The Franchise Tax Board's Enterprise Data to Revenue (EDR) project, a major five-year effort that has modernized technology systems and business processes supporting the collection of tax revenue in California, is often mentioned as a big project that's a big win for the state government.
After all, EDR has helped California collect an additional $3 billion in revenue so far, and officials expect it to bring in at least $1 billion annually going forward. But more than that, the project also has been a technical success and was delivered on budget.
"As you know, doing a large-scale IT project is very difficult and challenging, and EDR was no exception to this. We've been asked numerous times how the department accomplished this project. Well, first, it required years of hard work and dedication by our IT staff; it also required very detailed planning and good project management practices," Kem Musgrove, EDR's technical director, told the tax board during its meeting on Dec. 8.
With the project set to officially close out this month, Musgrove shared a few of the success factors that have helped EDR along the way.
1. One of the first things the tax board did was perform early initiatives at the onset of the project. They were smaller, lower-risk initiatives that used FTB's current legacy systems and business processes. More than 20 were done in a two-year period of time.
"These initiatives act as icebreakers, allowing for team-building, and for the staff to start working together. They also allowed us to develop good project processes as we started to work toward our new key deliverables," Musgrove said.
2. Another success factor was implementing EDR using a phased strategy. The tax board calls it "crawl, walk, run." They implemented smaller components, one at a time, and stabilized each of them, before moving on to another set of components — and doing the same process over again.
"This really minimized the risk versus doing an all-at-once type implementation. It also greatly reduced stress on the staff and the systems, and if needed, allowed for [a] contingency plan to fall back on our existing systems without impacting our customers," Musgrove said.
3. The Franchise Tax Board developed gates — Musgrove also called them "toggles" — between the tax board's legacy systems and the EDR systems. He compared them to switches that can be thrown on a railroad track. The switches allowed the tax board to control the workload volumes flowing into the legacy systems or the new EDR system.
"Using this gate and throttle approach, it helped control the risk and impact to FTB's business operations as we methodically switched over to the new system," Musgrove said.
4. The tax board also was mindful of its approach to project management and development throughout the life of the project.
"As you've probably heard buzz and much debate around which software development model is the best for IT projects, we found with EDR no software development model is perfect to cover all situations. We also found some benefits to all the different models available. So with EDR we used what we call 'the right model at the right time' approach," Musgrove said.
Specifically, the tax board used any or all of three models depending on the circumstance and the situation: waterfall, iterative and incremental, or agile.
5. Finally, FTB said it performed operational readiness reviews at 90, 60, 30 and 10 days before each major release. They also did a “Go/No-Go” meeting two days prior to going into production.
