February Minutes

ITAC Meeting Minutes
February 21, 2008

Attendees:
Niamh Darcy, Vass Johnson, John Killebrew, Gloria McNeill and Robert Michaud

Wake County:
Mike Masemore, Angela Strickland, and Velvadine Wallace

The meeting began at 9:05 a.m. Velvadine Wallace opened the meeting and stated that today’s topic for discussion was Permitting & Planning Update and the 2007 ITAC Progress Report. Velvadine introduced Angela Strickland, Applications Manager, and Mike Masemore, Project Manager, to the group and stated that they would be giving the presentation on the Permitting & Planning Project.

Permitting and Planning Update:
Angela Strickland briefly discussed the project history of the Permitting and Planning Project. She stated that Information Services partnered with other departments - Inspections, Planning, and Environmental Services to make up the core team. She stated an RFP was released last April. Seven vendors responded and the core team narrowed the selection down to three: Accela, CRW, and Municipal. Angela stated that the core team decided to use Agile methodology for the Wake County implementation and discussed the agile methods with the group.

Angela then asked the group what experiences they had with Agile implementations. Vass asked Angela what led the core team to choose the Agile approach. Angela replied that the customers were not looking at the big picture so the approach was to focus more on business processes to get their buy-in early on. The goal is to have a product that works for the users and to be able to secure and keep customer buy-in to the implementation. Robert asked about the efficiency in developing the process and the degree of consistency or redundancy and if the code was used in several places. Mike replied yes, the core team decided to use TQM to achieve integration and process improvement.

John Killebrew asked why the vendors initially opposed the idea at first. Angela replied that Municipal felt that using Agile was a way to leverage development and could not see the correlation using Agile methodology for an out of the box vendor product. Mike then stated that Municipal also struggled with skill set for Agile and Accela was more familiar with using Agile for development but not for implementation.

John asked Angela how they would control the cost of the project. Angela stated that this is the first major project that would use Agile methodology and that the contract would be set up in stages to track the progress. Niamh stated that at Research Triangle Institute they use Agile for development work overseas for processing medical records. She recommended that they use a good governing model to control the cost with iterative releases and clear guidelines with each release. She also recommended that they use hybrid, which is a more conventional methodology.

Mike then asked Niamh if she was suggesting they mix Agile with RAD. Niamh recommended they use iterating informal releases and continually having users drive the development design. She also recommended having a solid architecture in place to perform the testing as they go through the process to provide more robustness. Mike asked Niamh if they should try to get the releases out within three to four weeks. She stated that for the overseas project they released updates every six to eight weeks with reasonably robust information. She stated that they had structure around each release within three or four days for feedback.

Angela stated that Accela has an internal scripting language and they could help with the first and second releases. Niamh stated that there might be limitations on the core functionality. John stated that they should clearly indicate the releases on the front-end of the project. Angela then stated that the first iteration would be to meet with the development team and model and document lessons learned. John stated that he would love to hear about the outcomes of the project. Angela replied that she would be happy to follow up with an update. She indicated some thought is being given to create some type of on-line tracking for the project.

2007 ITAC Progress Report:
Velvadine then asked the group if they had a chance to review the progress report and if they had any changes. There was none.

Meeting adjourned at 10:00 a.m.