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Suggested Citation:"Chapter VII - Implementation." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Guide for Implementing a Geospatially Enabled Enterprise-wide Information Management System for Transportation Agency Real Estate Offices. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14504.
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Suggested Citation:"Chapter VII - Implementation." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Guide for Implementing a Geospatially Enabled Enterprise-wide Information Management System for Transportation Agency Real Estate Offices. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14504.
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Page 36
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Suggested Citation:"Chapter VII - Implementation." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Guide for Implementing a Geospatially Enabled Enterprise-wide Information Management System for Transportation Agency Real Estate Offices. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14504.
×
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Page 38
Suggested Citation:"Chapter VII - Implementation." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Guide for Implementing a Geospatially Enabled Enterprise-wide Information Management System for Transportation Agency Real Estate Offices. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14504.
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Page 38

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

Implementation should follow accepted software development techniques using software development life cycle methodology and is assumed to begin with the actual software development. Steps of the implementation process include the following: • Establishment of the detailed design • Prototype development • Incremental refinement • Testing and documentation • Training • Establishment of a maintenance and support plan Requirements As you initiate each phase, you should review the requirements for that phase to ensure that they still support your goals and objectives and meet the needs of your office. If necessary, you will need to revise these requirements. Resources Once you have reviewed your design and are ready to move to development, you will need to secure the necessary resources. You should have received a commitment for the development, implementation, and maintenance of the system before initiating the process, but now is the time to formalize the agreement and funding. The following resources need to be established: 1. You will need to secure funding. 2. You will need to obtain staff or hire the development contractor. If you are developing the system in-house, you may need to hire staff either in your office or in cooperation with the IT department. If you are contracting the work out, you will need to write the request for services, evaluate proposals, select the contractor, and award the contract. This contractor may or may not be the same one that you contracted to support your earlier planning activities. You may want to dedicate a staff member to working with the contractor during the implementation process. 3. If you are developing the system in-house, you will need to coordinate with the IT department to establish the necessary development environment including computers, communications, and the necessary development software. 4. Regardless of whether you develop the system in-house or with a contractor, you will need to work with the IT department to establish accepted development protocols particularly for integrating with existing database systems and other information systems and for creating your final data architecture and metadata. 35 C H A P T E R V I I Implementation

Detailed Design Before starting the software coding, you will establish the detailed design. Designers will review and confirm requirements with the agency project manager and work group and encapsulate them through the following: • Conventions for graphical user interfaces • Input screens • Output screens and standard reports • Navigation procedures • Database design • Geospatial functionality • Interfaces to other systems The basis for the last three items are included in the 8-55A logical model but actual requirements associated with the systems that exist in your agency need to be specified and incorporated in the design. Test Plan You will need a test plan to evaluate the system as it is operationalized. In addition to the standard alpha and beta testing of the phase being implemented, you can also include testing at milestones that were identified when you defined the system. The following types of tests can be included: • Unit testing for testing components that are being built • Integration testing for testing how components work together • System testing to ensure that the system meets business needs • Acceptance testing to evaluate user satisfaction • Scenario testing to ensure that the system meets user needs Most development environment software includes the ability to build these tests into the development process. It may be worth the time and resources to include time for staff to work with developers during the later testing, but prior to the alpha testing of the system as a whole. In the test plan, you will want to establish a method to document successful and unsuccessful tests and to capture comments during the process. Project creep can rapidly absorb allocated resources if you do not carefully control the evaluation of what was included in the design versus what “would be nice to have.” For contracted development, the contractor is responsible, at its expense, to ensure the system meets design specifications. Anything that is outside the design specifications is usually performed at additional cost. Procedures for Configuration Management—Versioning If you are developing the system in-house, you will need to have procedures for tracking versions and updates to the software. Most development environment software includes versioning and the ability to “check out” and “check in” code. When multiple developers are working on the project, you should make sure you have the enterprise version of the development software so that changes can be synchronized. If the system is being developed by a contractor, you will want to establish a method for tracking the versions that are released to you for evaluation or after fixes are made. 36 Guide for Implementing a Geospatially Enabled Enterprise-wide Information Management System

