Category Archives: Risk Mitigation

How do you propose to keep the Project on task?

The best approach we have found is to have one or two scheduled meetings per week during the setup. This is per permitting or licensing department. Each department can be implemented separately. We start the weekly meetings once we are 50% complete with the respective department setup. The meetings are basically a walk-through of the setup. This way the users can see and work with the system while the setup is being completed. This approach keeps the permitting and licensing software end-users involved so there is 100% buy-in with the application setup, fee calculations, workflow processes, inspection forms, letters, etc. End-users involved in the setup meetings rarely need much training because they were involved in the setup process.

Building Permit Software Risk Management

There is a reason most IT initiatives fail, especially in government where budgeting is necessarily fixed. The community development department staff needs to come up with permitting software requirements and plan for an annual budget. The building permit software requirements determine a scope for the work the permitting software or licensing software vendor is to perform. Once the scope is complete the traditional permitting software vendor needs to move on to the next project and the community development staff is stuck with whatever was delivered for the budget. The permitting software vendor typically provides support within the project scope to fix bugs or issues under a maintenance…
Based on the information provided in the RFP and experience in working with other cities, what is the Proposers perspective on the most significant risks to this Project and how do you plan to mitigate these risks?

As a pay-as-you-go cloud based software and service that includes unlimited support, many traditional project risks are already mitigated. With Citizenserve a permit application can be created with a review workflow and related outputs and a fee schedule in less than a day and this includes citizen portal features where applicants can apply, pay, schedule inspections and upload documents. Citizenserve already support thousands of community development professionals in hundreds of jurisdictions, so technology performance and underlying infrastructure issues are not notable risks. The main risks are making sure there is executive sponsorship and department level commitment to determining the desired processes. If there is confusion over what to do, then it is hard to implement. Citizenserve also has the benefit of easy configuration changes. As well as being easy to create; permits are also easy to modify and all configuration is on-the-fly with no programming/coding or downtime.