J_JTC_2018A 12/13/2018 12:35:32 PM Committee Summary

Sumana (Suma) Nallapati, Secretary of Information and Chief
Information Officer with the Governor's Office of Information Technology
(OIT) provided an update to the committee on the HRWorks Project.  Secretary
Nallapati introduced the other presenters with her at the table - June
Taylor, Executive Director of the Department of Personnel and Administration,
and Dan Santangelo, Chief Operating Officer and Deputy Chief Technology
Officer with OIT.

Secretary Nallapati provided a summary of the main goal
of the HRWork project, including to provide State of Colorado employees
with an integrated human resources payroll, benefits, and time and leave
system.  Secretary Nallapati explained that the project leadership
team, along with executive leadership team, decided to delay the launch
of HRWorks to ensure full functionality of the system, including necessary
time to build, test, configure, and make sure that the agencies that will
be receiving the HRWorks system feel fully supported.

Mr. Santangelo continued with the presentation to the committee.
 He described the objectives of the HRWorks project, including a human
capital management system, benefits solution, time and leave, and payroll
solution.  He described the challenges related to the HRWorks project,
including the process of constantly evaluating the project status, and
how the project leadership team determined that the project was not meeting
the expected progress.

Mr. Santangelo explained that the project leadership team
decided to bifurcate the project, by focusing on the human capital management
(HCM) component of the deployment and pushing out the deployment of the
time and leave and payroll solution.  He continued to discuss how
the HCM solution is currently at a 98 percent rollout.  With the addition
of benefits, the rollout is at a 75 percent completion.  Mr. Santangelo
explained that the goal of bifurcating the project is to complete this
portion of the project, show success with this portion of the project,
and to address and evaluate the decision process moving forward with the
second phase of the project.

Director Taylor described how the project
team is prioritizing its resources to focus first on the HCM portion of
the HRWorks project.  Director Taylor described how this now coincides
with the time frame when the state will need to procure a new benefits
solution and the savings that will be realized by having the same resources
dedicated to these two components.

Director Taylor explained that the open
enrollment phase in April/May will still be under Benefit Solver and will
be uninterrupted.  Director Taylor explained that the project leadership
team and executive steering committee for the project will continue to
inform and update the Joint Technology Committee and Joint Budget Committee
on the status of the second phase of the project.  

Sarah Wager, Director of the Office of
Administrative Services in the Colorado Department of Human Services (CDHS),
Minna Castillo Cohen, Director of the Office of Children, Youth, and Families
in CDHS, and Herb Wilson, Director of Health Information Services and the
Colorado Benefits Management System in OIT, came to the table to present
an update on the Trails modernization project.

Director Wilson provided an update on
the current Trails modernization project status.  Director Wilson
spoke about the history of the Trails modernization project.  He explained
that the modernization project is a five phase project and that the first
four phases have been completed so far, as follows:

• Phase 1: security requirements, delivered
  in September 2017;
• Phase 2: human trafficking functionality,
  delivered November 2017;
• Phase 3: licensing and monitoring, delivered
  March 2018;
• Phase 4: large release, including intake
  functionality for the hotline and referral; assessment functionality for
  safety and risk and development and trauma screening; case content for
  eminent risk; and fiscal content, delivered July 2018.

Director Wilson explained that the releases of the first three phases went
relatively well, while there were significant issues with the release of
phase 4 due to its scope.  He described the schedule of hot fixes
to remediate issues that were identified in the phase 4 release:

• August 5, 2018, remediated 9 defects;
  
• August 12, 2018, remediated 21 defects;
  
• August 19, 2018, remediated 6 defects;
  and
• August 24, 2018, remediated 4 defects.

In addition, Director Wilson spoke about service packs that were released
on September 16, which remediated 65 defects, and November 16, which remediated
97 defects.  Director Wilson spoke about counties' desires for the
department to deliver fixes faster, and in response, the department has
returned to a hot fix schedule, with fixes scheduled for release twice
per month, including on December 2, December 16, January 6, January 27,
February 10, February 24, March 10, and March 24.



Director Wilson spoke about the current status, including 74 identified
and prioritized items, including one critical priority item, 33 high priority
items, 35 medium priority items, and five low priority items.  Additionally,
32 other reports are currently under investigation.  These items are
prioritized and scheduled for remediation in cooperation with county trails
user groups, subject matter experts, program area representation, OIT,
and the vendor.



Director Wilson continued the presentation by discussing the corruption
that the reporting database experienced in October, which resulted in Trails
reports not being available for an extended period of time.  He spoke
about several lessons learned from this experience.  Additionally,
Director Wilson spoke about a coding mistake that was made during one of
the fixes released on November 7, related to referrals that mistakenly
included assessments.  He spoke about process changes being made to
prevent this from happening again in the future.  Finally, he spoke
about several issues that have occurred this fall related to outages of
the myCDHS portal.



Director Wilson discussed a communications plan review undertaken in collaboration
with counties, including strengthening internal communication, improving
access to existing materials and resources, creating more targeted and
digestible communications to meet various stakeholder needs, further defining
roll clarify between CDHS and OIT, and finding additional ways for Trails
users to get assistance.



Director Wilson discussed a request by OIT for $300,000 from the Technology
Advancement and Emergency Fund, which was granted and will be used to upgrade
the Trails database, hire a contract senior developer to assist in the
remediation of defects and the ticket backlog, and hire a contract analyst
to assist in categorizing, organizing, and prioritizing the ticket backlog.
 Director Wilson described that as of this morning, there are 3,263
tickets that need to be addressed.

John Stephenson, Senior Manager of Public Policy, Amazon Web Services (AWS), provided a presentation to the committee related to the services provided by AWS. A copy of his remarks are provided in Attachment A.