The division maintained a transparent and aligned portfolio of initiatives. The division leadership and agency executives made clear and strategic technical decisions that were aligned with core priorities.
by Christina Magriples | Oct 26, 2023
About the Engagement
In June 2013, following the occurrences of Hurricanes Irene and Lee, and Superstorm Sandy, a state-level disaster recovery organization was created to focus on recovery and rebuilding efforts for effective areas of New York State. The agency’s aid focused on four areas: housing recovery, small business, community reconstruction and infrastructure. In Fall 2021, our engagement team was procured to support the community reconstruction and infrastructure operations team. In 2019, the client underwent organizational restructuring, combining teams and changing roles.
Business Problem
Following the restructuring, staff had little time to acclimate into the new working order prior to moving to full-time remote, as a result of the Covid-19 global pandemic. One business problem was that there was not a defined strategy to manage change across the department, and more specifically, the operations team.
Challenges
The primary challenge was stakeholder engagement, ensuring buy-in across all staffing levels to create a shared understanding of the need for and importance of change management. The secondary challenge was understanding and documenting how department interactions occurred across the agency to ensure adequate planning and communication.
Project Impacts and Outcomes
The engagement team collected data and interviewed staff across the department to determine what was effectively working, where improvement was needed, and areas of the work requiring additional attention or improvement. This data was analyzed and used to create a solutions framework including a [re]training plan for staff, an onboarding plan for new hires, focused team building activities for improved morale and employee engagement, and a new staffing pattern to redistribute the workload.
by Christina Magriples | Oct 26, 2023
About the Engagement
In June 2013, following the occurrences of Hurricanes Irene and Lee, and Superstorm Sandy, a state-level disaster recovery organization was created to focus on recovery and rebuilding efforts for effective areas of New York State. The agency’s aid focused on four areas: housing recovery, small business, community reconstruction and infrastructure. In Fall 2021, our engagement team was procured to support the community reconstruction and infrastructure operations team. The community reconstruction and infrastructure operations team experienced leadership and staffing changes, while adjusting to a full-time remote working environment, due to the global Covid-19 global pandemic.
Business Problem
The business problems consisted of a combination of low team morale, inconsistent supervision, unclear expectations, and limited understanding of objectives and key results. The engagement team was tasked with ascertaining whether systems, structures, and staffing patterns were adequate to ensure timely, accurate, and efficient project-level, grantee-level, and grant closure.
Challenges
Through the needs assessment process, a series of challenges arose. The first challenge was low team morale. Another challenge was the lack of a change management strategy (for example: communication plans, procedural updates, risk assessments). In addition, a challenge was inconsistent supervision practices, and the final challenge was inability to communicate progress of workload and unequal portfolio distribution.
Project Impacts and Outcomes
The engagement team leveraged the findings of the needs assessment to create systems, structures, and updated procedures for the operations team. Team morale was the first target, and it was boosted through active listening and understanding of staff needs and challenges. The result was the ability to provide support and interventions, based on information gathered. In addition, new roles were created, and additional headcount was added to elevate veteran-knowledgeable staff and to build capacity for on-going support and redistribution of workload equitably. Supervision structures were created including meeting cadences and standard agendas to ensure consistency in expectations across the team. A progress-to-goals system was created to ensure a data-driven approach to goal setting for project-level and grantee-level closure. Lastly, training, learning, and development was a key area of focus to ensure ongoing support, accuracy in work product, and efficient project management.
by Christina Magriples | Oct 18, 2023
About the Engagement
In June 2013, following the occurrences of Hurricanes Irene and Lee, and Superstorm Sandy, a state-level disaster recovery organization was created to focus on recovery and rebuilding efforts for effective areas of New York State. The agency’s aid focused on four areas: housing recovery, small business, community reconstruction and infrastructure.
Business Problem
The agency identified the need to ensure data security best practices were in place and were compliant with state/federal data security, while also ensuring their data security policies and procedures were in-line with the New York state’s central technology office.
Challenges
The first set of challenges were focused on preparations and information gathering. To ensure state and federal compliance, along with understanding the client needs, our requirements gathering across multiple stakeholders and agencies was challenging because of the need for constant communication and stakeholder engagement. Another challenge was maintaining varying agile, hybrid-agile and waterfall software development lifecycle approaches, since multiple systems, or lack of, were used daily. The second set of challenges faced were centralized around the agency. One need was the development of customer service and support strategies for both staff and applications, which were implemented through trainings and presentations. As a result, we developed quality assurance and quality check procedures and created associated documentation for them.
Project Impacts and Outcomes
The Engagement team conducted an assessment to understand the current-state data security policies and processes that were in place. In conjunction, our team analyzed state and federal data security policies to understand guidelines and rules and regulations to ensure agency compliance. Once there was a comprehensive understanding of the current-state and the optimal future-state, we developed a roadmap to ensure compliance, and meet data security guidelines. As a result, while working with the agency, we implemented three components, the Data Privacy Office, software and hardware risk mitigation, and identity and access management. The Data Privacy Office is an agency group, dedicated to monitoring and leading the agency in the event of a data security event. This group implemented proactive policies and procedures for risk mitigation purposes and developed procedures for how to respond in the event of a data security event. The second component, software and hardware risk mitigation, was developed by working with the technical team, overseeing the implementation of enhanced privacy measures (e.g., ensuring all sensitive information access was monitored and had enhanced security beyond other agency data). The third component was identity and access management, created by designing and developing a system to aggregate identity and access information for agency staff, and limited access to information based on “least privileged access” principles.
