by Christina Magriples | May 21, 2024
About the Engagement
The engagement team worked with one of California’s largest cities and major technology hubs to develop a broadband, digital inclusion, and smart-city strategy. This undertaking demanded a comprehensive exploration of global smart-city and broadband initiatives, and analysis of best practices for attracting business and vendors to bridge the digital divide and implement smart technology.
Business Problem
Broadband and smart-city implementations worldwide are unique to the specific policy, governance, and funding mechanisms of the geography. The engagement team had to research and refine findings to ensure client applicability to support future goals.
Challenges
Due to the nature of broadband and smart-city implementation, the requirements gathering process required a comprehensive review, including constant communication and stakeholder engagement to ensure state and federal compliance and client needs. Another challenge was analyzing robust and geographically varied data to inform the city’s market strategy and solution.
Project Impacts and Outcomes
The engagement team’s analysis laid the foundation for the client to understand the varying components needed for successful implementation of broadband and smart-city solutions like the infrastructure and implementation considerations to bring broadband and smart city infrastructure to the city, and the internal technical and resource capabilities to leverage smart city infrastructure (e.g., with additional data insights, there needs to be the technical infrastructure to analyze data and the resources that conduct data analysis to incorporate into policy and operations). As a result of this analysis, the client incorporated our insights into their long-term plans to make the city an innovation hub.
by Christina Magriples | Mar 28, 2024
About the Engagement
After New York’s five super storms in 2012, the state created a temporary agency to distribute 4.4 billion dollars in federal funds to homeowners, small businesses, and municipalities. From the start, technology served as the foundation for this nascent disaster recovery organization. With continually shifting policies, strategies, and goals, the Information Technology (IT) team was forced to create a complex set of applications for processing, analyzing, reporting, and storing critical data and documents for dozens of programs.
Business Problem
The clients’ technology solutions and processes were developed quickly, and in silos because they needed to immediately begin releasing funds/benefits. Therefore, the client sought a partner who could re-engineer the complex architecture of dozens of disparate systems that needed to be maintained or rearchitected.
Challenges
A consistent 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 inconsistent monitoring and maintenance of software through the software development lifecycle.
Project Impacts and Outcomes
The engagement team provided technology strategy and execution services support to the client’s Chief Information Officer, which included the following:
- Current-state and future-state IT organizational assessment to determine and implement technology change management initiatives to improve technology delivery.
- Future-state business architecture to help determine future-state IT organizational capabilities, roles and responsibilities and staffing plans.
- Portfolio and project management support, including software architecture and design, business requirements development, testing and release management support.
- Comprehensive training modules to create structure and internal capabilities in technology delivery for project managers, business analysts, and developers.
Through the engagement team’s strategy and execution support, the client’s IT team has significantly improved its service delivery capabilities, including on-time delivery of projects and improved customer service. This work has helped train and empower the client’s IT team to be more customer-centric and improve delivery of services.
by Christina Magriples | Jan 31, 2024
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. They were tasked with distributing billions in federal funds to homeowners, small businesses, and municipalities.
Business Problem
The clients’ technology solutions and processes were developed quickly, and in silos because they needed to immediately begin releasing funds/benefits. Therefore, the client sought a partner who could re-engineer the complex architecture of dozens of disparate systems that needed to be maintained or rearchitected.
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 led the complex change management and training initiatives within the technology team and supported or led the new software development process (design to implementation) for dozens of applications. The team initiated the engagement in the role of IT organization current-state assessment and future-state recommendations, while also supporting the implementation of numerous software. This created the optimal environment and structure to enable agile delivery, to truly understand the on-the-ground needs, and to pivot as the client’s needs changed. This assessment also included focusing on external program-facing initiatives – the process points that required collaboration and communication between the technology and business.
