Parallel permit efforts

Overarching Timeline

Please also see timelines specific to Special Use Permits and Christmas Tree Permits.

June 2019

• 18F transitioned off the team
• Established Forest Service Recreation Program as the Forest Service business owner
• Updated all project documentation
• Decided that the scope of our initial scale-up will be to extend the Christmas tree permitting application to all of Region 6

May 2019

• Briefed executive leadership team on Open Forest to help establish long term Product Owner and Product Manager roles
• Finalized our transition roadmap and plans for 18F to handoff all production work to the Forest Service vendor team
• 18F delivered training and coaching to the Forest Service vendor team in preparation for the transition

April 2019

• Kicked off our engagement to transition 18F off of the project and hand over all operations and ownership to the Forest Service
• Conducted product roadmapping workshop
• Stood up the Open Forest strategy team comprising representatives from National Resource Manager and the Recreation program

March 2019

• Reignited work on Open Forest following the federal government shutdown

January-February 2019

• Pause on project work due to the federal government shutdown

December 2018

• Usability field visit during Christmas Tree Sales events
• Best Practices presented to USFS NRM staff
• After reviewing options and considering upcoming IT Optimization efforts the USFS began the transition began between GSA’s 18F and Forest Service ACIO Enterprise Business Service Solution Team

November 2018

• Secured system ATO
• Participated in stakeholder engagement and began developing engagement plan
• System went into Production and Christmas Tree Sales Began on 4 pilot Forests

October 2018

• System Testing for Christmas Tree application
• Initiated stakeholder engagement planning
• Developed Christmas Tree communication ad Roll out Plan

September 2018

• Focus on Christmas Tree MVP
• Work on Pay.gov connections

August 2018

• NRM Devops and Open Forest presentation
• Focus on Cybersecurity Operations

July 2018

• Team meeting in Salt Lake City
• Initial Transition Planning
• Roadmap Updates

June 2018

• Prepared for team Meeting
• Draft Roadmap updates

May 2018

• Prepared for USDA IT eBoard Governance briefings

April 2018

• Received ATT

March 2018

• Drafted production-readiness checklists
• Finalized security and compliance documents
• Ongoing discussions of program staffing strategies

February 2018

• Conducted additional research on naming options, and compiled a set of final options
• Published an RFI for the Special Uses Scale-Up module
• Published demo video
• Recommended long-term program staffing strategies
• Forked the US Web Design System and adapted for ePermit standards

January 2018

• Conducted a demo for BLM
• Drafted an acquisition plan for our next procurement
• Prepared a high-level product backlog for the next procurement
• Facilitated a product naming brainstorm with stakeholders

December 2017

• Conducted follow-on visioning session and determined our priorities are:
  • Scale our beta solutions (e.g., support all forests)
  • Improve services for the public
  • Improve services for small biz
  • Improve services for forest service staff
• Began onboarding Hannah Kane to serve as Product Lead; Rebecca Refoy-Sidibe transitioned to Engagement Lead
• Met with NRM to discuss additional work with cloud.gov
• Completed the User Authorization research and shared recommendations
• Completed initial NARA docs
• Completed a revised vision statement

November 2017

• Began onboarding Randy Hart to work alongside a contracting officer at FS to share best practices

October 2017

• Began onboarding Melissa Braxton to serve as Design Lead

August 2017

• Migrated Open Forest to our new cloud.gov organization
• With FS, held executive briefings for key FS leadership
  • We strategized on how to take our “Journey to the Cloud” to FS and USDA leadership
  • Conducted product visioning and roadmap workshop
  • Prioritized 18F’s work on the roadmap

July 2017

• Held joint discussion with SUDS Redesign team on how we can move forward in tandem
• Executed cloud.gov agreement

June 2017

• Launched our second blog post about why discovery research matters for modular procurement
• Interviewed Aaron Burk for a day in the life of an 18F product owner interview
• FS and cloud.gov worked towards finding security common ground
• Colin conducted a discovery sprint to figure out how to link the Forest Service homepage to the ePermit system. Read the results
• Conducted a gap analysis of the Cloud.gov customer responsibility matrix and proposed designs to meet the FISMA moderate controls left to the customer for cloud.gov.

May 2017

• Rebecca created a communications plan to make it easier to get blog posts approved and created a strategy to guide the various posts we have in motion.
• Mark Hopson (TTS contracting lead for this engagement) met with Robert Hinton to discuss procurement strategy for IT in the Forest Service.
• Colin began recruiting additional user research participants, in order to keep putting the different iterations in front of users.
• We worked with a visual designer to make this wiki 508 compliant so we could make it public
• We centralized research documentation into the project wiki.
• Laura had meetings with USDA ICAM about to better understand how to implement eAuth single sign on authentication for the online permit platform.

