NMFS E-Signature Project Activities for October 2008

October has been a productive month for the e-signature project.

We met October 1 to evaluate the Pilot Candidates project readiness against some standard project management best-practices criteria, and complete the e-signature risk assessments for each pilot. This readiness evaluation was not intended as a filter to eliminate unworthy projects, but was intended to inform and guide project sponsors, and as partial fulfillment of the scoping document evaluation suggested in the procedural directive. We did not complete the risk assessments so we deferred that item until our next meeting.

We met October 15 to complete the risk assessments, choose the appropriate OMB assurance level for each pilot project, and choose a representative e-signature solution from among the design alternatives. As documented in our ThinkTank results we chose OMB level 2 for four of our pilot candidates, and OMB level 1 for the Hawaii Non-Commercial Bottomfish Logbook Risk Assessment pilot.

We met October 29 to review the draft Hawaii Longline Logbook E-Signature Business Plan, prepared per the procedural directive; to agree on that draft as a template for the remaining pilots; and to agree on that draft as the basis of a "model" to propose for future e-signature proposals. The review of the draft pointed out several areas that need more work, but these tasks have been assigned and the document should be finalized prior to out next meeting.

We agreed that our next meeting on November 12 should focus on the steps necessary to get business plans developed for the other pilot projects (based on the model), and on documenting lessons learned from this process. Recognizing that we are near the end of our assessment and documentation phase, at our next meeting we will also discuss the roadmap for the subsequent e-signature approval process (that is, the roadmap for package consideration by F/CIO, GC, and GCEL).

We probably only have one more meeting as a group, and we appear to be in the homestretch for getting our pilot project documentation in order and ready to submit to the approval process.

One aspect of our Stakeholder Communication Plan is to publish and distribute periodic summaries of project activities, and this document is the third of those summaries.