Home

Welcome!

This repo contains documentation describing our collaboration with the United States Forest Service (USFS) focused on their Grants & Agreements (G&A) program. The wiki is designed to help the project team keep track of the overall project goals, progress to date, and learnings as we work. It is also intended to be a project landing page where stakeholders can access important and up-to-date project information.

• Sponsors and product managers might want to check out the project background, product vision and product roadmap.
• Designers might want to check out the journey map, a timeline of design activities and (user roles, goals, and needs)[https://github.com/USDAForestService/NRM-Grants-Agreements/wiki/G&A-User-Roles,-Goals,-and-Needs-Statements].

Background

Problem space

There is both a desire and technical need to modernize the legacy G&A application and migrate it to another platform that costs less to operate and is more flexible to policy mandates and evolving user needs.

NRM must sunset the legacy technology stack.

NRM and the Forest Service CIO overall are in the process of modernizing their applications to get away from a vendor-dependent technology stack.

The current NRM G&A application has a proprietary database and a web application architecture. The frontend application also controls the business logic and determines what data and transformations are allowed for the objects that are represented in the database.

The legacy system is using an old, outdated version and support for that version will shift into an extended support plan in August 2022. This support model is higher in cost, and will increase annually through August 2025.

The existing frontend application cannot be moved to a newer version within the existing technology stack, nor can it be used against a different database. As long as the existing application is running, NRM will not be off of the legacy stack, and the existing application will need to keep running until G&A staff are able to do their jobs using the new application.

G&A users need a system that is better tailored to their needs.

The G&A application was state of the art when it was first built more than 15 years ago. In the past decade, the information technology industry’s attitude to services and needs has changed. From user research, we observed that:

• People spend a lot of effort searching for basic information they can trust.
• The current system relies heavily on people to make sure everything is done right and can require manual attention.
• It’s easy to make errors, and errors are incredibly time and labor intensive to diagnose and fix.
• The design of the current tool matches the structure of the database, but not the users’ mental model.
• Bottlenecks in the information flow can delay service to cooperators.

Overarching problem statement

We have observed that current processes...

• Are often opaque to G&A users and cooperators
• Produce inconsistency, delays, difficulty getting information, and confusion for staff and cooperators
• Are error-prone; errors are costly and time-consuming to fix
• Lack sufficient validation and verification to avoid costly errors
• Face significant software, architecture, contract and funding constraints that make it difficult to serve users and respond to new policies
• Diffuse accountability and responsibility for delivering IT
• Are out of alignment with organizational goals to expand adoption of modern software practices

Which causes...

• wasted effort
• funding delays
• lost opportunities
• faulty and untrustworthy data
• employee and cooperator frustration
• failed modernization attempts
• uncertainty on what to do next

---

Overarching modernization goals

The goal is to incrementally build a new, modern application with open-source technology on top of the existing database, and ultimately move to a new database once the new application can fully support the G&A workflow.

This new system will:

• Expand USFS adoption of modern software practices.
• Support a fully digital workflow, reducing paper forms and manual, data entry.
• Be designed based on user needs and user-centered design principles.
• Be adaptable to evolving policy requirements.
• Be accurate, and reflect real-time information.

Product vision

We are building a new user-friendly, fully digital, web-based application for USFS cooperators and FS staff across regions and stations to centrally and consistently manage agreements from beginning to end.

It will intuitively guide users through the agreement creation and management process, ensuring that policy requirements are met while helping users find and act on information that is relevant to them so that they can focus on the project needs on the ground.

Risks

This project’s goals and roadmap are based on the following assumptions:

• That a contract will be awarded to a vendor who will use agile methodologies to iteratively develop a new G&A application.
• That the legacy NRM G&A application will be running in parallel until the end of module 3. After module 1, G&A users won’t need to navigate between the old and new systems, but there will be technical dependencies on the legacy system through module 3 development.