AGILE COLLABORATION AS THE WAY TO BUILD UGANDA NATIONAL LAND INFORMATION SYSTEM

Transcription

1 AGILE COLLABORATION AS THE WAY TO BUILD UGANDA NATIONAL LAND INFORMATION SYSTEM CAROL ROFFER, SERGIY LIZENKO, MAKSYM KALYTA Innola Solutions, Inc., USA Paper prepared for Lightning Talk presentation at the 2017 WORLD BANK CONFERENCE ON LAND AND POVERTY The World Bank Washington, DC, March 20-24, 2017 Copyright 2017 by author(s). All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for noncommercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies.

2 Agile Collaboration as the Way to Build Uganda National Land Information System Implementing a national scale land information system always poses challenges in keeping the client engaged, managing the significant change, and ensuring that all project activities and outcomes provide the most value. InnoLA Solutions is currently taking an agile approach to collaboration with the Customer and our development partners on the design, development and implementation of the Uganda National Land Information System. This project is Phase 2 ( ) of a Government of Uganda initiative, awarded to the IGN France International (IGN FI) consortium and funded by the World Bank. As subcontractor to IGN FI, we are configuring, customizing and integrating our InnoLA Software Framework to meet the registry, cadastral, land valuation, physical planning and public data access data needs of the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development (MLHUD). The developed solution and resulting National Land Information Infrastructure (NLISI) will be rolled out to 21 Ministry Zonal Offices (MZOs) in The new system, replacing the Pilot solution currently in 6 MZOs, is a fully integrated solution and is a result of collaborative analysis, business process re-engineering and design with the Customer and Supplier teams (IGN FI and GeoFit). The InnoLA Software Framework is based on open source components including, operational systems (CentOS, Ubuntu), DBMS system (PostgreSQL/PostGIS), GIS Server (GeoServer). The final NLISI will integrate data from existing systems and from a data conversion component of the project, and integrate with external systems, including the Uganda Revenue Authority to validate payments, the Uganda Registration Service Bureau to verity legal entities and the National Identification and Registration Authority to verify physical persons. Major implementation activities and customizations have included: 1. the extension of the data model to meet national needs and integrated business units including land valuation and physical planning; 2. a new replication approach for the distributed system architecture; 3. the development of tools and work processes for semi-automatic data quality control and data unification during migration, and to migrate current operational transactions in progress into the new system for smooth continuation of processing; 4. the implementation of a special component with administrative dashboards for tracking staff performance and activities, featuring an online drill down functionality to identify the operational bottlenecks and allow management to take necessary actions to resolve. Collaboration with Ministry staff and our development partners has been accomplished with the on-site meetings and workshops, but also with a rich collaborative development environment: Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect and BPMN 2.0 for formal business processes analysis and reengineering, data modelling; Atlassian JIRA (Web based) for project management, detailed task scheduling, issue reporting and development tracking; Atlassian Confluence (Web based) for planning and documents exchange and project repository for meeting notes, forums, input materials; TestRail (Web based) for management of QA/QC and testing efforts, for planning regression testing sessions of each released version of the System; On-Site Test Server Environment allowing for frequent review of development progress by Customer and Supplier teams, and testing and verification of the incremental builds before rolling out in production to zonal offices. Our approach to collaboration has allowed us to establish an open and transparent environment for discussion and analysis, design, and development by multiple teams. Engaging the Customer in this way has gone a long way in building permanent local expertise and ensures the Customer s ownership of the solution.

3 Specific Collaboration Principles To some degree, the active collaboration has been assisted by the earlier positive outcomes of Phase 1 of the project ( ) and availability of certain local operational capacity and domain expertise. To accelerate the momentum, the following principles have been systematically executed: 1. Availability of multi-party online tracking system to allow: Record all the tasks/requests/features; Schedule iterative deliverables with prioritized features to implement; Records all the feedbacks/bugs/requests; Track the velocity of the progress and re-prioritize base on the actual state. 2. Establishing on-site operational testing infrastructure and local Quality Assurance and Testing (QA/QC) Team to perform: Permanent testing of iterative system deliverables; Accumulating hands on experience with the system and provide early feedbacks; Test data migration procedures and verify the quality of the migrated and newly produced data; Validate workflows and rules with engagement of the local domain experts and stimulating re-engineering enhancements and processes improvements. 3. Availability of online wiki-type collaborative environment to specify: o Using templates to document each detail of the transactions and workflows; o Use modern technologies tools and standards to establish common lingua franca for presenting; o Details to the local experts and have their early inputs; o Define and store all input and output documents assumed to be caught in and produced by the system. Based on these collaboration principles the project team of experts and developers represented by IGN FI (France), Innola Solutions Inc. (USA), GeoFit (France), Land Equity International (Australia) on one side, and by the MLHUD executives, domain experts and the World Bank supervisor on the other side, we have established well-coordinated communication and efficient way of resolving any issues that arise. That process involved key steps of detailed analysis and specification of the workflows and transactions, and review of those specifications by all stakeholders before getting into the cycle of implementation. It has been mandated that the system implementation could be executed only after achieving major consent of the stakeholders concerning relevant specifications. Naturally, there were some feedback and iterations for certain functions and processes, but overall the transparency and clarity made the overall development life cycle quite efficient. An example of the efficiency and business value gained as a result of the re-engineering process that took place, we compare workflows implemented in the pilot system operationalized as result of the Phase 1 and the ultimate nation-wide system of the Phase 2. There were 130 transactions (40 never used) in the pilot system and as result of a detailed review and introduction of new system based on InnoLA Framework, less than 80 finally covered all land tenure operations cadastre, registration, land valuation, physical planning.

4 Figure 1. BMPM Workflow Diagram

5 Figure 2. WORKSTATION: Documents Panel with list of documents provided and scanned image

6 Figure 3. DASHBOARD: Monitoring of Registration Process

7 Figure 4.DASHBOARD: Tasks by Role and Tasks Ageing

8 Figure 5. PORTAL: Search on map