Center-of-Excellence.md

###Center of Excellence

###Overview

This document is the charter for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) Enterprise Platforms (EP) Center of Excellence (COE) (hereafter referred to as “COE”), and as such formalizes the responsibilities, process, and authority of this body.

###Authority

This document includes the authority and responsibilities of the COE and its members who will abide by the practices set forth in this charter. This charter authorizes the COE to perform the following:

• Review, approve, disapprove, and prioritize development initiatives within T&I’s enterprise platforms and commit resources to the development of approved initiatives
• Review, approve, disapprove, and prioritize changes to configuration items within T&I’s enterprise platforms and commit resources to the implementation of approved changes
• Manage T&I’s enterprise platforms application development, operations and maintenance processes
• Ensure the technical quality of all software deployed to T&I’s enterprise platforms and of services integrated with these platforms

###Purpose

This document establishes the authority, membership, roles, and administrative procedures for the Center of Excellence (COE). The COE is a decision-making body that provides oversight and management of CFPB’s enterprise platforms. The COE is the official mechanism for controlling the strategic direction of CFPB’s enterprise cloud, web-enabled and/or on-premise platforms and tools, such as Salesforce.com. The COE serves the following primary functions:

• Strategic Platform Roadmap and Standards - for driving the technical direction and standards of the Bureau’s platforms in support of enabling business and process automation
• New Solution Review - for new applications, initiatives, concepts, and high-level requirements provided by internal customers to determine enterprise applicability, collaboration opportunities, and platform destination
• Design Review - for initial system designs prior to entering a development sprint
• Go Live Review - for completed systems and releases prior to production deployment
• Change Request (CR) Review - for changes to production applications / features or approved plans / processes

###Responsibilities

The COE is responsible for making project-level tactical decisions for applications deployed to the Bureau’s Salesforce platform that support the strategic direction established by the Chief Information Officer in line with the Bureau’s Strategic Plan.

The COE shall be responsible for the following activities, organized by primary function:

• Strategic Platform Roadmap and Standards:

  • Define scope and permitted uses of enterprise application platforms at CFPB
  • Define strategy for use of CFPB’s enterprise platforms
  • Define technology and process standards for EP, the Platform Software Advisory Group (“SwAG” ) or COE
  • Render decisions in a timely manner
  • Maintain records of decisions
  • Perform due diligence
  • Communicate decisions to appropriate parties
  • Ensure adherence to approved processes
  • Share business and technology best practices across the organization
  • Escalate issues as needed to the CIO, Business Executive Sponsors, and higher level governance bodies

• New Solution Review:

  • Review and approve every application concept and initiative considered for an enterprise platform within CFPB (e.g., Salesforce etc.), prior to T&I Project Gate 0
  • Authorize, categorize and prioritize development initiatives which use EP resources or will be hosted on an EP-controlled technology
  • Act as governance liaison to the Technology Committee and the CIO for all EP-related activities
  • Ensure alignment of priorities with enterprise initiatives, Enterprise Architecture (EA) and direction from higher level governance

• Design Review:

  • Review design artifacts and “approve” or “disapprove” initial system / solution designs. This review is conducted by the SwAG and a final recommendation for approval or disapproval will be presented to the COE by the Principal Platform Architect.
  • Determine level and extent of resources within EP purview to commit to detailed analysis of approved initiatives

• Go Live Review:

  • Validate that necessary activities prescribed by the EP COE process have been completed
  • Grant authority to move a system to Production (“Go-Live”) on one of the Bureau’s enterprise platforms (will still require T&I Project Gate 2 review and approval prior to release)

• Change Request (CR) Review:

  • Authorize, categorize and prioritize configuration changes to T&I EP-controlled configuration items, which may include software or cloud environments, processes, approved plans, and other configuration items as defined by the EP COE
  • Support enterprise CR review and reporting for T&I’s Enterprise Change Control Board (CCB) based on T&I PMO’s published CCB criteria and thresholds

Roles

Membership of the COE consists of the following voting and non-voting member roles.

Roles	Govt / Ctr*	New Sol Vote	DESIGN Vote	GO LIVE Vote	CR Vote
COE Chair	Govt	☑	☑	☑	☑
Alternate COE Chair	Govt	☑	☑	☑	☑
Platform Program Manager	Govt	☑	☑	☑	☑
Principal Platform Architect	Govt	☑	☑	☑	☑
Platform Project Gov Lead	Govt	☑	☑	☑	☑
Enterprise Architecture Rep	Govt	☑	☑	☑	☑
Data Team Rep	Govt		☑	☑	☑
COE Solution Architect	Govt or Ctr	☑	☑	☑	☑
COE Technical Architect	Govt or Ctr		☑	☑	☑
Cyber Security Rep	Govt or Ctr		☑	☑	☑
COE Facilitator	Govt or Ctr
Platform Business Analyst	Govt or Ctr
Project Management Office Representative	Govt or Ctr
Business Line Representatives	Govt

*Note: Only government employees may be voting members. In the event that a role above is being filled by a contractor, the voting check mark in the table above is instead a recommendation for those roles which are considered to have especially appropriate input to the type of vote indicated.

