Steering Committee Meeting Minutes
April 10, 2009
9:00 - 11:00 a.m.
Room 102, Landon State Office Bldg.

The meeting of the Sunflower Project Steering Committee was called to order by Kent Olson. The following persons were in attendance:

Duane Goossen, Division of the Budget
Carol Foreman, Department of Administration
Denise Moore, DISC
Kent Olson, Sunflower Project Director
Gary Schneider, Sunflower Project Implementation Manager
Peggy Hanna, Deputy Project Director
Chris Howe, Department of Administration
Dennis Williams, Department of Corrections
Mary Blubaugh, Board of Nursing
Alan Conroy, Legislative Research Department
Elaine Frisbie, Division of the Budget
Dick Koerth, Department of Wildlife and Parks
Jerry Sloan, Judicial Branch
Laura Howard, Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services
Marty Kennedy, Department on Aging
Alice Knatt, Department on Aging
Marcia Ferrill, Department of Transportation
Cindy Hooper-Bears, State Treasurer
Diane Duffy, Board of Regents
Paul Lavery, Accenture
Loren Westerdale, DISC
Becky Kersting, DISC
Connie Guerrero, Enterprise Readiness Team Manager, Sunflower Project
Les Lauber, Communications Lead, Sunflower Project

I. Project Status & Activities

Kent Olson informed Steering Committee members the Chart of Accounts was distributed last night. This document will help agencies move forward with configuration activities related to mapping data from their existing systems to SMART.

Project Timeline
Mr. Olson reported the Sunflower Project is currently completing remaining tasks associated with the Design Phase until the end of April. The next Phase will be the Build Phase that will include the technical design, build and configuration of reports, interfaces, customizations, etc. A Project Plan for Phase II of the Project has been submitted to the KITO office for review. The final version of the Phase II plan will be submitted to KITO by April 15, 2009.

Project Status and Activities
A quarterly update of the Project Plan was submitted to KITO today. Sunflower Project team members are busy finalizing approximately twenty deliverable documents. Mr. Olson stated that agencies will use the Data Warehouse instead of the production environment to run and/or obtain the majority of financial reports. A total of twenty-five reports are already in the process of being developed and another twenty-five are in the process of being requested.

Two interface workshops were held in March for agencies that will be interfacing with SMART. The workshops were intended to help agencies begin planning for the work that will be needed to interface their existing systems with SMART. Feedback regarding the workshops received to date has been positive and additional follow-up workshops and office hours have been scheduled for April 21 and 22nd for Accounts Payable, General Ledger and Accounts Receivable related interfaces.

The second Change Agency Network meeting was held on March 26th. Agency readiness liaisons incorporated feedback from the first meeting into this event including the ability for agencies to participate in this meeting remotely. Agencies outside of Topeka were granted access to participate remotely during a special afternoon session. The Project has received very positive feedback from everyone who connected remotely and plan on incorporating this option into all upcoming meetings.

Mr. Olson reported that agency readiness liaisons have been very busy conducting the initial visit with all agencies. He indicated the liaisons have a variety of expertise including knowledge of PeopleSoft Financials and State of Kansas financial management processes.

An order has been placed to purchase the hardware needed for the production environment of SMART. Kent Olson complimented Denise Moore and her staff for their support of the project and for their assistance in completing technical tasks associated with the Sunflower Project. Technical team members on the project have begun work on the creation of a disaster recovery plan and an electronic record retention policy for data that will be stored in SMART and the Data Warehouse.

Upcoming events on the Sunflower Project include a visit by an Accenture Quality Assurance representative on April 15th and from the Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) vendor during the week of April 22nd. The IV&V vendor has requested to meet with selected agencies during this visit. State of Kansas Sunflower Project team members will also attend an “all hands” meeting on Friday, May 1, 2009. This will be an opportunity for Project Leadership to hear about any concerns that team members may have and to celebrate the hard work and successes that have been achieved to date.

Kent Olson reported that decisions on the method for interfund processing and year end encumbering are still being worked and a final decision should be reached by the next Steering Committee meeting.

II. Change Control

Peggy Hanna provided Steering Committee members with two Change Order requests that are greater than $50k.

The first request was to add additional data elements to the Travel and Expense Module. Steering Committee members had several questions regarding this Change Order. Marcia Ferrell from the Department of Transportation wanted to know if this would replace the current travel approval form and whether the system would have the intelligence to calculate mileage for some of their remote worksite locations. Gary Schneider reported that the functionality in SMART would replace the existing travel voucher being used today but that the system would not have the built in intelligence to do these more complex mileage calculations. Mary Blubaugh from the Board of Nursing wanted confirmation that a paper form would still be available for agencies that have Board Members that only fill out a request 3-4 times a year. Mr. Schneider confirmed that a paper form would still be available and that it would be up to agencies to make a decision on how to roll-out this functionality within their agency. Dick Koerth from the Department of Wildlife and Parks wanted to know if Vehicle Number would be tracked on the new form and in SMART. Peggy Hanna will follow-up on this question and get back to Mr. Koerth. Jerry Sloan from the Judicial Branch inquired as to whether or not an analysis was done on our existing travel policies to determine if these custom fields were necessary. Peggy Hanna and Kent Olson assured Mr. Sloan that an analysis had been completed and there would be advantages to agencies by having these data elements available on the screen and in the data warehouse. In some cases it will allow an agency to eliminate paper from this process as all of the necessary information will be available within the core SMART system.

