Bill would promote IT strike teams to assist troubled projects

Last summer, following the 21st Century Project failure,  the California Department of Technology began plans to develop a Consulting and Planning Division which would send forth teams to help state departments deal with difficult IT projects.

Then in Feb of this year, Assembly Member Ken Cooley authored AB 2523 that would require the CIO to review the California Project Management Methodology Reference Manualand draft a report recommending how a team of IT experts could be developed to support state agencies and help mitigate IT project risks and challenges in the following 13 specific areas:

• Governance.
• Development and management of contracts.
• Testing.
• Organizational change management.
• Data conversion and migration.
• Schedule development and management.
• Evaluation and possible pitfalls of seeking value for taxpayers by re-engineering state systems and procedures.
• Risk and issue identification and management.
• Interface identification and management.
• Quality assurance and quality control.
• Requirements definition and management.
• Architecture.
• Roll-out planning and approach.

21st Century project fallout included a yearlong IT project academy, a Senate oversight hearing earlier this month and plans are also in the works to formalize project authorization under the State Technology Approval Reform initiative.