Attachment 1
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Executive Summary Professional Services Procurement Plan |
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Executive Summary
Further to the review of information, the proposed
approach to the portal build is based on current best practice project
management disciplines and is outlined in this document. It addresses the following key areas:
Priorities for the delivery of the
Portal capabilities and services,
Elaboration on some portal requirements,
Economic and Operational Impact,
A technical architecture to guide the next
steps,
An estimate of development costs for the Joint
Portal, and a
A set of detailed recommendations and conclusions.
Vendor Review
Our review process concurs with the conclusion of the
municipal Evaluation and Selection Committee, that, as presented, IBM is the
most cost effective architecture on which to develop the regional and municipal
portals. The IBM architecture is based
on technologies, which are industrial strength, and are predominant in large
scale web sites. This architecture has a
proven track record, wide acceptance and in this instance, has the lowest of
costs. IBM was the only vendor to offer
vendor hosting capabilities. IBM’s
technology is broadly accepted and is used across Fortune 500 companies. It is important to note that it is the
underlying technology for most of the Canadian Banks, and the Services Ontario
portal. As such, resources should be
available locally (as opposed to offshore) for your development efforts.
A review of all three short listed vendors reveals a
familiar “theme” relating to approach.
The vendors want the municipal governments to, up front, commit to
spending many millions of dollars for a massive development project, while
there are still many unknowns. With this
approach the community may not see tangible deliverables, for years.
Going forward with the IBM platform, we would propose that
the project use emerging, more iterative flexible, “on demand” methodologies
such as Agile, or a variant of what Kent Beck popularized as eXtreme
Programming (XP). These more
collaborative approaches produce time boxed, incremental releases of the
portal, at earlier dates. These
iterations would each be smaller than what the three vendors have proposed,
and, as such, far more manageable. Each
release defines certain requirements as mandatory, and certain requirements as
desirable. Regardless, the release dates
are near-fixed, and the variable is what may be in each release. Creating detailed requirements, and highly
complex and difficult to manage processes, and managing them brilliantly, is
one approach, but it is a more expensive and risky one.
The developmental approach suggested by all three vendors
uses the more traditional non-iterative, less collaborative “Waterfall method”. We believe that simplicity of approach with
simpler management processes, that produce visible results, earlier reduces the
risk. This allows for more timely
feedback and for the difficult to manage unknowns, to become known, much
earlier. We believe that for a project
of this magnitude that an “agile” approach is today’s best practice and is the
most appropriate for this project.
By far the largest cost component of all three short
listed proposals is the professional services component. We would recommend that the Town and Region
manage the vendor, rather than the other way around. The recommended IBM technology is well
understood by many in the local area, and through a separate RFP process, the
municipalities should be able to find resources for professional services at
far more competitive rates. A process to
do just that has been undertaken by John Chiarelli and Associates, as part of our
overall approach.
We strongly recommend a highly iterative approach, and
believe that you can meet the majority of your relevant requirements, faster
and cheaper with this agile method. RFP’ing
smaller sets of requirements, in search of more cost effective resources, we
believe, makes good business sense.
Priorities for
the Delivery of the Portal Capabilities and Services
Interviews have been conducted with Markham and York staff
from the numerous business departments, to establish the priorities for both
The Town of Markham and York Region.
This has been an important driver to the professional services plan,
detailed in our Final Report. The
business priorities have been sensibly blended with technical architectural
considerations, and “out of the box” capabilities, to develop the overall joint
portal development plan.
“The plan” takes into consideration not only external
development capabilities but elaborates on what internal resources will be
needed to develop and maintain the portal.
It ensures that the portal continues as a living entity, as opposed to
something that satisfies a set of requirements, at one point in time. Major priorities include payments, citizen
engagement, and online information on community activities from transit schedules
to events to garbage collection.
Moving forward, it is extremely difficult for anyone to
determine what the capacity demand on this portal will be. As such, it is strongly recommended that
minimal development, testing, and production environments be acquired as
needed, on a just-in-time basis. It is
likely, that for the first few months in production, even if advertised, demand
will be similar to what it is today.
Only when resident’s habits change, and more collaborative aspects of
the portal are discovered, resulting interest communities built, and its use
becomes a part of local life, portal transaction volumes will then climb. Future capacity increases will occur at a
pace where computing power can be acquired later, at a better price.
Economic and
Operational Impact
It is clear that the portal, as it is being articulated
and defined, will create improved efficiencies, and in time, could well be
transformational. It is difficult to
predict how quickly traditional patterns of resident interaction will move from
“lineups to online” interactions.
All of our best research efforts to date lead us to
believe that improvement in the “service delivery” and reduction in costs are
possible with a structured portal offering.
Few will wait an hour in a physical lineup for a service that signs
indicate is available from the comfort of your home. Other internal
efficiencies including data harmonization / systemization are also
planned.
For the business case, IBM provided the Town of
In the post implementation phase, it is clear that these
systems can support dramatic growth in service levels. The only impact should be in the graphs of
income and service volumes that will appear in the to-be-developed Business
Intelligence system.
With the interest and focus on costs and operational
efficiencies, part of the plan as developed (and is optional) measures the
current costs of today’s processes, so that pre- and post- implementation,
operational costs can be better known, measured and managed. However to proceed in this direction requires
thoughtful consideration. The new system
should help in cost containment, expand services to 7/24/365 and make access to
services more convenient through this new enhanced online channel.
Graphs from other municipalities indicate that it took
many years for their portals to be discovered and extensively used. For more details please refer to our final
conclusions and recommendations in the Final Report.
Recommendations
In summary, we recommend that an agile approach be taken and
decoupling deliverables into smaller more manageable phases. We further recommend that the RFP developed
for the first iteration of the portal system be issued, and the first portal
iteration be developed at a managed cost.
We believe that the application of current project management
methodologies, rigorously applied, along with a competitive bidding process for
the development resources and a constant re-evaluation of needs, may result in
cost savings of 30% or better.
Appendix A
Robert (Bob) Tapscott is a
seasoned information technology strategist and leader with a diversified
background in organizational creation and transformation having delivered
bottom-line results from the successful design, construction, and
implementation of new strategies, systems and processes. Bob has developed and managed banking and brokerage
systems in
Bob ran Business Intelligence
at Qwest; managing a variety of disparate technologies including Business
Objects, SAS, Informatica and Information Builders. He has recently co-authored articles for SAP
(and others) on Business Intelligence and Master Data Management. Bob was a member of the board and senior most
committee’s of the Canadian Payment Association, empowered with governing