Engaging with key stakeholders is important for any successful enterprise, including a federal shared service like Folio. For this reason, the electronic Capital Planning and Investment Control Program Management Office (eCPIC PMO) is always looking for ways to ensure that our customers lead the conversation around Folio development. We’ve hosted agencies in “visioning” sessions to define high-level Folio concepts, collaborated via “tiger teams” to brainstorm functionality, conducted usability testing, and gathered feedback through direct agency outreach meetings.
Now that we understand the vision agencies have set for Folio, we know that the “go-live” version of the tool will emphasize functionality in four main areas:
- Data collection
- Reporting capability
- Data submission to OMB
- Administration of the application
These areas are intentionally broad, yet we need to ensure they contain the capabilities most important to agencies. The current eCPIC Admin Module contains dozens of pages of functionality. Questions arise– how can we prioritize what agencies truly need to properly administer their site? How do we distinguish those “must-have” needs from lower priority “nice-to-haves?”
Over the last 3 months, our team has conducted one-on-one meetings with agencies to help us prioritize detailed functionality within these four areas. We used a prioritization exercise called MoSCoW (“Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, or Won’t Have”). Each agency organized 15 areas of functionality into one of the four categories identified above. This exercise regularly sparked lively and interesting conversations between agency members about their internal processes, how they currently conduct business in eCPIC, and how they envision these processes will translate into Folio.
Now that we have conducted the vast majority of these meetings, the eCPIC PMO is aggregating results, and working to make go-live decisions based on the findings. There were some clear trends that developed in certain areas, and we’ll share those findings at the September FESCOM meeting. This was an important step to help us with delivering the new Folio application, and we’re glad that agencies have been so eager to participate. We look forward to continuing the conversation.
