Advisory and Governance Groups

Executive Sponsors
The Executive Sponsors own the project and are ultimately responsible for its successful outcome. Their main role is to provide strategic direction to the project. The Principal Executive Sponsor of the OAKS project is J. Pari Sabety, director of Ohio's Office of Budget and Management. In this leadership role, Director Sabety is authorized to make many of the executive decisions that do not require the consensus of the entire board of executive sponsors. Director Sabety works closely with other executive sponsors including Hugh Quill, director of the Ohio Department of Administrative Services and Steve Edmondson, director of the Ohio Office of Information Technology in fulfilling this role.

The Executive Sponsors:

• Have ultimate authority over and responsibility for the program.
• Authorize budget and funding.
• Set strategic-level project priorities and approve scope.
• Settle statewide issues and conflicts.
• Ensure statewide support for the project.
• Approve decisions affecting policy or involving legislative changes.
• Approve project scope change requests impacting schedule or budget.
• Communicate with the Governor's office and the legislature.

Program Management Office
The Program Management Office (PMO) is responsible for the successful execution of the project activities. The PMO is comprised of certified program and project managers, support staff, and integrated project teams. The PMO ensures compliance with a structured project management methodology.

In its oversight capacity, the Program Management Office:

• Assists senior executives across the state in program initiation, planning and management.
• Manages contractor support.
• Identifies business objectives and strategic needs and translates those needs into the program/project charter and project plans.
• Manages competing demands relevant to scope, schedule, cost, risk and quality.
• Ensures the alignment of program goals with business and financial objectives as well as with application, data and technology strategies.
• Applies project management knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to meet project requirements through the effective use of initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing processes.
• Assigns and empowers members for the Business Oversight Council.
• Performs project governance activities and establishes appropriate consolidation, tracking and reporting processes.
• Facilitates resolution of policy issues as required.
• Provides final sign-off on all contractor deliverables.
• Provides overall technical direction at the program level.
• Selects, configures, and maintains the servers, software and communication network, which forms the backbone of OAKS.
• Researches, analyzes, designs, proposes, and delivers solutions that are appropriate for the project's business and technology strategies.
• Assists in the implementation, design and configuration of the ERP system, including areas such as systems integration, development, or interactive design.

Teams

Agency Liaisons
Liaisons lead agency preparations for OAKS. In this role, liaisons:

• Help establish and monitor stakeholder relevance, confidence, trust and satisfaction;
• Coordinate change readiness assessments, training needs assessments, agency commitment events, process improvement projects, communication surveys and end user training;
• Ensure agency-wide support for the project; and
• Promote effective teamwork and continuous improvement.

Agency Implementation Teams
Agency Implementation Teams (AITs) are the core group of agency representatives for the project. Implementation teams are most prevalent in large and medium-sized agencies where there are significant numbers of OAKS users. As appropriate, multiple-agency AITs referred to as M-AITs may be formed where team members represent two or more smaller agencies, boards or commissions. Each Agency Implementation Team or Multiple-Agency Implementation Team:

• Works with agency leadership to promote awareness of and commitment to OAKS objectives;
• Provides accurate, timely and relevant information about OAKS to agency management teams and their staffs;
• Facilitates process improvement and organizational change;
• Identifies and ensures the technical infrastructure necessary for OAKS deployment;
• Coordinates end user training programs; and
• Tracks benefits attainment after software implementation is complete.

Change Management Team
Change management provides the overall direction for OAKS communications, process re-engineering, training, and benefits management. In addition to coordinating the project's outreach program, the change management team works with advisory groups, agency liaisons and implementation teams to help ensure enterprise readiness of the changes OAKS represents. Change management is also responsible for developing and guiding the PMO's strategy for measuring and documenting the extent to which the state realizes the benefits defined in the OAKS business case. Five sub-teams comprise the Change Management Team. The sub-teams are:

• Agency Preparedness
• Communications and Events
• Training Deployment
• Training Development
• Web Site Management

Financials Team
The Financials Team is responsible for completing all project tasks necessary to deliver functionality in the areas of accounting and budgeting, procurement, fixed assets and capital improvement projects consistent with detailed business requirements. Five sub-teams are responsible for core financial requirements necessary to support the accounting and reporting requirements of the state, development of appropriations and agency budgets, and procurement. The sub-teams are:

• Design and Development
• Release 3 Functional
• Release 5 Functional
• Release 6 Functional
• Testing

Human Capital Management Team
The Human Capital Management team is responsible for completing all project tasks necessary to deliver functionality in the areas of human resource management and payroll. Two sub-teams are responsible for defining and implementing core human resources and payroll requirements necessary to support the human capital management requirements of the state and to pay personnel. The sub-teams are:

• Payroll
• Human Resources

Technical Team
The Technical Team is responsible for organizing, planning and monitoring all activities related to the technical environment. This includes software development, deployment of required hardware and software to all end-users, security and workflow set-up, and development of the data warehouse solutions. Four sub-teams comprise the technical team:

• Data solutions
• Development
• Infrastructure support
• Security and control