UI Tax & Benefit System Modernization Consortium

Transcription

1 UI Tax & Benefit System Modernization Consortium July 2010 Arizona Wyoming Idaho North Dakota 1

2 UI Tax & Benefit System Modernization Consortium Vision Deliver excellent service to all our customers ensuring the best customer experience possible by replacing our legacy systems with a modern, integrated solution. Goals Increase Efficiencies Increase Customer Satisfaction Achieve and Maintain Compliance with Performance Measures and Other Federal Requirements Increase Trust Fund Integrity Increase Efficiencies by: Objectives Increasing timeliness of first payments, registering covered employers, number of detected overpayments and fraud and scores in nonmonetary time lapse. Reducing pending lower authority appeals and processing times for transactions that have no issues and achieving and maintaining quick tax report processing, wage report entry and cash deposits. Empower end users to maintain application parameters without information technology intervention so users see more user options. Minimizing human involvement by creating the ability to process more without staff intervention. Maximizing the internal efficiencies through the automation of manual processes for both business users and information technology staff by having fewer manual processes Increasing security with pass security assessment. Reducing ongoing operational costs so work can be performed with declining resources. Reducing misunderstandings, disputes and appeals. Permitting states to focus on improvements rather than maintenance by reducing maintenance times. Increase Customer Satisfaction by: Empowering customers with additional self service capabilities. Increase secure customer access to understandable information that minimizes follow up inquiries and visits. Minimizing the need for customers to make direct contacts. Freeing staff to work with clients requiring more assistance. Reducing misunderstandings, disputes and appeals. Achieve and Maintain Compliance with Performance Measures and Other Federal Requirements by: Increasing employee accuracy and performance measures by leading them to only correct decisions with a system that will show where it improves employee ability to make accurate decisions. Achieving or exceeding the performance measures. Decreasing the turnaround time to implement new programs, policies and business procedures required by legislative mandates as well as economic reality with a system that shows the decrease in actual time. Increase Trust Fund Integrity by: Minimizing and detecting overpayments and fraud through increased detection by investigators or voluntary leads from the public. Saving trust fund dollars through fewer overpayments and less fraud. 2

3 Strategy Overview The federally funded consortium of Arizona, Wyoming, Idaho and North Dakota, commonly known as AWIN, is investigating the modernization of unemployment insurance tax and benefit systems. The U.S. Department of Labor is funding both the staff resources and external consulting services required of two consortia to develop a specification for a modernized application. The federal funding of these efforts is intended to reduce the public cost and risk of modernizing UI tax and benefits systems, which are typically 25 years old. It is unreasonable to expect existing systems to last much longer. States face skyrocketing support costs and loss of staff who know these systems to retirement. These systems do not respond well to heavy customer loads, implementing legislative programs or incorporating productivity enhancing technologies. A number of states have tried or are trying to modernize their systems. Only a very small number have succeeded. The large majority face significant cost and schedule challenges that in some cases have resulted in projects being suspended or even terminated. Should each state attempt to modernize on its own, the American taxpayer would bear a cost of $70 million to $120 million per state $3.5 billion to $6 billion nationwide. Smaller states would spend up to 10 times more per capita than larger states. In addition to slashing costs, this consortia approach enables each state to individually increase efficiency, consumer satisfaction, trust fund integrity and federal compliance. Ultimately, systems must be more responsive to changing legislative agendas while needing fewer staff to provide better customer service that complies with federal standards. The Consortium Necessity Unemployment insurance tax and benefit systems are complex. They are made up of 70 and 80 major processes, each requiring as many as 34 discrete steps or activities. Many processes have a large number of underlying, complex business rules and accommodate state specific legislative environments or unique process integration among various state agencies. Each main process may be subject to as many as 17 variations or alternate decision branches. For example, states normally account for an employer tax payment one way, but in the case of a bankruptcy or seizure, it is done another way. Managing a large software development project such as unemployment insurance modernization demands substantial staff participation and expertise. Single states have generally struggled with this. In a consortia, states can pool their staff and achieve greater stewardship of governmental resources. The U.S. Department of Labor s State Information Data Exchange System is a precedent setting example of a successful consortium project designed and developed by six states with 12 more joining them. AWIN is a consortium of four states Arizona, Wyoming, Idaho and North Dakota working together to investigate the modernization of unemployment insurance tax and benefits systems. 3

4 Instead of hiring retired staff, AWIN is harnessing the knowledge of over 100 experts on the specifics of the four state programs to define a harmonized and efficient process. These are people who truly understand their states, people who are committed to working together as a consortium and people who will individually need to live with the new processes defined by AWIN members. In addition, proven best practices from the other 46 states are being assessed and infused as appropriate. By working together, AWIN member states can produce a common blueprint for modernization. This blueprint will give states accurate modernization costs, an assessment of innovative modernization options and leverage and control over potential modernization vendors. AWIN: Designed to Reduce the Risk of Modernization AWIN innovations are designed to reduce scope creep, enhance cost controls and reduce modernization risks. 1) Focus on Integrated Tax and Benefit System Many of today s process and system inefficiencies exist precisely because these systems are separate and stovepiped. With an integrated system, the overall program of modernization is vastly simplified. 2) Focus on Getting the Requirements Right In general, software projects based on poorly developed requirements have less than a 50/50 chance of being successful. In the Lessons Learned analysis of the unemployment insurance information technology domain, poor requirements are a leading cause of cost overruns and schedule delays. AWIN requirements will be based on best practices, and the resulting projects will have commensurately high probabilities of being on time and on budget. This is achieved through either build phase vendor contracts with clearly defined outcomes and sharp teeth or internal development on well defined, prioritized, modular functionality. 4

