Report 2018-037 Recommendation 13 Responses

Report 2018-037: California Department of Housing and Community Development: Its Oversight of Housing Bond Funds Remains Inconsistent (Release Date: September 2018)

Recommendation #13 To: Housing and Community Development, Department of

To ensure that it maximizes the benefit of the funds it has invested in CAPES's development and to support its ongoing efforts to improve CAPES's usability, HCD should, by January 1, 2019, develop a remediation plan to augment CAPES in the specific ways required by any HCD programs that are currently unable to use the system for their operational needs. Concurrent with the remediation plan, HCD should develop realistic project management plans, including project milestones, for completing the necessary system upgrades.

1-Year Agency Response

HCD has reviewed and revised the data remediation plan (attached), based on the decision to to replace CAPES over the next few years.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 1-Year Status: Fully Implemented

If HCD follows through with its remediation plan for CAPES, it will implement our recommendation.

6-Month Agency Response

Data remediation plan has been completed and is being implemented. A hard copy of the remediation plan will be provided.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 6-Month Status: Partially Implemented

HCD provided a data remediation plan. However, HCD states that with the assistance of an outside consultant, the department is currently in the process of evaluating the divisions' programmatic and business needs against the CAPES system capacity to inform a cost-benefit analysis and associated final recommendations on the feasibility of continuing to maintain the CAPES system or procuring an off-the-shelf enterprise system. We will review an update from HCD in its next response on whether it will continue to use CAPES and if so, how it will follow through on implementing its remediation plan.

60-Day Agency Response

HCD will create a project plan with project milestones to augment CAPES to meet department needs and ensure that all data in CAPES is accurate and complete. The following tasks will be included: - Sessions will be conducted to identify and document issues (defects, missing functionality, and data issues, etc.)

- Analysis will be conducted to categorize and organize issues discovered in these sessions. Root cause analysis of the issues will be reviewed to determine if issues are known issues, known requests for enhancements, training issues, process issues, or user errors, etc.

- In depth meetings designed to drill down into each of the issues that require CAPES changes will be conducted to identify the requirements and determine levels of effort.

- Staff will prioritize these issues.

- Identify issues will be assigned to sprints based on priority in order to develop a project plan to address all issues across multiple sprints.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 60-Day Status: Pending

All Recommendations in 2018-037

Agency responses received are posted verbatim.