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Q&A
Passport quality assurance, funding, and system improvements
0:37:23
ยท
3 min
Council Member Julie Won inquires about quality assurance, funding, and improvements for the Passport system. Director Lisa Flores discusses ongoing efforts to enhance the system and recent changes made.
- Additional funding of $500,000 in FY25 and $1 million in FY26 has been allocated for Passport quality assurance
- Recent improvements include implementing budget readiness process and decoupling certain activities related to invoicing
- The quality assurance provider is still being brought on board
- There are no current capital funding requests for Passport updates
Julie Won
0:37:23
For Passport, are there recommendations from Evalua or Accenture or whoever does the quality assurance now for maintenance as well as upgrades to make it up to date because as we've seen since the first year that we've been in office or have had this position till now, the user experience hasn't changed a great deal for it to be a very user friendly platform.
Lisa Flores
0:37:49
Thank you for that question.
0:37:50
Yeah.
0:37:50
And do remember, I think, our first meeting, Chairwon, and you came over.
0:37:54
Looking at from your background in technology, it doesn't necessarily have the look and feel that folks are necessarily accustomed to.
0:38:03
But I would say, again, even with our Citi's financial management system, ultimately, you want both a user experience and stabilization that the system works.
0:38:13
And I'm very proud of the fact that we have done some major releases, major changes in increasing the volume.
0:38:21
And we have still areas of improvement, but that the system is working.
0:38:28
But we definitely, every single day, not only with our contractors but I can't emphasize enough that we, through our change management team, have change management officers at each agency which we engage with.
0:38:40
And we're constantly looking at ways that we can update the system again in a way that more accurately reflects the most streamlined process, as possible.
0:38:50
And always look forward, and as you know, any recommendations folks have, we really take those seriously and look at what would potentially have the greatest impact across the system to the greatest number of users.
Julie Won
0:39:02
The November the November plan included $500,000 in fiscal year twenty five, increasing to 1,000,000 in fiscal year twenty six for the out years for the passport quality assurance.
0:39:12
How much of this funding goes to quality assurance, and how much of it is actually fixing bugs in the system?
0:39:18
And what improvements have you seen in the passport system since the additional of this funding?
0:39:23
And who is doing the quality assurance now?
0:39:24
We wanna make sure that it's not the same vendor who's also doing the maintenance.
Lisa Flores
0:39:28
Yeah.
0:39:29
Thank you.
0:39:29
Thank you, chair one.
0:39:30
And, again, I appreciate the commitment in ensuring that we receive additional funds.
0:39:36
I definitely have to get back to you with some of the detail of your questions, but I would say that we have, as I mentioned earlier, the budget readiness is one of the changes that we made.
0:39:44
We've made some additional changes, and more that are in the hopper, related to decoupling certain activities that were built in Passport related to invoicing to allow for more streamlined payments.
0:40:01
So I'll give you one example.
0:40:03
Advances, as you know, our nonprofit providers and human service providers are eligible for an automatic advance of 25% at the beginning of the fiscal year.
0:40:13
Previously, as we fully adopted all those contracts from Accelerator into Passport, there was a sort of checks and balances built into the system that would not allow advances to go forward automatically if there was another pending action related to that contract.
0:40:30
We removed that in order to ensure that we have more seamless flow of funds to vendors.
0:40:36
So definitely can share with you after this, there's been a bunch of these sort of what, again, I would say may seem like little changes externally, but altogether are towards this end of really having, especially the invoicing and budgeting process, be more streamlined than it is now.
Julie Won
0:40:54
And who is the quality assurance provider now?
Lisa Flores
0:40:57
We're we're still working, through bringing that vendor on and can definitely give you, updates.
Julie Won
0:41:03
Okay.
0:41:05
Are there any other capital costs for updating Passport that I know that right now you there's nothing definitive, but is there anything that that you have in mind or a project ID that we can try to support?
Lisa Flores
0:41:19
At this time, we don't have any capital funding or pending requests for capital funding.