Travis County Commssioners Court
November 25, 2003
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Item 6
Now, number 6, do the facts support -- 6 is status update for facts implementation for district clerk, district judges, county clerk, county judges, probate court and justice of the peace to provide current project accomplishments, issues and time line considerations. And we did indicate we will take number 8 next. That's the matter dealing with 2201 post road. Then we'll go back up and get number 7 as we start to get most of the folk in here.
>> good morning. Alicia perez, executive manage he for administrative operations. We're here today -- I'm here today with our i.t.s. Staff to make a presentation to fully automated case tracking system. We commonly refer to that project as facts. The facts information system utilizes a technology that enables information from various justice-related agencies to be shared and tract in an integrated database t. Material presented to the court today has been shared with primary stakeholder and elected officials as well as appointed officials and all the departments affected by staff. And they are our partners in the implementation of this most important technology project. We are in the home stretch of the implementation of the facts, completion of the baseline implementation is scheduled for may of next year. I.t.s. Wanted to make sure all tools for the success of the project were fully operational and provided measures for accountability to everyone involved. We believe the approach we have taken and the one we'll present to you today has heightened awareness and accountability and is a powerful plain language guide that not only explains how to use facts, but also provides individualized training, consulting and a means of documenting any and all problems that can be tracked in an automated system holding all participants accountable. Finally, the layers of restructures that will be presented by joe and judy will greatly add to communication, accountability, and a successful implementation of the baseline product. And joe and judy, do you want to --
>> as alicia has said, we've put together a campaign, marketing campaign for better words, I guess, to make everyone aware of the functionality and the features and to make sure that everybody gets involved that's going to be using this system so that everybody understands what it is that the system will do and how it will work and how it can be mixed into their day to day work. And this plan that we're putting together and taking to the departments for presentation has a lot of tools with it that the users can use to document issues. And the main thing here is to communicate the final strategy for the implementation of the facts project. And during this process, we want to make sure that everybody is aware of all the issues that need to be addressed and that they are addressed timely and that we have an accountability on the part of i.t.s., The user groups, and the surrender to make sure that -- vendor to make sure these issues are all addressed and taken care of. We've assign, like, three additional people to work with, one with the judges in the courts, one with the district clerk, and one with the county clerk to do nothing but, you know, stay within the departments and listen to the issues that may come out to make sure that everything gets identified to i.t.s. So we can identify it and get it taken care of. I'll let judy kind of walk through the tools that we provided for this purpose.
>> I want to take just one moment to say publicly thank you to my Travis County family for your support. And love in my recent family situation. Thank you very much. In your handout what we provided was a power point and facts update binder and that's what I'm going to be going through today. The power point should be showing on the screen there. What we tried to do was increase communication and to approve or improve, excuse me, accountability for i.t.s. And users and everyone on the project team that was involved in the project. So the pyramid that we'll be building today will show you all the resources that are available to the user community as well as i.t.s. To make this a successful project. The foundation of that is the 17 to 18 project team members that had the responsibility of development and designing the product. It's a tremendous flexible product, facts is, and I know that it takes a lot of time and effort to build the tables the departments are going to use. If you look at this handout, page 4 of your power point, here's what they were actually doing. They were completely final form development. At the end of the project what that means is there will be some 1500 reports and standardized forms that now will be automated. Instead of -- and i've got a handout Ron is going to hand out to you -- instead of having to roll a form into a typewriter or write on that form manual data, the data will be merged into the basic standard forms for the county, the district and the j.p.s. So all of the highlighted area with the information that would have to be searched out in a folder and keyed in to a document. At the end of this project, information that will be coming from the prosecutor, from the sheriff, and from other departments will be merged into a document just like that. That is the efficiency that we hope to offer once the final piece of i.j.s. Is put in place. So that some 1500 forms now will be automated. And we think that will be a big, big improvement. The work flow documentation, as many of you know, the jail overcrowding task force has gone through a laborious task of looking at work flow for jails, and as facts is being brought up, the project team and the department user group is looking at their work flow and their processes, and there are still processes that they will need to adjust and I think Ron may address that a little later. The other thing is the functional acceptance test. And it comes in multiple flavors. Functional acceptance tests will come in the users will test out the system from a case management standpoint and they will also test it out from a financial standpoint. Before the users ever come to that functional acceptance test for financial, the auditor's office will do a complete close closeout. Is that right, ron? Complete end of month, end of year, end of day closeout. Multiple. And in the final task that the project team has been working on is the final conversion. And each department has a different conversion strategy. The district, I think, has elected to convert active cases. Is that correct, ron? And county will be converting many more cases than that, and the j.p.s have their own strategy, but all those things are in place right now and the project team, ron's staff and the user project members are working on that. The other layer, the next layer is the i.t. Liaisons that joe mentioned. We feel like this is a critical, critical thing that has been put in place. One of the things we wanted to improve was communication between the user departments and i.t.s. And the project team. And that came with the budget presentation where the users did make it known that we need to do improve that. So in an effort to do that, we have taken three staff and assigned them to work on this campaign to make sure that we set up meetings for the user community. I will tell you that I am -- from an interruption in my life and behind on November, but we will get that done. That's an