Project: Moped v1.0

[amenity]

Moped 1.0 is the inaugural release of Moped, our shared platform for Austin Transportation and partners to manage the City of Austin's complete portfolio of mobility infrastructure projects.

Background

The City of Austin has a diverse portfolio of mobility infrastructure projects. These are currently tracked in various platforms — from simple spreadsheets administered by a single workgroup to bespoke enterprise software that tracks capital-funded projects. Without a centralized system of record, cross-workgroup coordination is challenging, analysis and reporting capabilities are limited, and resources are not used with maximum efficiency.

Scope

This inaugural Moped release will provide a shared platform for Austin Transportation and partners to manage the City of Austin's complete portfolio of mobility infrastructure projects.

Moped 1.0 will include all the features and infrastructure needed to support an organization-wide transition to a single application to manage their projects. As a result, core project data and we will publish a rich, high-quality dataset to leverage in public-facing viewers, BI platforms, and more.

The following capabilities, outside our current scope of work, will be considered for future Moped releases or constitute independent products in the Moped ecosystem:

• Integrate mobility-related project data from partner organizations like CapMetro, TXDOT, and others who own and manage mobility-related projects in Austin.
• Establishing an authoritative geography for department-wide use.
• Creating a GIS tool with capabilities beyond the basic feature editing/creation that ArcGIS does now. (Users must currently define features by drawing them freehand, but a future tool would allow users to select individual points, lines, and features from the authoritative geography and tie them to a project.)
• Building a public-facing mobility project explorer.

Outcomes and Deliverables

Desired outcomes	What success looks like	Deliverables
The City of Austin tracks its complete mobility project portfolio and mobility activities of partner entities on a shared platform.	• Interdepartmental use of the same tool • Ability to tell the full story of mobility activities in Central Texas • Platform tailored to mobility planning, project/program development, and asset tracking	• Enterprise relational georeferenced database • Published live mobility projects lists and maps
Systems are integrated so that data flows between them rather than being replicated.	• Data entered once • Automation keeps data sets up to date in multiple systems (e.g. upon project completion or pulling real-time financials) • Consistent information across channels and systems — from public reports to eCapris	• Standardized naming conventions and data type • Integration with eCapris (capital projects), budget, asset inventories, and partner entity project databases
Data is available to inform decision-making for mobility planning, project management, and business process improvement.	• Accurate live data is available and well-structured for business intelligence, analysis (mobility, equity, etc.), reporting, and mapping • Flexible data framework as needs evolve	• User roles, permissions, and structures that support appropriate levels of access and consumption for reliable security, stability, maintenance, QAQC, and data retention.
Platform to facilitate effective and efficient project and program management	• Workflows and structures to support coordination across teams for projects • Flexible cost estimation tools in a centralized platform for consistency and quality • Tracking of funding sources not yet in our financial system (developer contribution or by partners)	• Tracking and workflows to support reviews, agreements, work orders, data collection requests, date tracking, update alerts

Roadmap

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This Github issue represents a project of Austin Transportation's Data & Technology Services team. Project status is documented regularly in the comments below.

[amenity]

Status update:
We completed discovery research focused on Active Transportation's Interim Project Database and high-level technical strategies. Our project kickoff with MPD stakeholders helped us develop our understanding of user needs and organizational vision. We will soon bring in an external consultant to continue requirements gathering and design the MPD data architecture.

To stay involved and receive regular updates on MPD, please fill out this one-minute stakeholder survey.

[amenity]

Status update
Procurement has been completed and JD, @zappfyllc, is scheduled to begin our engagement on 10/7/19. He'll be working remotely, half-time, and will begin with a research phase. This includes:

• Data architecture research and design
  • Research data currently being tracked by ATD workgroups (typically in spreadsheets 😉) outside of the Access DB
  • Research data structure and storage in eCapris
  • Deliverable: Recommended MPD data architecture design
• Knack UX/UI requirements elicitation
  • Research tracking, analysis, and reporting activities by ATD workgroups
  • Deliverable: Documentation of MPD user stories

[amenity]

Status update
We are currently interviewing users from various workgroups to learn about their project tracking workflows and data. So far we have worked with:

• Arterial Management
• Transportation Engineering
• Office of the Director and Systems Development — focused on funding
• Vision Zero
• Signs, Markings, and Banners
• Public Works - general

Up next we've got:

• Systems Development
• Transit Enhancement
• Public Works - Urban Trails

We'll also be learning more about eCapris, Capital Projects Explorer, and the Capital Improvement Projects GIS feature class. During our first Sprint Review in mid-November, we'll present our research findings and discuss next steps with stakeholders.

[amenity]

Status update
We presented findings from our user interviews with stakeholders during our first Sprint Review:

• Slide deck
• Video recording

After wrapping up interviews, we'll be synthesizing those to connect with the success criteria identified during our discovery period and building requirements into the feature roadmap. With this in hand we'll be able to plan and resource our upcoming implementation phase.

[zappfyllc]

ATD MPD Learnings documentation (success criteria vs. takeaways from user interviews): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jtd81HmzCUAAigBK8ZaIAfkuzrgaHObJ/view?usp=sharing

[amenity]

The team did outstanding work to get the Moped 1.0 release out on schedule, despite the winter storm, and our AMD stakeholders were with us the whole way, providing invaluable feedback.

As of this release, Arterial Management is using Moped to manage signal projects. We imported over 150 existing projects from Data Tracker and are working with AMD to onboard their team to the platform and refine functionality as needed.

In March, we’ll turn our attention to Moped 2.0 features. These include an ArcGIS Online viewer for Moped projects, enhancements to project mapping, and eCAPRIS integration. We will continue to do biweekly sprint reviews with the Moped User Group to align on requirements, assess progress, and prioritize efforts.

Once the group has determined that Moped 2.0 meets everyone’s must-have needs, we will migrate projects from the Interim Mobility Project (Access) Database and onboard users from Active Transportation, Project Delivery, and Transportation Engineering.

[amenity]

Arterial Management has been using Moped for project management since February. Two more divisions, Project Delivery and Transportation Engineering, are in the process of onboarding staff and adding projects to the system. Meanwhile, we are extending the Moped data model, refining the user interface, and building a consolidated map view of projects. We plan to transition Active Transportation to Moped and migrate their extensive existing project data to the platform this fall.

[amenity]

We are going to start doing biweekly releases to ensure users get features faster. The next release, v1.7, includes

• Ability to select funding sources from eCapris
• Ability to edit phases from dashboard view
• Add roundabout map component type

We’re planning to release every other week on Thursday afternoons. This may result in brief intermittent downtime.

Our biweekly meetings with PDD and TED are productive. It appears that we’ll need to do some refactoring of our phases and milestones. We’re also speaking with PDD and ATSD this week to ensure we’re aligned on the intended outcomes and timeline for PDD & TED onboarding.

[johnclary]

We committed to releasing new Moped features every two weeks, and we've stuck to that. Moped v1.8 shipped on 9/14. Our next release is schedule for 9/28.

Most recently, we've added the ability to use "tags" to group related projects together. This feature was expedited to support the Mobility Annual Plan (MAP) report. We've also implemented a number of enhancements to our project timeline tracking to support the needs of Traffic Engineering and Project Delivery. The Project Delivery Division is on track to begin using Moped in production upon the release of v1.9 on 9/28, at which time we will shift our focus to onboarding the Active Transportation and Street Design Division.

[johnclary]

We have now onboard the Project Deliver and Transportation Engineering workgroups into Moped. With that, we're closing out the v1.0 project as we set our sights on Moped v2.0.