Harlan C. Bridges, PMP

Projects

My projects have included Project Management Office (PMO) implementation, Project Portfolio Management (PPM) implementation, Project Management Methodology (PMM) implementaton, business analysis/assessment, web applications, software development, technical communications, and proposal development.

Michigan Department of Agriculture Licensing Consolidation Business Assessment

Background

Six different Divisions inside Michigan Department of Agriculture (MDA) issue 41 different "license" types encompassing nearly 100,000 individual licenses and using approximately 20 different computer applications. The MDA Executive Management sponsored the initiative to explore the consolidation of the licensing function into one central process and processing area. The first phase of this project encompassed mapping all 41 existing licensing processes and facilitating agreement on an ideal, "to-be" licensing process. Potential savings of $700,000 or 15,000+ staff hours annually is expected to be realized after a 2-3 year development and implementation time frame.

The current applications supporting the distributed licensing functions are not capable of supporting the consolidated "to-be" process. In all instances, Divisions are unable to receive applications and fees electronically (web interface) and no database structure exists in MDA that provides for a central repository for all licensing entity information.

Project Goal

The goals of this project included the following:

  • Develop and document a consolidated licensing process
  • Identify MDA business, user, and functional requirements to support the new process
  • Research and provide analysis on existing solution alternatives in other state or federal departments that perform similar licensing functions or within other Michigan state agencies
  • Provide vision, scoping and estimating information to MDA Executive Sponsors for system development and/or implementation based on analysis

Scope of Work

The scope of work for this project was to complete the business requirements document, to perform evaluations of up to 6 existing licensing systems and to develop and document estimations and strategic direction for choosing a consolidated licensing system.

The following activities and deliverables comprised the scope of the project.

  • Perform high level requirements gathering resulting in the development of a Vision and Scope document
  • Perform detailed requirements gathering and analysis resulting in the development of a requirements document
  • Perform analysis of up to six existing licensing systems
  • Develop strategic recommendations and estimate for recommended solution

Michigan Department of Management and Budget - Office of Retirement Services Data Structure and Management Improvements

Background

The jClarety application is the main line-of-business application for the Office of Retirement Services (ORS). It is tightly integrated with several other applications, including Filenet and Siebel. jClarety has been developed in a multi-phase project over 6+ years, during which time no single coding standard was utilized. During this time period, a large number of break-fixes, enhancements and new business needs have been applied to the application as well without a single unified architectural approach guiding it. The lack of unified coding and architectural standards has resulted in an application that is functional but difficult to maintain.

In addition, the ever-growing size of the jClarety database requires a significant amount of storage to accommodate the number of environments necessary to support the varied testing needs. The database contains a large volume of "inactive" records that are not regularly accessed or used. Due to statutory requirements, it is necessary for ORS to retain this information. However, since it is being maintained in the production database and replicated across the various testing environments, it extends processing time, maintenance time and other aspects of system performance and increases storage cost. A long-term solution is required to meet the needs for improved system performance, reduced cost and data retention and retrieval.

Currently, database maintenance operations compete for processing time and system resources with other tasks such as batch processing. As new functionality is added and member self-service is implemented, the amount of time available for these essential maintenance tasks decreases. By reducing or streamlining the data searched and processed for each transaction, the data structure improvements will provide more efficient use of shared resources and noticeably enhanced performance for staff. The project will position ORS to support the ever-increasing amount of data required for pension processing while continuing to make Michigan government more secure, user-friendly, and cost-effective through wise productivity and management tool investments.

Project Goals

The ORS has embarked on a two-phased project to 1) understand application and database design deficiencies prohibiting scalability and usability, and 2) to plan requirements for a new data management solution to support increasing data required for pension processing by the Department.

Scope of Work

Dewpoint will assist DMB and DIT in creating a strategic plan for optimizing the current ORS systems environment - with the ability for State staff to then coordinate a 2nd tier level of analysis to determine changes to be made in coordination with the overall strategic plan Dewpoint will produce for Phase 1. The scope for Phase II is to gather and document requirements for a data management solution.

The following activities and deliverables are in scope:

  • Phase I Tasks
    • High level review of existing documentation, including jClarety LOB, Workflow, Imaging and CRM Components
    • High level review of existing application and database components
    • High level review of existing architecture
    • High level review of existing infrastructure framework
    • High level review of data and data-related issues>/li>
    • High level review of existing data management needs
    • Compare database to industry standards
    • Perform gap analysis of "As-Is" with industry standards
    • Identify areas of inefficiency and areas for improvement relating to:
      • Documentation
      • Application
      • Architecture
      • Database
      • Infrastructure
      • Data and data management
    • Provide recommendation of viable solution for improvement and maximization and/or optimization of the application, database and infrastructure
    • Provide recommendation of viable data management solutions
    • Provide data the SoM can use to perform ROI analysis
  • Phase I Deliverables
    • As-Is Assessment
    • To-Be Assessment
  • Phase II Tasks
    • Facilitate requirements gathering based on selected solutions with ORS and AST staff
    • Scheduling and coordination of requirements gathering
    • Provide technical and application expertise
    • Documentation of detail-level requirements
    • Review of detail-level requirements
  • Phase II Deliverables
    • Detailed Requirements Documentation
    • Requirements Traceability Matrix
    • Viable Solutions Document