important thing to us. Here's the people that will be working with the county clerk, the district clerk and the j.p.s, and their job will be not just to do identification of issues, but to identify anything that's needed by that useer to make sure facts can come up on their system, that it's performing well, and those people will stay in contact with that user department after they go live. So we are leaving them there for a period of time. The next layer of the pyramid is facts assistance database. One of the things that we saw a hole was that we needed realtime communication. We didn't need a gossip game where the user said here's what's wrong and it came through to us through somebody else. What we put in place was the facts assistance database. And that database, and let me switch over real quick, can be accessed through the intranet. If you look at the first thing, it says links to facts information. It brings up the facts status report, which we'll talk about later that Ron updates every week that has the new time line as it changes. It has overall project status and any issues. But we also have the facts assistance request that has been built by the intranet team at i.t.s. This is a form, and in your booklet, I think it's there, it looks like this, this is a form that the user, any user can access through the intranet and complete, and it will immediately be added to the facts database. That doesn't necessarily have to be an application. If you look at this request here on the screen, here's an issue with a p.c. We want to make sure that i.t.s. Is getting those things resolved so that nothing slows down the implementation. This facts assistance database if it is an application, one of the things that we have is the user is able to to go directly to the contract. Because we are directed by the contract to install, I think it was 6.1 of facts as baseline. And as in any packaged software, it's like i've given you word, but I really want word to do this. There are things that people will want that won't be in that contract that won't be covered by the money that we've allotted for that facts baseline contract. So what we asked the user to do is just kind of look at their requirements. If you access the contract online, it will show the user -- let me just go down here real quick. What is in the contract for the county clerk. What is in the contract for probate. What is in the contract for district. Just kind of take a glance and see if this need is in the contract. Because if it is and the system isn't doing it, then Ron goes to work and joe goes to work and I go to work to make sure tiburon is delivering it. If it's not there, then what we ask is that they give us a time line and say that it would be post production. That that's not covered financially and it's not covered in this contract. Because we need to bring baseline up first. Very similar to what happened in law enforcement side. We had to bring the baseline up first. Let me go back over to the power point. The next layer of the pyramid is the customized user guide. I want to give the project team and the department users credit for this. Very often in my -- and I hate to say 38 years in this industry, but that tells you that I'm not 19 or 38 anymore. They don't finish the job. The customized user guide, the vendor delivers a user guide and says here's how my system works. Not say tiburon has done a bad job, but their user documentation doesn't tell us how to use our system. So if you look in your guide here, i've included a customized sample user guide, and what it does is it takes things like -- let's look at what's on the screen, the case docket. How I do add or change the docket. And takes the actual transaction, puts it's in the user guide and then says here's how you use this screen in our language, in Travis County's language. These are excellent. They are doing a great job. These are draft guides. And the reason they are draft tkpwraoeudz is they will be changed during training as actual users sit down and go, you know what, I don't understand this. So we'll change those guides. But this is an excellent, excellent tool. For users to learn how to use the system. One of the things that hurts the system is after the system is installed and hopefully some day i'll get to retire or that user gets to retire and somebody takes over, if you don't have something like this, people begin to use the system incorrectly. And then you begin to have problems with your system. And this is an example of a customized transaction. A simple docket, it's unique to Travis County. This is a screen that if you look at the bottom tells the user what to fill out, and this is the result. The actual central docket that many of the district judges need. Okay. That's what I thought. The next thing is the project status report. And I kind of alluded to that. If you go to the intranet, that report is updated every Monday. With any change in time line. It gives overall project at that time status. It will also, if we've had changes in resources that have been assigned from the user group, those will be there. It's a way for the user community to look and say what's happening today. Every Monday, what happened last week. The facts update newsletter, you have a sample of that newsletter in your book. It's another tool that we will be sending out to try to keep everyone informed. We're working on one right now and it should go out shortly. The department executive schedule meetings. This project encompasses so many people that we feel it's important that joe and myself and Ron sit down with the elected officials, sit down with the management of the user departments at least once a phorbgs come to the Commissioners court -- month, come to the Commissioners court at least once a month and give you a update. Because this is the final stone in this building and we're real excited about getting to that point. We know there's going to be bump, but we're excited about getting there. So we have online an awareness calendar that says here's what we're going to be doing, and we're trying to follow that calendar as closely as we can. The stakeholder review, in any project there will be issues or there will be things that are enhancements that will need to be discussed at a high level, a management level to see if those are required or those issues can be worked through, so we will, when needed, establish those meetings between the elected officials. And of course the status updates which we talked about, and that's the department staff actually -- and there's a sample. Every week the members from the user department will -- are creating user reports that go back to their parent department and come to the project manager. And those reports say here's what i've accomplished this week, here's what I intend to accomplish next week, and here are my concerns. We believe that's a communication vehicle that will help us stay in tune and the department stay in tune with what their staff is working on. The liaisons also create a department report each week and send that to myself, and they come to our management meetings and say here's what we need. We need jackie goodfellow's help desk team to work on this or russell's network team to work on this, so we're staying in touch. We also are logging all of the meetings and e-mails that we're having with departments. Us a see in your handout, we have noted that. And I think in summary, joe wants to kind of go over what our goals are.
