Following June’s Independent Project Oversight Report from the Department of Technology, the state’s FI$Cal project will not be making any changes to its project schedule.
The report found that the project would not likely reach its goals on time or on budget. It also slated the project as a high criticality level.
“We’re following the work plan of our schedule. We’re working according to the schedule and the tasks that we need to do to complete the project, and that’s how we measure our work,” FI$Cal spokesperson Amy Norris told Techwire.
Bringing on the state controller’s office is a key piece of the project that was scheduled to be completed in 2016.
“As mentioned in the report, we’re working on a special project report, which is basically going to be our plan for bringing the state controller’s office on board,” Norris said.
FI$Cal has begun using in-house services, such as state employees answering help line calls, which has led to some consulting savings over time.
The department also got a block of new positions with the new fiscal year and has begun the process of hiring to fill those vacancies. The addition of new positions brought the department’s vacancy rate up to 24 percent from the previous 19 percent.
“We’re always working hard to fill these IT positions because it is a really specific skill set and we want to make sure we get the right people in the jobs because not only do they need IT expertise, they also need the business operation expertise,” Norris said.
The state has been taking over a lot of the duties that were previously handled by the contractors. Our IT team is taking over more of the fixes and the tech pieces so we are able to save money that way,” Norris said.
“The Department of Technology report was based on where the project was at that point in time and does not speak to any possible savings the project may realize. We continue to work on a daily basis with the Department of FI$Cal to address the concerns referenced in our June 2017 report,” Bryce Brown, a spokesperson for the Department of Technology, told Techwire in an email.
It’s routine, they do the report every single month. We have a lot of oversight on the project so there’s multiple ways we have oversight, there’s the independent evaluator, the IBNB, the Department of Technology, so this is just a normal part of an IT project,” Norris said.