###COE Administration

Normal COE meetings will be held on a weekly basis. If there are no items for review, COE meetings will be canceled at the discretion of the COE Chair. Additional meetings may also be scheduled at the Chair’s discretion to handle a high volume of agenda items.

The COE Facilitator is responsible for maintaining calendar invites, reserving rooms, setting up WebEx or conference bridges, taking requests for agenda time, recording meeting attendance, and documenting / posting meeting minutes. The COE Facilitator will prepare an agenda for each COE meeting. Items to be considered for a COE meeting must be submitted to the Facilitator no later than one hour prior to the meeting. See request agenda request form here.

Links to the COE agendas and meeting minutes can be accessed through the T&I Enterprise Platforms team Google Documents collection.

###Decisions

• New Solution Review New solution concepts will be introduced at COE meetings by Platform Business Analysts (BA) who will be expected to present high-level requirements and the analysis conducted (Project Detail, Fit Gap Analysis) to make a platform decision to the COE. After each new solution concept is discussed, a vote will be taken to approve, defer, or disapprove the proposed item. The EP Program team will work with the business line(s) involved and T&I PMO to review scheduling, resources, and budget for the new solution request.

• Design Review In order for an application or set of requirements to proceed to a development sprint or development contract, they must first go through a design review with the Platform Software Advisory Group (SwAG). The COE may decide to approve or disapprove design based on recommendation from the SwAG and Principal Platform Architect.

• Go Live Review Prior to a new or updated platform release being approved for deployment to a production environment it must undergo a Go Live Review. The Go Live Review is driven by a Go Live checklist for the project / iteration and will happen prior to the T&I PMO Gate 2 review. The COE will vote to approve go live, disapprove go live as is, or approve go live contingent upon an ensuing task. For the latter decision, the approval will be considered to take effect once the contingent action is fulfilled.

• Change Requests (CRs) CRs will be introduced to the COE by the product project teams or support and operations groups (e.g., centralized O&M team or app-specific groups). The COE will review the business justification for the CR submitted. At the conclusion of the CR review, the COE will approve, disapprove, or defer the CR. The COE Facilitator will notify the product manager and business owner and the T&I CCB (if required by threshold criteria).

• Emergency Requests A virtual COE vote will be held for only emergency requests. The virtual voting process will follow the normal COE process except that no actual meeting will be held and voting will be conducted through email.

  The COE will be responsible for:

  • Validating that the request is an actual emergency
  • Ensuring that no action is taken in the event that a quorum is not reached
  • Recording the decision
  • Ensuring that each emergency request is processed in a timely manner

• Quorum Requirement COE members are expected to participate in each meeting. In order for the outcome of a COE vote to be official there must be a minimum of three voting members present (in person or remotely via WebEx or conference call), including a COE Chair or Alternate COE Chair. In the event that neither the official COE Chair or Alternate Chair may be present, they may each designate in writing a secondary alternate who may fulfill the quorum requirement in their absence. Note that only government employees may be voting members or COE Chairs.

  When a quorum is present, COE decisions will be based on a majority vote of the present voting COE members. In the event of a tie, the COE Chair will exercise executive decision making authority to approve, defer, or disapprove the decision.

  The COE Chair has the authority to veto all decisions, though in cases where a veto goes against the majority the rationale for the veto must be documented. All change requests, excluding Emergency Change Requests, will be voted on during the weekly COE Meetings. If a quorum is not present, voting will be deferred until the next COE meeting.

• Supporting Tool(s) Change Requests will be tracked in the Remedyforce application and any changes that elevate to the level of a CCB review will also be tracked in the Bureau’s Redmine Tool.

###Changes to the Charter Any proposed changes to this COE Charter may be reviewed and approved as a standard CR. This charter will be reviewed annually or as required. Any necessary revisions will be made and tracked via the charter revision history.

###Appendix A

Acronym List

BA - Business Analyst
CCB - Change Control Board (or Configuration Control Board)
COE - Center of Excellence
CR - Change Request
SwAG - Software Advisory Group - The SwAG is composed of a diversified team of architects (technical, solution, product-specific) with expertise in technologies the Bureau supports T&I - Technology & Innovation

###Appendix B

COE Membership

Name	COE Role	Govt or Ctr
Katherine Kravchonok	Chair	Govt
Dave Cassidy	Alternate Chair / Platform Program Manager	Govt
Bill Shelton	Principal Platform Architect	Govt
Adebimpe Abanishe	Platform Project Gov Lead	Govt
Miklane Chang	Enterprise Platform Developer	Govt
Tim Ryan	Enterprise Architecture Rep	Govt
TBD	Data Team Rep	Govt
Jo Deng	COE Solution Architect	Ctr
Joe Grefenstette	COE Technical Architect	Ctr
Rincy Issacs / Bryan Roundtree	COE Data Architect	Ctr
Dwayne McDonald	Cyber Security Rep	Govt
Alexis Wu	COE Facilitator	Ctr
	Platform Business Analyst
	Project Management Office Representative
	Business Line Representatives