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MANAGEMENT
NYS Department of Transportation
New York State Roadway Inventory System
Background
The New York State Roadway Inventory System (RIS) continues to be a high-priority project for the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT). The RIS web application is the primary tool for data management for the Highway Data Services Bureau (HDSB) within NYSDOT.
The RIS project and application were designed to meet explicit business deliverables. The Chief Engineering Officer, Chief Administrative Officer and Chief Information Officer laid out the high-level business requirements which were comprised of nearly a dozen critical business reports and outputs, with non-flexible delivery dates. The main motivation for the project was to support the Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS) reporting process. The RIS HPMS output is submitted to the Federal Highway Administration and is responsible for billions of dollars of Federal funding to further maintain NYS roadways.
The NYSDOT executives required that the project: a.) produce the next HPMS series of reports on time; b.) deliver all business requirements within the duration of the project; and c.), complete the project within 14 months while following an accelerated development approach. The project's success was paramount to the Department due to it being a critical funding mechanism.
Description
The NYSDOT project team was assembled in May, 2007 and was chartered to come up with a rapid development plan and to make RIS flexible and scalable. The first phase of the project was delivered to the users in 6 months, a record time for a complex application/data warehouse solution. Prior efforts to implement a solution took over 3 years and didn't meet the complex requirements.
Due to NYSDOT's critical business requirements, unusual functional requirements and constrained timeline, the development team needed to work creatively with the Bureau to design a user interface suitable for editing an enormous quantity of information while maintaining complex data integrity and business rules. This was a new approach with a new team making a radical departure from other development efforts in both approach and technical solution.
The application manages data from three separate sections within HDSB, i.e. pavement condition data, traffic aggregations, highway inventory and HPMS attributes. Currently the application maintains over 600,000 highway inventory records, receives over 165,000 pavement records and 30,000 analysis records annually via batch processes.
The project team created an internally open-sourced framework which will be leveraged for future phases and projects. A number of third-party java-web components were used and heavily modified, saving the project time and money. The solution needed to be delivered quickly and be easy to learn for users. A web interface was chosen with the look and feel of an Excel spreadsheet. This gave users a familiar experience and reduced training time.
- The RIS project utilized a new-to-NYSDOT project methodology. This methodology was a combination of Rapid Application Development and Agile Development. The team took advantage of the agile development approach with the usage of multiple simultaneous development streams, numerous iterations in short build cycles delivering modules of work faster than ever before at NYSDOT. The agile development approach reduced cycle time between iterations by 75% and overall project time by 50%, saving 7 months on the schedule. The project required the streamlining of several internal processes within the Information Technology Division (ITD) and intense coordination between groups in order to accommodate the rapid speed of development and need for quick migrations to production. RIS placed a high demand on ITD support resources.
- The project was broken into distinct modules designed for delivery with the HDSB business cycle. This delivery plan helped to ensure timeliness of business deliverables and kept the HPMS deadline on target. The team was organized into three distinct team units to tackle multiple iterations and development streams simultaneously.
- Each development stream addressed major elements of the application and database.
- The project team leveraged third-party web components to save time and money, and simplify the user learning curve.
- The application and database structure was designed from the ground up to be scalable for future Enterprise integrations and data warehouse implementations.
- The RIS application was able to create a highly-complex spreadsheet-like interface with over 80 data elements and 35 multi-layered, multi-directional business rules. The RIS interface has the capability to search and return thousands of records (80 columns wide), for data maintenance purposes, in less than 20 seconds. RIS' performance falls well within industry standards for a data maintenance application of this magnitude.
- Included 4000+ data elements, calculations, function, procedures and components.
- For government and private projects, RIS was developed with an aggressive schedule.
Team Composition
RIS' executive leadership and sponsorship came from the Chief Information and Chief Engineering Officer. The RIS project/application development team included one project manager, four business analysts, two data architects, five java programmers and three Oracle developers. Assisting the project team with requirements gathering was the customer group HDSB, which included approximately 10 subject matter experts and technical resources.
Benefits from RIS
There are many qualitative and quantitative benefits of the RIS application for NYSDOT:
- Ensured accurate and timely delivery of the HPMS federally mandated data to FHWA, ultimately securing billions of dollars of Federal reimbursements year after year.
- Improved data integrity with the enforcement of complex application business rules.
- Consolidated four disparate data sets from various groups within HDSB.
- Improved the reporting capability for internal and external customers of HDSB.
- Increased HDSB work productivity 20 % by consolidating data maintenance tools and data into one application.
- Eliminated RIS' predecessor application and associated maintenance expenses totaling more than $400,000 per year.
- Created a framework for enterprise integration with disparate application databases.
- Established the foundation for an enterprise data warehouse for roadway data.
Contact:
- Susan Mardon
- Director, IT Project Management Office
- NYS Department of Transportation
- Information Technology Division
- 50 Wolf Road, Rod 2-2
- Albany, NY 12232
- (518) 485-7108
- smardon@dot.state.ny.us