To support the development of a real, practical, and sustainable IT planning and portfolio management approaches, Northramp assisted the NRC in using FEDPASS to establish and implement a standardized data model which helped establish and reinforce a single technology investment structure for use across the entire IT lifecycle, from planning and budgeting through analysis of performance. The resulting unified model, managed in FEDPASS, enabled the organization to begin establishing a ‘common language’ for the IT services and systems it invests in and maintains, and provided line of sight from strategic goals and strategies to these services and systems as well as their underlying activities. With FEDPASS, NRC enjoys a range of automated capabilities across several functional areas.

Portfolio Maturation

FEDPASS instantiated an IT information model for the agency, connecting IT Strategic Planning, Enterprise Architecture, IT Budget, and IT Portfolio Management information to better facilitate internal oversight over OCIO’s services and improve their delivery. This included:

• Formally defining and establishing the relationship(s) between IT investments, systems and services, IT projects, technologies, contracts and their supporting technologies
• Leveraging the information model to help re-align the IT portfolio to better facilitate reporting
   

Capital Planning and Investment Control (CPIC) Processes

Northramp helped NRC implement FEDPASS with the intention of addressing a major gap in seamlessly integrating NRC’s IT strategic planning, enterprise architecture, IT budget and IT portfolio management information. The previous state was multiple disconnected repositories, which prevented NRC from having true portfolio visibility and control over its IT investments and budget. With this effort, the NRC expanded its use of FEDPASS in the CPIC process by further extending FEDPASS capabilities to automate CPIC reporting and further enhance NRC’s IT budget formulation and execution processes.

The NRC also decided to further strengthen its internal CPIC Control processes by connecting FEDPASS™ to its IT project management repository, PMM 2.0. Once completed, the NRC will maintains financial visibility into its IT investments and projects, as well as real-time insight into the portfolio’s risks and schedule information. The combination enables the NRC’s IT leadership to maintain end-to-end visibility and insight into its IT portfolio.
 

Automated and Improved OMB CPIC Reporting

The NRC leverages FEDPASS to further automate OMB annual and monthly CPIC reporting. This approach, previously performed by another toolset, materially reduced the NRC's spending in this area while providing additional functionality. FEDPASS currently enables the NRC to:

• Annually formulate the IT budget, including tracking changes from offices, IT governance and senior agency leadership
• Track the execution of the IT budget, including monitoring contract spend, total office obligations and annual spend plan
• Integrate IT portfolio management with IT budget information for improved decision-making
• Seamlessly report CPIC information to OMB, as needed, without creating additional files or translations of IT investment information

FEDPASS also automates for the NRC collecting and reporting budget, contract, risks, project data and CIO questions and submission of this data to the IT Dashboard via an API.
 

Manage Budget Execution and Enhance Portfolio Planning

FEDPASS is supporting NRC's transition from spreadsheet-based IT budget execution to leveraging FEDPASS for IT budget formulation and execution. This enables the agency to integrate the tracking of spending for investments, services and activities with the IT portfolio and reduce the ‘cuff systems’ or manually updated spreadsheets that have previously dominated the process, to provide a central source of IT portfolio and budget information. To support an improved budget process, FESPASS:

• Produces funding and spending reports for leadership, PMs and CORs to provide greater clarity on financial budget data
• Enables the alignment of budgets with contract execution data