Project governance assessment improves state government’s online portal and reporting efficiencies

Client background

This client is a state government division responsible for managing interactions between the State’s departments and businesses, including business search and registration, workforce management, tax registration and business file reporting.

The business challenge

The client was working to implement a one-stop online resource for registering and managing a business and ensuring the business complies with state laws and regulations. This solution required partnerships with the Secretary of State Office, Business Services Division, Department of Workforce Development and Department of Revenue. A central online portal was developed and designed to streamline the process of registering a business with the State, collecting required data from those businesses on behalf of State agencies and providing that data to requisite agencies. Because of the high-profile nature of this project, the State was interested in monitoring the health of the project across all stages of implementation to ensure the intended goals and benefits were realized.

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly was selected to lead a multi-phased project governance assessment as an independent verification and validation (IV&V) partner to assess the health of the business services online portal project based on adherence to the project management and structured design, configuration, testing and development disciplines, recommend improvement opportunities and identify risk and mitigation options to enable the intended value from the project.

To facilitate the project governance assessment, Baker Tilly conducted two quarterly reviews that included the following activities:

• 22 on-site project interviews involving project managers, IT leads, vendors and project sponsors
• Reviewed project documentation including product road map, product dashboard, milestone, deliverable and invoice payments, steering committee presentations, risk and issue logs, communication plans, vendor contracts, testing documentation and vendor methodologies
• Produced a draft and final report for each quarterly review to outline major findings, risks associated with the findings and grouping findings into categories

The project governance assessment outlined specific findings that may have otherwise compromised the project:

• The program suffered missed milestones resulting in delays compared to the original timeline and revised baseline plan.
• Limited quantitative productivity metrics were leveraged for work units within the program. Given significant missed milestones, more structured/disciplined work unit earned value management techniques were then recommended.
• The program encountered significant resource constraints and those resource constraints were a top priority within the constrained agency. It was recommended that the program achieve milestone dates moving forward to not miss the limited window of opportunity with constrained state agency resources.
• The agency workstreams operated in a very silo-oriented nature and the PMO obtained only limited details on the project work units necessary to have confidence in the project schedule. Action items to improve program integration were recommended and implemented.

By embarking on this project, the full value of the project was delivered which improved the experience and efficiencies for business search and registration, workforce management, tax registration, business file reporting and the back-end processing of data collection required for state agencies to support business transactions and requests.