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 pilot.
We described and characterized a wide spectrum of alternative e-signature approaches. Based on our requirements some of the alternatives were immediately eliminated from further consideration, and we eventually chose to proceed to the next step with three alternatives which were representive of the remaining range of approaches. We met on September 3 and conducted an Alternatives Analysis, comparing these three representative e-signature approaches and ranking those approaches according to weighted evaluation criteria. Results are documented in this report.
We next began describing potential e-signature Pilot Candidates. We met September 17 to discuss the pilot candidates. We are currently in the process of incorporating feedback from the September 17 meeting, and we will be meeting October 1 to evaluate the pilot projects and complete the risk assessment of each pilot.
Our Proposed Meeting Schedule is now one week behind our initial plan, but we continue to make steady progress and a week's delay won't have any significant consequences.
One aspect of our Stakeholder Communication Plan is to publish and distribute periodic summaries of project activities, and this document is the second of those summaries.