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01 Background and introduction
OPS is the OPRE Portfolio management System. It is a new system currently being designed and developed.
The Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) is part of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). OPRE organizes and executes research that supports many of ACF’s programs (like Head Start). This includes evaluations of existing programs, explorations of innovative approaches to helping low-income children and families, research syntheses, and descriptive and exploratory studies. They largely contract out for these research services.
OPRE staff plan and manage research, evaluation, and data projects to build evidence to improve the lives of children and families. This work involves administrative responsibilities related to procurement, budgeting, portfolio management, and workforce planning. The information and workflows they need to fulfill these responsibilities are spread out across numerous HHS-owned systems and manually-compiled documents, and require coordination among several people & multiple steps. This is cumbersome, inefficient, and error-prone, taking time and bandwidth away from mission work.
OPS will empower managers and staff with the visibility they need into OPRE’s research, evaluation, and data activities, as well as streamline budget and administrative tasks. With this system, it will be easy for OPRE to plan and manage projects so they can spend less time managing the work and more time building evidence to improve the lives of children and families.
As we design and build OPS, we will seek to have the following impact:
- OPRE has a single source of truth about projects that has relevant, accurate data that any staff can easily access
- Budget and administrative tasks can be completed quickly, easily, and independently
- Reliance on and usage of spreadsheets and human-induced email-based communication is reduced.
- OPS can be updated and modified more efficiently and with less risk.
More details on OPS goals can be found here.
OPRE started working with the 18F team in March 2021 to assess the sustainability of MAPS (a 12-year-old system) from a technical, security, usability, and cost perspective and get advice on what OPRE should do with the system moving forward.
18F is a multi-disciplinary office within GSA that partners with agencies on projects like modernizing software development processes, improving public-facing services like websites, and digitizing and streamlining internal systems.
MAPS (Management and Accounting of Projects System) is a back-office web application created in 2012 for OPRE to centralize and simplify procurement- and budget-related activities so that staff could spend more time focused on research. MAPS allows OPRE research, management, operations, and budget staff to communicate about planned and in-progress procurement actions and agreements, authorize payments, and track spending. It is not a system of record, but rather consolidates all this information into one place to streamline procurement and budgetary activities.
While MAPS is infinitely better than the system it replaced, OPRE has grown and its procurement and budgeting needs have evolved from the time when MAPS was built. In addition, OPRE lacks a comprehensive system to support its portfolio management and workforce planning activities. MAPS was not designed to grow or scale in the ways OPRE needs.
18F recommended that OPRE rebuild rather than improve upon MAPS. 18F assisted OPRE in selecting a vendor to build and maintain the system long-term. During this phase of work, 18F learned that OPRE had several other tasks that they wanted to be able to do more easily that had to do with managing their research projects and staff. Together, we aligned on an expanded vision for the new system, which they have named OPRE’s Research Portfolio management System (OPS).