Federal Student Aid – Common Services for Borrowers Project
Goal
Combine four large complex information systems into a single comprehensive service offering--Common Services for Borrowers (CSB). This was the largest systems conversion undertaken by the U.S. Department of Education's Federal Student Aid (FSA) division.
Challenge
- Project plans were developed during proposal stage with limited construction rules and no resource assignments
- Co-ordination of major sub-contractors became a large issue and a hindrance to progress of program
- Government client not confident in plans and management team
Solution
Cognitive Technologies created a PMO and brought in a professional project management team to achieve the following:
- Developed a complete, integrated set of project plans encompassing 50 individual project plans, over 500 resources, 15,000 tasks, and 500,000 hours of work
- Installed and configured a complete Microsoft project server based tool suite for managing the program
- Created task assignments for all resources and implemented a time tracking system for all team members to report progress.
- Implemented earned value measurements to monitor and track progress toward implementation.
Cognitive Value Added
Cognitive Technologies provided professional and skilled project managers and business analysts to:
- Integrate large numbers of teams, tasks and people into one predictive set of phased releases
- Implement standard project methodologies and processes using PMI and CMMi best practices
- Provide coaching and mentoring to FSA client, project team leads and executives
- Implement web-based collaborative tool suite using a Microsoft SharePoint portal for effective management and communication on the projects.