By Director Miriam Barcellona Ingenito
The shared goal of FI$Cal and our partners has always been the delivery of a quality system that meets the needs of all of our stakeholders.
As you already know, we delayed our scheduled March Release. In the interest of working towards delivering a quality system that serves end users, control agencies and the citizens of California, we needed to take some time for additional business process documentation and feedback on upcoming functionality.
Since that announcement, our Steering Committee made some important decisions that provide more clarity on our schedule. We are adjusting the rollout of the remaining milestones, which are related to SCO functionality, to realign work and meet customer needs. Based on your feedback, we are giving departments a chance to see and test some of the changes before they are deployed into production. The extended timeline will also give the State Controller’s office additional time to test.
We expect to release key components of the second half of Milestone 3 this summer, including improvements to bank statements and some departmental payroll functionality. We will implement the remainder of Milestone 3, and Milestones 4 and 5 by July 2020.
We are also working on initiatives that will result in improvements for you, our customers. We are holding Imagine FI$Cal – – a series of design thinking workshops to give you the opportunity to brainstorm ideas on focused topics such as training, customer service, or system improvements. We are re-evaluating and rebuilding our change management network so we can deliver the specific type of help departments need. We are creating a strike team to help lower our FI$Cal Service Center ticket counts and resolve end user issues within a reasonable timeline. In addition, we are working to improve system performance to cut the runtime for reports and reduce delays caused by errors that occur in off-peak hours.
Over the coming weeks we will be fine-tuning our schedule for deployment of the remaining system functionality and will provide you with information on new dates as soon as they become available.