April 2017

• On Monday April 17th, the product owner, Aaron Burk and the executive sponsor, Brian Schwind flew to DC and we held stakeholder meetings with various members of the Forest Service leadership. The meetings covered a number of topics, including DevOps, considerations for scaling the ePermit system, a project retro, themes related to SUDS modernization, how to conduct user-centered design at scale, and TIM modernization, among other things.
• Following these meetings, we provided FS executives with a number of due outs, including policy recommendations based on the user research we’d conducted. Many of these materials can be found in our GH docs folder.

March 2017

• We explored alternative hosting options including that in the Virutal Data Center (VDC) at the Forest Service Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) .
• Laura began investigating the technical requirements necessary for implementing USDA eAuth in the Open Forest system. We developed a summary of opportunities for providing modern digital services in the Forest Service.
• We also worked with Forest Service OCIO and Natural Resource Manger (NRM) staff to determine a technical solution to allow Open Forest to access SUDS, while maintaining appropriate security controls on the information being passed through the system. We communicated with the Forest Service’s Office of Communication staff on how to integrate functionality and design assets of the main FS website and the ePermit platform.
• We also connected our FS partners with the Deputy CIO of the Federal Election Committee to discuss how to implement broader cultural change within an agency.
• After drafting a blog post, we received the necessary approvals from the Forest Service, BLM, and GSA. We published the post ton March 15th.

February 2017

• In order to align our procurements with an iterative build process, we determined that we could only work on one internal-facing module and one external-facing module (upon which others would be built).
• After more than two months of trying to access our development server in NITC, we outlined what challenges the proposed hosting solution presented to modern agile and open software development.

January 2017

• In January, we fleshed out all of the modules we were then working on and future modules that we’d identified.
  • Because we were building in an agile way, we couldn’t lay out a detailed timeline for all future functionality. We did, however, create a backlog of modules that our folks prioritized as we moved forward.
  • Based on the user research Colin completed, we identified potential work to be done and why it’s important for the users he interviewed.
  • This exercise helped align our understanding of the project objectives with what we had heard from potential users, Forest Service staff, and stakeholders.
  • In the course of doing this, we agreed upon this vision for the ePermitting project: Existing administrative systems restrict, rather than facilitate, responsible use of the forest, and reduce the time spent on stewardship-oriented business and engaging forest users. These processes and systems result in sub-optimal customer satisfaction, less business, and less of a connection between people and their environment. We believe that by digitizing these processes for the public, we will allow Forest Service staff to focus on their primary job and help correct the current overemphasis on restriction rather than facilitation. And, we believe that this will lead to better customer satisfaction and more permits.
• After developing our vision and a list of modules, we worked with Aaron and Brian to prioritize which modules we should develop next.

December 2016

• In December, Aaron connected our team with the appropriate point of contact to begin investigating how ePermitting would affect existing Paperwork Reduction Act clearances for Forest Service forms.
  • What is the PRA? Here’s our handy people-friendly guide to what that is and what it means to you.
• We also worked with the Forest Service and NITC to spin up and gain access to a development environment.

November 2016

• In November, we began the hard work of figuring out where to host these systems that we’re building in successive, interoperable increments.
• Without a FedRAMP ATO, the Forest Service determined that we could not move forward with cloud.gov so we began working with NITC to establish environments that vendors would be able to work in.

September 2016 In September, we laid a lot of the groundwork necessary to begin our project.

• We developed a discovery plan covering special uses (outfitters and guides and non-commercial group use) and Christmas trees.
  • This discovery plan included a user research plan with a detailed schedule, research questions for further investigation, and our methodology. Our goals of the discovery phase are below:
    • Discovery research will help us test our assumptions about how ePermitting systems will help users and help us craft more specific requests for the Agile BPA buys.
    • The special use and Christmas tree permitting discovery phase may be slightly different. For special use permits, we’d like to construct a prototype noncommercial-group-use application form, show it to both forest users and frontliners, and gather their thoughts.
    • For Christmas tree permits, we’d like to observe end users participating in the permitting process and, perhaps, construct a rough prototype that shows an end-to-end permitting user experience and experiment with possible payment systems.
• In conjunction with this, we also began discussing with our contracting officers an acquisition approach for this project and how that would affect their workload.

August 2016 With a signed IAA, our project began and we held a project kickoff meeting and determined when the workshops for both special uses and Christmas trees would be held.