Another aspect to be aware of as you develop your system is the versions of the other agency-wide systems that your system interacts with including the following: • Operating systems • Web-based browsers or Internet connection software • Runtime framework software • Database management systems • Geospatial software or tools Major upgrades or version rollouts can substantially affect your system functionality and design. Software Development Once you have defined your test procedures and versioning, you will start actual development. Development will consist of the following steps: 1. Develop the prototype. Prototype is the term for the system while it is being developed and before it has been officially accepted. 2. Prepare documentation. Documentation should start when development starts and should be updated throughout the development process. You should specify the type of documentation you require such as the user manual, a programmer manual, a data dictionary, on-line help, etc. and when it should be submitted such as with each milestone and test phase. Documentation is a part of the process that is often allowed to slide, which then results in limited usefulness if and when the software is completed. 3. Test prototype. Ideally, you want each potential user, or at least a representative of each use case, to test the system. Realistically, you will probably assign a small number of staff members from your office to perform the initial alpha test. It is important to document the results of the test based on the test plan to identify discrepancies between its performance and the design specifications as well as any problems or bugs. 4. Refine prototype. The prototype and documentation need to be revised to address the issues identified during alpha testing. As noted earlier, it is important to distinguish what is part of the original design that needs adjusting to meet the specifications and what is new or modified functionality. 5. Retest prototype. This is the beta test and is usually close to the deployable system. If possible, this testing should be as close to “live” as possible to make sure that it is performing as expected. 6. Implement system. Once you have officially accepted the system, you will roll it out to the right-of-way office staff. You may want to consider a phased implementation with one region going live followed by the remainder of the state or you can roll it out all at once. Training Plan As the system is getting ready for testing, you should prepare a training plan. This is separate from the regular training that will be necessary for new hires, although you can potentially use any material generated as part of the training process. You will need to consider the following aspects as you put together your plan. • Where will the training take place? Will you have one or more short courses at a central facility, will you visit the regions and/or local offices, or will you offer synchronous on-line training? • Will you offer training sessions for each type of user or will you train staff in the overall system? • Will you train trainers, training a selected number of staff members who then train the members in their area? Implementation 37

• Will you train with live data and active projects? • What resources will you provide to staff: users guides, step-by-step guides, on-line tutorials, full-time help staff? If you phase implementation across the state, you will want to phase the training as well and possibly revise it based on input from the early sessions. Information to include in the training should cover the following: • Security requirements, how to set up an account, how to reset passwords, etc. • How to maneuver through the system • How to search for information • User screens including how to get to them • Data being entered and any rules or restrictions associated with those data • How to generate reports • How to use the geospatial tools • How to use document management tools • Who to contact when users have questions or problems Training Providing adequate training is one of the most often mentioned lessons learned from system implementation reports and presentations. You are asking your staff to do something that they are not familiar with and in many cases to change the way they have done things for several years. It is very important that you provide them with the necessary training so that they are comfortable with the new system. Although you may be tempted to be sparing with the number and length of training sessions, you will probably regret it in the long run. Communication is also critical to the training process. Listening to your staff will assist in making sure that the training is effective. Once you have delivered a training session, solicit feedback and follow up with any problems or concerns that came up during the session. 38 Guide for Implementing a Geospatially Enabled Enterprise-wide Information Management System

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TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 695: Guide for Implementing a Geospatially Enabled Enterprise-wide Information Management System for Transportation Agency Real Estate Offices provides guidance for right-of-way offices in implementing a geospatially enabled enterprise-wide information management system and includes a logical model to assist with this implementation.

NCHRP Reort 695 presents the guide for implementing the logical model; a CD-ROM, included with the print version of the report, presents the logical model and a guide for its use. The annotated bibliography and executive summaries are available online.

The contractor's final report, which documents the research related to development of NCHRP Report 695, may be downloaded from the NCHRP Project 8-55A web page.

The CD-ROM is also available for download from TRB’s website as an ISO image. Links to the ISO image and instructions for burning a CD-ROM from an ISO image are provided below.

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CD-ROM Disclaimer - This software is offered as is, without warranty or promise of support of any kind either expressed or implied. Under no circumstance will the National Academy of Sciences or the Transportation Research Board (collectively “TRB’) be liable for any loss or damage caused by the installation or operation of this product. TRB makes no representation or warranty of any kind, expressed or implied, in fact or in law, including without limitation, the warranty of merchantability or the warranty of fitness for a particular purpose, and shall not in any case be liable for any consequential or special damages.

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