Case Study Overview:
The British Columbia government in conjunction with the Canadian federal government is presently engaged in the negotiation and implementation of a number of treaties with First Nations. At present they have struggled with managing these negotiations and the subsequent treaty implementations. In effect, this is an immensely large portfolio of complex projects that involve parties from various Federal departments, Provincial ministries and a large number of external stakeholders. These projects go through a series of 6 stage gates that each require review and approval by the involved parties. Also, as a mechanism to provide Final Agreement benefits prior to their ratification (in order to expedite negotiations), BC and First Nations can enter into Incremental Treaty Agreements. These Agreements largely involve the transfer of treaty land. These ITA's need to be tracked along with their corresponding Final Agreements.
At present they have been attempting to manually track the negotiations and implementations through the use of a variety of word documents and excel spreadsheets. Additionally, the documents associated with a particular negotiation are not centrally tracked or managed. Issues were also identified with disparities between treaties. Finally, executives in charge of the process have no way of receiving an overview of the status of the projects. In combination these factors have caused inefficiencies, delays, rework and other negative cost drivers. The lack of transparency and easy collaboration has also reduced the trust between the parties therefore complicating the process. Together these problems present an opportunity for large improvements with minimal investment.
Arbutus Solutions has developed a solution based on SharePoint and Project Server 2010 to address these concerns. More specifically:
· Portfolio Management – In order to meet the Ministries business requirements, the stage gated treaty process has been mapped onto the solution. This has been done through the creation of an enterprise project type (EPT) for treaties. This EPT encapsulates the 6 governance phases (which the Ministry calls stages), the internal phase reviews in the form of stages and associated project detail pages. This will enable the key business goal of policy related quality control and consistency. The system also utilizes rolled up project status reporting and has project KPI’s rolled up into a portfolio dashboard for executive review.
· Collaboration – Key artifacts of the treaty negotiation process are stored in the form of custom SharePoint lists. These per project lists will be compared within the overall portfolio to master treaty language to ensure policy agreement, consistency, legality and fit with overall strategic direction. Legal opinion and documentation can be linked to specific related list items which represent sub-sections of the treaty agreement. An approval workflow will be associated with this custom list to ensure consistency on the final treaty language. Additionally, as part of the pilot we explored the usability of SharePoint Workspace to enable disconnected collaboration during the actual negotation sessions.
· Search – Search capabilities will be used as a mechanism to respond to adhoc requests to compare treaty contents during the quality control, policy development and legal review processes. This will be done through the development of custom search pages, filtering views as well as tagging the data with key meta data
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