Clients

Overview

The Office of Facilities Management (OFM) at the Department of Veterans Affairs is responsible for providing asset management services (acquisition, construction and support) to the Veterans Health Administration and other areas of VA. The office works with medical centers, clinics, regional offices and national cemeteries to ensure that quality facilities are available to support U.S. veterans. Tracking, analyzing and preparing reports for VHA, VA, Congress and others involved in federal construction projects, is a routine part of OFM's duties, while also maintaining capital asset inventories.

Objectives

OFM goal is to modernize their core systems in order to effectively operate the estimated $5 billion of capital assets that it is expected to manage, due to the approval of the Capital Asset Realignment for Enhanced Services (CARES) program.

Requirements

• Improve the ability to maintain and adapt systems as the business changes over time
• Improve data quality, integrity & integration between systems
• Improve data access and visibility among various systems (consolidated reporting & analytics)
• Comply with Federal Government guidelines and mandates, including but not limited to
• Inspector General audit trail requirements
• Certification and Accreditation
• e-Gov initiatives
• Reduce employee resource dependencies
• document systems
• document operational procedures

Solution Description

VMD, as a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin, has architected a solution to deploy a system of systems to satisfy the requirements of OFM. Each unique system, whether a COTS product or an OFM developed application, seeks to share data wherever possible and eliminate redundant data entry. The OFM applications provide the following core business functions:

• COTS Contracts Management application - The contracts management systems provides standard contract administration functions such as contract document creation wizards, acquisition management, contract financial accounting, integration to other non-VA government services (FedBizOps, etc.) and electronic contract document retention.
• Project management - The project management system provides Project Managers (PMs) and Resident Engineers (REs) working in the field with detailed project milestone creation and tracking as well as integrated views of project status. Integration with the Contracts Management System will allow for a unified view of the project across the organization.
• CMIS - The re-architected and redesigned CMIS application allows central office personnel to augment and manage project financial or milestone data for reporting or analysis purposes that is not actively managed through the Contracts Management and Project Management applications. This application is integrated with the Contracts Management and Project Management applications. Additionally, this developed solution would contain functions from the current RPPTS system that are not provided by the COTS Contract Management application.
• Facility Tracking System - The re-architected and redesigned CAI application would contain all required CAI functionality as well as possible integration to the COTS Contract Management system, Project Management system, and CAMS.
• COTS Reporting System - The COTS reporting system would provide for unified reporting and analytics against all internal OFM system data as well as select external VA data sources such as FMS. This system would provide reporting functions currently within CIS, PMDRI, CMIS, and CAI.
• Single Sign On - The OFM identity management solutions would provide for single-sign-on (SSO) to all internal OFM applications and would utilize a user's standard VA network login for authentication. Increasing usability and ease of access will contribute to increased adoption of the solution.

Process

The VMD team is using the Rational Unified Process (RUP) Methodology, to implement the modernization solution for OFM. RUP is made up of the following four phases, which are performed in an iterative manner:

• Inception - Creation of the business case and the vision of the product to be developed. Confirmation or rejection of project feasibility and definition of project scope.
• Elaboration - Capturing of system requirements (typically using Use Cases) and designing system architecture. Identification of risks, schedules, staff and cost for the project.
• Construction - Capturing more detailed requirements while iteratively building and testing the components and subsystems.
• Transition - Ensuring that requirements are met and taking steps towards release of the product to the end user. Site preparation, documentation, defect handling and the system release to the user community are a few of the items involved in this phase.

Results

VMD, as a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin, completed the inception phase of the project, by validating and identifying the vision of the project. Steps have also been taken towards the elaboration phase, as some system requirements have been captured and the software architecture has been sketched out to ensure collaboration and maintainability between subsystems. VMD is also in the process of documenting Standard Operating Procedures for OFM which will be valuable artifacts for the modernization effort.

The next phase VMD will elaborate the requirements with more detail and begin construction on some of the first set of core systems and components (CMIS, Reporting and Single Sign On).