Support Activities

Provide technical support to the project's processes and products to help manage the product configuration and quality.

Introduction Activities Roles and Responsibilities Artifacts Additional Resources

- IT Products and Data - Support Plans - A-TARS Configuration Management Activities Quality Assurance Activities - IT Products and Data - Support Plans - Process and Product Evaluations - Developmental Configuration - Status - Configuration Management Team - Quality Assurance Team - Change Control Board - Other Key Stakeholders

Introduction

These support activities can be performed within the context of each project or as a single project serving many other projects. These activities provide technical support to the management, engineering, and acquisition activities by:

• Establishing and managing the product integrity

• Objectively reviewing and auditing the project's processes and products to establish expectations on product quality

The CM activities establish and maintain the integrity of the project's baselines. This facilitates the flow of products between projects as they each contribute to a portion of the plateau goals. Each project is generally small and of short duration; hence, the baseline contents will generally conform to each project's product. The items to be controlled include any technology-related entities and associated life-cycle documentation. These items can be created in the engineering activities or provided by the acquisition activities. Management products, such as plans and project or product requirements also can be placed under formal control.

The QA activities provide project, plateau, and executive management insight into the activities and work products created and used on the project. The project's planned work activities and their results are evaluated against the project's established procedures, standards, and guidelines. Noncompliance issues are identified and addressed to ensure that project's practices and products conform to those noted in the project and support plans.

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Activities

Key support activities performed on one or more fabrication projects are described below:

1. Configuration Management Activities. Key activities are:

   • CM planning. These activities establish formal plans for performing the CM activities on one or more projects. Prepare a Configuration Management Plan (CMP) during the early project definition and planning stage. Some items to address in this plan are as follows:

     • Explicitly define the CM activities, schedules, and resources. Establish dependencies to engineering and acquisition activities.

     • Identify items to be placed under CM and establish the criteria and permissions needed to make changes. Items may include engineering work products and items acquired or transferred from outside the HS Agency. You should control and manage development tools and platform software configurations. 

     • Establish the CM repositories and implement the tools and infrastructure.  For software, include storing and retrieving individual products or parts, creating a configuration and managing its integrity, archiving items, and reporting change actions and configuration audits.

     • Document procedures for CM activities, including: changing repository contents, handling change requests, making and releasing items between projects and to deployment, and configuration status accounting.

   • Configuration identification and baseline management. These activities uniquely identify the items placed under control and ensure their integrity and distribution. This includes the following practices:

     • Identifying baselines and the items they contain. This may include a baseline for contractor received products, a system transferred from another State, or a set of applications developed in house and ready for deployment.

     • Establishing the identification method for each item, keeping item relationships consistent when they change (e.g., design documentation, code modules, module test scripts, test databases, test results, and user documentation kept consistent with one another).

     • Establishing and executing a Change Control Board (CCB) with approval of change requests and oversight of baseline changes. This board oversees the configuration of products when released from a project and approves release of the developmental configuration to deployment.

     • Generating and distributing reports on the contents of the baselines and CM actions.

     • Conducting audits of a baseline to assess the consistency and integrity of the items in it.

2. Quality Assurance Activities. Key activities are:

   • QA planning. These activities establish formal plans for performing QA activities on one or more projects. Prepare a Quality Assurance Plan early during the project definition and planning stage. Some items to address in this plan include the following:
     • Assign explicit responsibility and authority for the QA tasks to the QA team. The assignment should ensure independence from others associated with the project, as necessary to maintain objectivity and limit influences. Provide orientation for the QA Team on the project practices, such as technical, management, CM, and acquisition practices. Provide orientation for other members of the project team on the role and responsibility of the QA team in accordance with the QA Plan.
     • The QA Plan reflects the project goals and is realistic within project constraints. Identify processes and intermediate or final products to be evaluated in the QA Plan. Activities provide for evaluation of internal and acquired products. Include activities for contractor process reviews in the plans, as applicable.
     • The QA Team participates during the early project definition stage to establish the appropriate processes and standards to be used on the project. These processes and standards should conform to the project and product requirements and the applicable portions of the A-TARS.
     • Create procedures, checklists, and tools to objectively evaluate the adherence of processes and products to those established on the project. These may be common across projects.
   • Quality reviews and audits. The QA Team formally reviews and audits project work processes and products to identify any noncompliance. This includes the following practices:
     • Reviews may be performed using a variety of methods, including observations of processes execution, use of checklists, or automated tools (for example, something as simple as a spell-checker with tailored dictionaries).
     • Audits are generally more thorough than reviews and require physical evidence to substantiate that the work was performed in accordance with the project's defined processes.
     • A noncompliance is first addressed with those that performed the work, and if not resolved, is escalated to an appropriate level of management. The escalation chain may include the IT Project Manger, the IT Evolution Team Management, or the IT Division and other executive management.
     • All reviews and audits must be objective, relying on published criteria documented in the project Quality Assurance Plan and checklists, done in accordance with written procedures and guidelines.
     • Because the QA Team has firsthand insight into project quality issues, they may periodically generate and disseminate lessons learned across projects. These lessons learned can be the basis of improving all project practices.

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Roles and Responsibilities

The key roles and their responsibilities are as follows:

• Configuration Management Team. These individuals have primary responsibility for performing the CM activities for one or more projects.
• Quality Assurance Team. These individuals have responsibility for performing the QA activities for one or more projects.
• Change Control Board. The IT Project Manager, the IT Evolution Manager, the HS Program Manager, or other interested parties may be on the board. They approve release of the developmental configuration, as well as changes to a product once it is released from a project.
• Other Key Stakeholders This includes any group or individual with a vested interest in the performance or status of the support activities. This may include the IT staff, State procurement personnel, Contract Manager, or others who interact with the support personnel. The IT Project Manager, the IT Evolution Management Team, and other senior managers (the CIO) and technical persons ( Chief Architect) also will have insight into the status of these activities as necessary to understand the developing configuration and its qualities.

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Artifacts

The following information is used or produced by these activities. Templates, examples, and checklists for identifying and documenting items are available through the Additional Resources section at the end of this page.

• Developmental Configuration. This is the major output of these activities, an integrated set of IT products or data that is formally controlled, of known quality, and ready for release to deployment.
• IT Products and Data. These items are placed under configuration change control as needed. These products and related process data are subject to QA review and auditing actions as noted in the Quality Assurance Plan.
• Project or Product Requirements. This consolidates all the requirements imposed on the project from all sources: IT Evolution Plan, the HS Program Staff, HS IT Division, the Project Charter (constraints), and others. These requirements are used as a basis of defining and planning the project. Project success is defined by how well the requirements are satisfied.
• Support Plans. All support tasks are managed formally according to their appropriate specialty plans, such as the Configuration Management Plan or the Quality Assurance Plan. These specialty plans augment the overall IT Project Plans. Project or product requirements allocated to the support tasks are delegated through the support plans.
• A-TARS. Applicable parts of the A-TARS will influence the Support activities. Beside the technical design requirements, the A-TARS: Technology Guidelines may include process-specific requirements that QA activities will review or audit against.
• Process and Product Evaluations. The result of QA reviews and audits are distributed to the appropriate individuals. Issues that cannot be resolved at the working level are elevated to project and IT Division or other executive management, as necessary.
• Status. Technical progress and issues are forwarded to the project management activities. Status is against the tasks in the appropriate Support Plan.

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Additional Resources

Resources applicable to this activity are cataloged below. Lists of all available resources may be found in the Resources portion of the IT Planning and Management Guides.

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