Duane Goossen asked members to indicate their approval for this Change Request and all members voted in favor of the request.

The second Change Order was to reduce the scope of the Purchasing Modules that will be implemented at go-live. Project Team members in cooperation with the Division of Purchases recommend we defer the Catalog Management and Supplier Rating System modules until after go-live. Chris Howe reported that he has contacted Purchasing Officers in other States that have implemented PeopleSoft and even with the reduction of these two modules we are still implementing more functionality than other States.

Peggy Hanna informed members that the cost savings associated with delaying these modules will be put in the same reserve fund with the credit from the eGrants module to be used if we need to develop any additional contingency reports or have other things come up that need funding. Steering Committee members did not have any questions about this request.

Ms. Hanna also informed Steering Committee members that the analysis of the Warrant Tracking System maintained by the State Treasurer has been completed a week ahead of schedule. The recommendations are with Duane Goossen and the State Treasurer who will meet to make a decision on the direction of replacing this functionality going forward.

A total of 8,002 hours out of a possible 19,130 for modifications and enhancements has been authorized to date. Peggy Hanna reported that a few more modifications will likely be needed but the Project team has been very frugal in bringing forward requests.

III. Data Warehouse Advisory Group

Gary Schneider provided an overview of a Data Warehouse Advisory Group (DWAG) that is being formed to ensure that the new SMART data warehouse will meet the needs of agencies. The DWAG group will meet approximately every 2-3 months and is comprised of representatives from a cross section of representations from agencies and the Department of Administration. The first meeting will be held on April 29th. During this first meeting the group will review the initial set of reports and queries that are being built for agency requirements to determine if some additional agency specific reports will need to be developed. The second meeting that is scheduled for June will include an opportunity for DWAG members to try out some of the delivered data warehouse and query/reporting tools.

Diane Duffy from the Board of Regents suggested that Legislative Research may want to have a representative on this team since they deal with many requests for statewide data. Alan Conroy from Legislative Research will go back and identify a representative for the DWAG group.

IV. Agency Visits and Interactions

Gary Schneider reported that Sunflower Project team members are meeting with several agencies. He went over the highlights of several agency visits that have occurred including meetings with Department of Revenue, Kansas Health Policy Authority, Department of Commerce and several others to discuss issues ranging from decommissioning systems to discussing their unique and complex internal businesses processes and how they will work in SMART. The goal is to identify which agencies fall into the top 35% of where the project needs to expend the most resources to ensure these agencies are ready for go-live.

V. Testing Kickoff

Paul Lavery provided Steering Committee members with an overview of the System Testing Kickoff presentation provided to team members of the Sunflower Project that was held two weeks ago. He reported how impressed he is with the quality of functional team. Mr. Lavery reported that the Testing approach for the Sunflower Project includes nine different discrete test cycles which occur between June 2009 to June 2010. They include Unit Test, Assembly Test, Conversion Test, System Test, Interface Test, Performance Test, User Acceptance Test, Disaster Recovery Test and Operational Readiness Test. These test cycles overlay one another and incorporate the way the State of Kansas does business into the testing process. It also helps to build up data so that the final test cycles include a realistic set of data that will mirror the go-live production environment.

Mr. Lavery discussed the difference between test conditions and test cycles. Test conditions should tie back to a requirement. However, a test condition can be used to meet more than one requirement if they are logically related to a business process. All of the requirements identified in the Project’s Requirement Traceability Matrix will tie back to a test condition(s). Test scripts are the detailed steps that tell the tester what they need to do to trigger the test condition.

Accenture has many templates available from other Projects that will allow test team members to incorporate State of Kansas requirements into them so that we can leverage the tools that have already been developed. Mr. Lavery reported this is an exciting time on the project where concepts are starting to be put into tasks.

Gary Schneider informed Steering Committee members that the State of Kansas Quality Assurance team is available to come out and provide agencies with some basic test condition and test script templates .

Next Steering Committee Meeting

Kent Olson concluded the meeting by reporting that the Project continues to be on schedule, scope and timeline and is currently under budget. The next Steering Committee meeting will be on Friday, May 8, 2009 from 9:00 – 11:00 a.m. in Room 102 of the Landon State Office Building.
The meeting was adjourned.