5 3) Strong Leadership From the outset, executive agency leadership within the four states has been firmly committed to the success of AWIN. Their visible support through, for example, their proactive involvement and decision making, remains unwavering and sends the message to all state agency staffs that success will be achieved. 4) Focus on Best Practices in Competitive Contract for this Project The competition sought greatest COMPE TENCY and the best price. 1. AWIN is focused on Requirements Definition and Management competency not a specific IT solution. The vendor needed to be an absolute expert in RDM and capable of working on projects of this magnitude. The AWIN members forced vendors to disclose RDM maturity levels by probing their strengths in underlying competencies and finding that while many vendors purport to do requirements, few are truly competent. The innovative approach to competition yielded a successful vendor relationship. 2. AWIN forces the vendor to achieve valuable outcomes within a set number of hours of service. Each outcome achieved by the RDM vendor enables AWIN to better control system delivery after the requirements vendor is gone. Therefore the blueprint is objective, costs are controlled and value is realized. 5) AWIN Adopted an Iterative Approach to Requirements AWIN selected a vendor that could develop requirements in a highly iterative process, where each stage is tightly controlled. The vendor was mandated to develop specific plans, which detailed the quality of requirements materials produced, and build into task orders an adherence to these standards. The result is a structured approach to Requirements Definition and Management that is efficient for AWIN members and accelerates value delivery. AWIN: Success to Date provides a summary of what this approach has produced so far. The vendor, IAG Consulting, has done a remarkable job to date in meeting the expectations of AWIN members and is executing on the accelerated timetable, which is shown to the right. Behind this summary diagram is a detailed require 5

6 ments definition and management plan, which is clear on quality and expectations and available on request. 6) AWIN Members Committed to Travel and Working Together Over 100 staff members from the four states have cleared agendas and are participating in centralized sessions to define a blueprint for harmonized unemployment insurance tax and benefits program. The consortium is leveraging the expertise of experts from all four states in making decisions on improving the process in a collaborative, high intensity, albeit exhausting environment. The AWIN project team and steering committee have spent a great deal of time and effort enforcing appropriate practices, securing the commitment to participate and crafting a strong dynamic among the states participants. Ultimately, this commitment to AWIN is what will make AWIN a success. 7) Flexible Architecture and Design AWIN's architecture and system design will be based on software best practices principles: Open standards based, flexible and extensible to include user reconfigurability and promote ease of third party product substitution, modular, absent of any single points of dependency or single vendor lock in and portable to other states. A first draft of the project scope is illustrated in the form of a Business Area Diagram on page 7. AWIN Requirements Definition: Outcomes for Stakeholders The leadership team of the AWIN Project has designed this project to achieve valuable results even if it is not possible to deploy systems a centralized consortium system which will process unemployment tax and benefits for all four states. To be clear: The consortium leadership has progressed far enough into the project to believe AWIN will produce valuable materials if it remains on its current project trajectory. We believe AWIN will offer Federal stakeholders the opportunity to show that modernization can be accomplished through consortia and this goal continues to need support by the Federal DOL. Even should the DOL be unable to fund modernization based on the AWIN blueprint, materials will be created that would enable each state to individually RFP the modernization effort, or have a well crafted blueprint to support this effort as it evolves. Specifically, each of the stakeholder groups benefits from supporting the AWIN consortium. See page 8. 6

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8 Stakeholders For Federal Stakeholders 1. AWIN will produce a blueprint of the essential business processes behind unemployment insurance tax and benefits optimized with the best practices of four states and the input of over 100 subject experts. This blueprint can be used to guide the modernization efforts of all states. A large majority of states need to modernize. AWIN cuts over $100 million from the cost to American taxpayers because reuse of its blueprint will reduce the time to get requirements for tax and benefit modernization in other states by 30 percent. The blueprint may be comprehensive enough to cut the time to get clear, accurate and complete requirements by far more than 30 percent. Equally compelling will the achievement of a high quality requirements set, a rarity in the unemployment insurance information technology modernization domain. That can lead to much greater success in the development phase of these projects than has currently been experienced. 2. AWIN s process for modernization could well be held up as an example of best practice four states working together toward common goals. At a minimum, AWIN objectively explores centralization opportunities. For Legislators 1. Unemployment insurance tax and benefits systems have almost 25 years of band aids holding them together in ways that are very difficult to change. This means that the systems environment is not well suited to respond to changing legislative agendas nor is it well suited to maintaining compliance with federal standards should the bar on standards continue to rise. 2. UI tax and benefits are government mission critical systems, where customer satisfaction with current capability is open and vocal. The public needs to see groups like the AWIN consortium improving service delivery, reducing time to first payment and the number of people appealing decisions due to incorrect information, enhancing access to individual "account" information via self service and making it easier for the employers driving the economies of our respective states. For State Procurement and Project Management 1. AWIN creates a clear, accurate and complete understanding of software needs for a harmonized tax and benefits system. With a clear specification, tight vendor contracts can be made that offer limited ability for vendors to underperform and still be paid. State procurement and project managers need the ability to make the next phase of development competitive and manage SCOPE CONTROL rigorously. 8

