1. NM Department of Transportation (NMDOT) Electronic Grant Management and Performance System
Executive Sponsor: David Harris, Division Director
Business Owner: David Harris, NMDOT Transit and Rail Division
Project Managers: Deborah Bach and Marcy Eppler, NMDOT Transit and Rail Division and Jo Girard NMDOT IT Project Management Office
Electronic Grant Management and Performance System (eGMPS)
Project Certification for Closeout
March 29, 2017

2. Project Overview Objective/Business Goal Outcome:
Replace an inactive online grant management system, and the existing paper and spreadsheet based system, with a functional interactive system that meets the NMDOT Transit and Rail Division’s requirements.
Migrate current data to a new repository
Outcome:
The system has fully met these goals

3. Project Overview Desired Outcomes Desired Outcome Results
Improve service delivery to constituents
System has streamlined a number of business processes, and allows business team to analyze trends for improvement.
Collect and track invoices while monitoring project balances
System fully supports invoicing workflows with sub-recipients, and provides automated balance rollups and detail reports.
Automate compliance with statutory funding requirements
System is fully compliant with Federal Transit Administration (FTA) requirements
Improve productivity, achieve cost savings, and reduce time in producing reports
System has streamlined a number of business processes, and allowed the business team to eliminate some altogether. Reports, including standard federal reports such as National Transit Database (NTD), are able to be generated at the click of a button, based on data already submitted by sub-recipients within the system, eliminating much of the manual data compilation previously required.

4. Funding Appropriation History Certification History Fiscal Year Amount
Funding Sources
FFY 2017
$674,975
Funding Breakdown:
$128,000: FTA Section 5309
$514,975: FTA Section 5311 Administrative
$32,000: NMDOT State Road Fund
TOTAL
Date
Amount
Phase
3/2016
$20,000
Initiation
7/2016
$654,975
Planning & Implementation
TOTAL
$674,975

5. Total Cost of Ownership
Description
FY17
FY18
FY19
FY20
TOTAL
IV&V
Independent Validation & Verification
$29,244
Panther
Project Management, Configuration, Customizations, System Implementation, Reports, Testing, and Training
$55,717
Maintenance
Yearly Maintenance and Technical Support
$55,716
$111,433
$111,432
$390,014
Contingency*
$50,000
$200,000
Total
$190,677
$161,433
$161,432
$674,975
*Contingency is based on Federal Transit Administration’s Final Rule of the Transit Asset Management (TAM) Plan

6. Total Budget (Projected/Actual, by Deliverable)
Projected Cost
Actual Cost
Project Phase
Independent Validation & Verification
$29,244
Initiation - Close
Requirement Deep-Dive
$5,572
Planning
Project Management
Configuration Requirements and Design
$22,286
Implementation
System Configuration
$13,929
System Deployment
$2,786
System Testing and Acceptance
Training
Contingency (if needed)
$50,000
$12,500*
*Estimated usage, FY17
FY17 Maintenance and Technical Support
$55,716
Post-Close
FY18 Contingency (if needed)
$50,000*
*Estimated usage, FY18
FY18 Maintenance and Technical Support
$111,433
FY18
FY19 Contingency (if needed)
*Estimated usage, FY19
FY19 Maintenance and Technical Support
FY19
FY20 Contingency (if needed)
*Estimated usage, FY20
FY20 Maintenance and Technical Support
$111,432
FY20
TOTAL
$674,975
$637,475
Under Budget ($37,500)

7. Project Schedule Project Phase Date Deliverable Planning August 2016
Project Plan, Timeline Schedules
Requirements
September – December 2016
Software Requirements Specification (SRS) & Designs
Build
October 2016 – January 2017
Development drops to test instance
Test
December 2016 – March 2017
Iterative beta and system testing of delivered modules
Train
January – February 2017
Complete training manual & deliver training to NMDOT end-users and administrators
Deploy
March 2017
System GoLive for NMDOT end-users and administrators
Close
Project Review meeting, project archival activities, follow-up activities
Sub-recipient on-boarding
May – October 2017
Sub-recipient on-boarding to the yearly grant workflow for FY18 and FY19 grant year activities

8. Project Accomplishments
The system is live
FTA requirements fully satisfied
All NMDOT users are fully trained
System can be used to track & manage all Transit Division grant funds
Invoicing process is now fully electronic
Elimination of data transfer errors; reduction in review & processing time
Elimination of 2 manual tracking processes (pre-audit worksheet and logbook entry)
Report generation time has been cut significantly
Elimination of data transfer errors; reduction in review, research, and post-processing time
NTD reporting compilation time drastically reduced – previously taking several staff months to compile and review. Compilation is now available on-demand from data already entered in the system.
Oversight & compliance process can now be transitioned to a fully paperless process
Communication with sub-recipients streamlined in multiple areas
Deadlines & requirements, status of applications & payments, notification of new personnel, etc
Process of adapting existing business process to application allowed team to identify several processes that could be streamlined or eliminated
Project came in under budget and aligns well with yearly grant workflows for sub-recipients. Project completed within 6 weeks of projected end-date.

9. Lessons Learned
Communication, flexibility, & expertise was high across sub-teams, which greatly contributed to adapting business processes and effective testing of the system. The experience of the team helped mitigate the fact that this was the business team’s first large software adoption.
Formalized processes surrounding testing and issue management allowed the team to adapt to the aggressive schedule and to test effectively while changes were in progress. Participation from all team members, and frequent communication amongst project team members contributed to the effectiveness.
Trainings were scheduled just prior to usage of each specific module, which assisted the team in effective testing of all functionality
Business team noted that, due to the overlapping nature of the yearly grant cycles across fiscal years, there is no ideal time to on-board sub-recipients. The team created a staged rollout plan for sub-recipients that will allow on-boarding at logical points within a given FY. This increases the number of trainings that will need to occur for the sub-recipients, but will allow both FY18 and FY19 data to be used within the system
Rollout plan detail assisted with prioritization of bugfixes for issues found in testing, and allowed the team to safely defer a subset of fixes to later in the year, increasing stability of critical functions needed at GoLive
Common baseline with other states’ implementations provided more stability. Team was purposely restrictive about making unique changes to maximize reuse.

10. Lessons Learned
Loss of a key staff member midway through design approvals caused some misses during the design review period, which caused later rework.
Allowed business team to re-evaluate staffing for the project and increase the number of team members reviewing designs
Allocation of ‘pad’ time within the project schedule allowed the project to still finish prior to sub-recipient on-boarding deadlines
Aggressiveness of schedule
Shortened time available to refine adapted business processes. Expectation is that, as system is used over time, additional changes will be identified to further refine usage model.
Made it difficult to gauge development progress at times. For future projects, team recommends phasing in of any updated modules to the test environment be coordinated with the order of workflows to be tested. This would minimize the amount of retesting needed as new functionality is introduced into the test environment.

11. Next Steps
Population of in-progress data for FY18 grant award by NMDOT staff, and subsequent on-boarding of sub-recipients for FY18 grant and program management
Population of FY19 grant opportunities by NMDOT staff, and subsequent on-boarding of sub-recipients for the full FY19 grant application yearly cycle
On-boarding of sub-recipients to oversight and compliance module via the eGMPS system in late summer, 2017.
Closure of deferred maintenance fixes prior to the above on-boarding milestones
Use of the system for all FY18 and FY19 grant year reporting, including NTD reporting.

12. Electronic Grant Management and Performance System
Questions?