The 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, project managers and business analysts were maintaining a consistent hybrid-agile framework, leading to on-time and prioritized software delivery. Quality assurance and testing was thorough and comprehensive, ensuring applications were delivered bug-free. The IT team maintained a transparent and aligned portfolio of initiatives.
by Jessica Otunuya | Jan 31, 2024
About the Engagement
At the onset of the 2020 pandemic, a state-level agency received the task to distribute funds from the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP), acting as a grantee in the nationwide initiative that amassed approximately $46.5 billion. The program aimed to deliver substantial economic relief to assist households with low and moderate income who were at risk of homelessness or housing instability by offering support with rental arrears, temporary rental assistance, and utility arrears.
Business Problem
With households experiencing financial troubles, the agency needed to begin delivering relief funds as soon as possible. The agency had to ensure compliance with state and federal rules and regulations, develop internal policies and stand-up a massive grant management and administration operation within weeks. Specifically, the agency needed to develop processes and procedures to support application submission, applicant verification, benefits calculation, and documentation storage and maintenance. Lastly, given the priority to deliver relief funds as quickly as possible, the operational teams needed to be ready to accommodate changing policies, organizational governance, and technology on a week-to-week basis.
Challenges
Within the engagement, the primary challenge was system architecture and design. The system architecture/design was critical to ensure timely and efficient grant distribution. In addition, the system had to be accessible by varying stakeholders, with varying roles and aligned to the criteria set by lawmakers. The risk assessment(s) all pointed to prospective flaws in the system.
Project Impacts and Outcomes
The engagement team implemented a series of systems and processes to address the high stakes need for the agency to award grants to applicants. Specifically, the team implemented: 1) Governance to ensure a model for operation and oversight of the program, with a goal of customer ease and satisfaction with the program; 2) Management/Supervision to ensure a defined understanding of decision-makers and all roles; 3) Training to support knowledge and understanding of the technology and use end-to-end among all user types; 4) Quality Assurance protocols for accuracy at all levels of engagement; and, 5) Traceability between agency goals and customer service representatives to ensure everyone understood the goals and the guiding principles to make them actionable in day-to-day operations.
by Jessica Otunuya | Jan 31, 2024
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
In the beginning, the agency’s goal was to deliver benefits to citizens as quickly as possible. As a result, business processes and business requirements were developed with the best knowledge and understanding at the time. These original processes and requirements were adequate but not the optimal business processes and technology.
The engagement team identified three areas of focus: current-state assessment and analysis, future-state requirements and optimization, and change management, recognizing that software development processes were not formalized and therefore created challenges upstream and downstream.
Challenges
The first challenge was managing a large group of stakeholders with competing priorities, interests, and understanding of pain points. Another challenge was maintaining varying agile, hybrid-agile and waterfall software development lifecycle approaches, since multiple systems, or lack of, were used inefficiently. The final challenge was staff proficiency with systems and this challenge showcased the need to develop strategies to support staff in their use of systems and applications.
Project Impacts and Outcomes
The engagement team worked across various programs, each with multiple departments, and shared services to gain an understanding of the existing pain points with user flows and the system interfaces to understand current-state processes. From there, the team developed future-state user flows and system requirements (e.g., screens, field requirements, etc.) with the goal of optimized workflows. To support staff learning, usage, and understanding the team implemented training and presentations with associated documentation for reference. Staff were trained in quality assurance and quality check procedures. Following this, the team worked with the agency to architect the ideal technology solution, which resulted in an organizational shift to more consumer-driven software development business processes. To complement the future-state recommendations for optimization, the team created a change management roadmap and detailed plan. The team enabled the client to actualize the vision and meet the goal of confidently delivering software enhancements – meeting programmatic needs, on-time, and within budget. Through implementation of the change management initiatives across the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), the client’s improved internal processes have enabled staff to ensure better communication and efficient workflows. In addition, the enterprise software and underlying technology are flexible and robust for ongoing needs. Ultimately, the client is able to meet programmatic needs on time and on budget.