Founded in 1643, the State of Rhode Island was the thirteenth colony to ratify the U.S. Constitution. Now known as the “Ocean State,” Rhode Island has approximately one million citizens. With 140 state and quasi-public agencies including 15 to 20 major agencies, the state has approximately 15,000 employees, with 10,000 in the executive branch. The state’s annual budget is around $6.5 billion.
In 2003, the state was running a budget deficit of approximately $180 million. That year, Governor Donald Carcieri laid out a vision for Rhode Island to become a model for the delivery of cost- effective government services to satisfied citizens who would have confidence that their tax dollars are being spent efficiently. Implementing the visions would require both cultural changes in way that state employees do business as well as technology change to support those business processes.
To achieve his goal, the governor launched what came to be called the Fiscal Fitness program. The objective was to examine the way the state delivered services and conducted business. “The governor had a vision for a more effective and efficient government,” said Mark Treat, the director of the State of Rhode Island’s six-member project management office in the information technology division where he is responsible for the delivery of IT projects statewide. The division of IT is responsible for maintaining the information infrastructure, including the networks, servers and applications. The division is also involved in application development and what Treat describes as “change management,” as part of the project delivery process.
As a part of the Fiscal Fitness program, a team was assembled in which people from one agency would examine the processes from a similar agency. For example, for Health and Human Services, a person from, let’s say, the mental health department would look at the programs in elderly affairs. “They had some knowledge of the area but they weren’t an incumbent in the agency,” Treat said.
The team examined the different ways that agencies worked and developed a series of ideas. The ideas then went through the project management analysis and a steering committee. They were then analyzed according to return on investment and a cost-benefit analysis. “They looked at cost savings and improvements in government services,” Treat said.
The individual teams were then combined into larger, “super” teams. For example, there was an individual team looking at the Department of Mental Health and Retardation. That team was combined into a larger team that looked at all of the health and human services agencies. Those team leaders prioritized the recommendation and brought them to the project management office, which looked at the proposed portfolio of changes.
The project management office had representatives from major governmental areas – administration, general government, human services, education, public safety, and natural resources and transportation. The mega team leaders and the project management office made recommendations to the governor’s office, which made the ultimate decision.
The governor also had an advisory board, which included the directors of some larger agencies, representatives from the state legislature and representatives from the major unions. “They had an opportunity to provide input into the governor’s agenda,” Treat said.
Through the process, 450 ideas were developed. Based on the review, in which the governor’s office itself participated, 146 ideas were approved. About 77 eventually moved to implementation. The ideas ranged from re-engineering business processes such as licensing to redefining the mail delivery routes to the use of electronic payments to online Web-based transactions for the citizens of Rhode Island. The entire review had six phases. Each phase took two to three months. The implementation of the ideas varied according to their complexity.
Although many of the projects did not have an information technology component, many of the projects did. Most of the IT oriented projects focused on changes to application development – either new applications that were being developed or integration efforts with existing applications. “We found that the way we did projects was a very long error-prone process,” said Treat.
The state traditionally used what Treat describes as a waterfall methodology in which requirements are identified and documented. An IT analyst would then write up use cases using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and pass documents to a business user, who often was not familiar with UML. The business user would then confirm the requirements, which would then be put out to bid. Twelve to 18 months could pass during the procurement cycle. The result, Treat said, “was a low bidder with poorly defined requirements that the users did not understand. We had projects that failed to meet their expectations because the expectations were not clearly communicated through the whole process.”
Treat and his team took a close look at the project management process and significantly reworked it. The result was an agile project delivery methodology that allows the state to develop technology to better support its business processes. In fact, the Fiscal Fitness program has led to $130 million in documented savings so far. For an in-depth look at how the Rhode Island’s project management office reworked its project delivery process, read the November issue of BPM Strategies magazine.