9 2. The average overrun for a project with poorly defined requirements is 234 percent on budget and time while less than 70 percent of the required functionality is delivered to the business, according to the Business Analysis Benchmark, Seventy four percent of projects that fail, fail because of poorly specified requirements, according to Infotech Research. It is essential from a project management perspective to remove requirements risk from modernization efforts. For the IT Department AWIN will produce the artifacts needed to develop an on time and on budget solution: 1. Process flow, data flow, business rules, Use Case descriptions of main flow and alternate flow, activity diagrams and system context leading to functional specifications. 2. Data dictionary, conceptual data model, business intelligence model with facts and dimensions, class diagrams, data definitions and validation rules, reports for federal compliance and business support. 3. Business locations and collaboration of major systems and subsystems. 4. The stakeholders, their flow of information across departmental boundaries, workflow, system use cases and user interface models orwireframes. 5. Major business events, Integration Definition and sequence diagrams where necessary and state diagrams for elaboration. 6. Vision, mission, strategy, goals, objectives, risks and required outcomes. AWIN: Success to Date In the Last 60 Days the AWIN Consortium: 1. Selected a vendor. 2. Set a high level plan in motion for initiating the project. 3. Refined vision, goals and objectives of the project with steering committee members. 4. Determined the scope of the project and described the unemployment insurance tax and benefit process at a high level by listing the more than 800 activities and hundreds of variations which comprise this business function. 5. Captured a permanent record of the vision and scope of this project in a summary document that describes business motivation, high level product features, the scope and variations, stakeholders and users, system context and high level non functional requirements. This report is supported by a 250 page detailed report. 6. Created a requirements definition and management plan complete with: a. A project plan for the requirements phase of this project. b. Requirements definition and management workflow. c. Defined organization roles and responsibilities. d. Documentation standards including: 9

10 i. Requirements model and requirements architecture. ii. Form of requirements. iii. Work products and artifacts. iv. Requirements software tool recommendations. e. A requirements definition and management methodology including: i. Iteration plan. ii. Requirements elicitation approach. iii. Requirements modeling approach. iv. Requirements reviews. v. Requirements prioritization approach. vi. Requirements change management. vii. Requirements communication approach. 7. Organized over 100 subject experts from the four states into a set of requirements definition meetings including: a. Optimizing team participation. b. Defining platoon leaders for individual subject sessions. 8. Put in place a communications and collaboration platform for sharing project information, managing version control on documents and approval and feedback on documents, communicating meeting logistics and enhancing stakeholder engagement with the process. 9. Determined the requirements management tools environment and held initial conversations with the tools vendor for pricing and terms that meet the AWIN consortium needs. 10. Initiated and completed 50 percent of the current state systems analysis for the state of Idaho including capturing the: a. Business work flow screen sequencing and manual processes of thetax and benefit systems in BPMN format so that this model is tool interchangeable. b. Major variations and identifying the existence of business rules. c. User interface for every screen used. d. Keystrokes used to navigate from screen to screen. e. Data entities and attributes for the current state system. 11. Completed a satisfaction review of stakeholders participating in the AWIN program to determine if the course and pace of the project are in line with expectations. 12. Initiated business requirements discovery sessions with stakeholder teams. Business Feedback: IAG & Process On a scale of 1 to 5 5 = outperform expectation and 4 = meets expectation, IAG consulting is rated as either meeting or outperforming expectation by all stakeholders of this project. Rating Criteria Is IAG setting objectives that are valuable and important? Is IAG meeting the objectives set and agreed to by the steering committee Are we going at the maximum pace AWIN can sustain? Please rate IAG on our transparency as a vendor for the AWIN consortium where transparency means. Comments from Participants Avg. Score Without a company like IAG guiding this process, I don t believe that four states could come together and make the progress that we have made. IAG s expertise in requirements gathering, I believe is what will make this project successful. IAG is doing a fantastic job. The experience that IAG brings to this project is well worth the associated costs and my guess is that it will probably be a major factor in our success. I feel that IAG brings a lot to the table, and that the time spent on requirements will pay dividends in the long run. IAG is providing an invaluable service and requirements gathering techniques that will prove to be very important to the success of the project. It s a tough agenda, but clearly laid out and just what we needed to get the project moving where we want it to go It is laid out very well where we need to be in the coming months. 10