>> in summary, what we put together here is a campaign to be sure we have a process in place to technically manage this project to final conclusion. And to make sure that we have the accountability for the user departments, the accountability for i.t.s. And the accountability of the vendor to deliver the baseline product. And we've had -- to date we've had something like 354 issues. We've reshoveled like 294. About three weeks ago when we prepared our presentation, it was 60 outstanding issues. Today there's like 45. So we're plowing through the final issues and to get to the point where we can turn the first court online. Our target is middle of January for the district criminal to go live. So that's where we're headed. I'll give you a financial summary. The overall i.t.s. Budget was $24,940,000. Expenditures to date are 23 come 659,000. We've got another 1,280,000 left to pay for the facts conversion when we're finally complete wit. And the '04 budget, we've got interfaces in there for about $600,000 to cover interfaces back to c.s.d. And c.s.c.d. System to cover pretrial real-world interfaces and cover the e. Filing documentation to Texas online. Those will be coming back to court in the next few weeks.
>> we expect to complete the project within that budge senate.
>> yes, sir. Certainly do.
>> okay. Questions, comments?
>>
>> [one moment, please, for change in captioners]
>>
>> having been through major systems conversions, you really need to think all of this stuff through ahead of time so that the system deals with it and you can test that. And make sure that these processes are operating because once it comes up people have enough just learning the new system, how to handle things without going back and now working on processes. There always will be some that you forget or things that you did not think of that these things are out there and need to be addressed immediately. So that we can begin testing on it.
>> [inaudible - no mic].
>> we need to get a mic.
>> while we're waiting, are they strictly the district clerk's procedures are are there similar things for the county clerk and similar things for the jp or is it solely the district clerk?
>> no. Tammy, you can address that.
>> this list just pertains to the district clerk: it does include criminal and civil. The memo in January is to bring up criminal. But the track record we've had with facts is to run over like scripts to fix like one thing, other things that have worked before, they break. So we're trying to say before any of district goes up, we would like for anything civil and criminal to work properly. And they are working on some of these issues. A lot of them are even -- like remote receiving. That process works, but they need to decide what paperwork is going to flow between offices and how the cash will be transferred between bank accounts and all that. And there are still some issues with the conversion of the criminal data. That's a big one. What they're reporting to our office on a monthly basis isn't exactly matching what their numbers are that they're converting into the facts system. So that's a critical issue that need to be addressed definitely before we go live.
>> so since the civil and criminal courts are up first in terms of fact implementation, this is their list. But would we expect a similar kind of list as we get nearer to the bringing up of facts for the jp's and then another list that's going to occur in order related to the district clerk?
>> yes, ma'am.
>> yes. We're trying to implement some of those things. We're trying to adjust them to make sure that the basic functionality of those work so that we don't crash and burn when those come up later.
>> it's a very large project and a lot of people involved. And it's critical that everybody stays in tune to where we are.
>> so this basically sets forth the financial issues that are being worked on in the district clerk's office?
>> right. And we worked with the district clerk's office to come up with this. This was mainly put together by sue cechings and jennifer and the district clerk representatives when we worked on district clerk projects here awhile back, our team, we just noted processes that we had come across that we don't remember seeing in facts how they worked, so we've added to the list of a few of the items. So this is mainly put together by them. And we try to help suggest operational procedures when they ask, but basically these are procedures that they need to decide in their office how their operations need to work on a daily basis.
>> okay.
>> joe, do you anticipate any problems with these 35 issues being worked through in order to meet the time line that has a scheduled start in middle of January?
>> that is our project schedule. If things fall in place like we think, we think we'll be fine. If we run across something else, that date will change. We don't want to come up unless it's working right.
>> but one of the -- one of the good things, really positive processes that you have with this communication accountability and implementation pyramid is that you have different levels that those issues can be addressed. If they're not being addressed quick enough, then you have ongoing department executives schedule meetings. If they're not addressed at that level, the elected officials and department heads and stakeholders in, if they're not quickly addressed at that level rg then on a monthly basis we come to the Commissioners court and make the presentation, and it may be the court that need to assist also in addressing some of these issues. So either way they get done. We speak with everyone, therefore we have communication. Everyone is held accountable. And our goal is always implementation of baseline contract.
>> anything further on this item? Thank you all very much.
Last Modified: Tuesday, November 25, 2003 8:52 PM