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Project Impact on OHS
Head Start Training and Technical Assistance (TTA) services are available to grantees to support Head Start program excellence and positive outcomes for children and families. There are some 1600 grantees spread across 20,000 centers around the country. At the regional level, OHS leadership approves a TTA request and assigns OHS-contracted TTA specialists to deliver the services. Specialists are external vendors hired under 5-year contracts; grantees also receive OHS funds to hire a non-OHS vendor of their own choosing.
TTA activities are planned and delivered at the federal, regional and local grantee levels. The data captured at each of these levels is siloed. There is no centralized data system organizing the records they create. Various streams of TTA data are housed in:
- the Head Start Enterprise System, which is not designed for robust TTA functions;
- in spreadsheets pulled from a retired and limited legacy system;
- stand-alone systems managed by regional contractors and national cooperative agreements;
- non-standardized documents held by individuals at various levels of the system.
In addition, or perhaps as a direct result of this siloed structure, TTA activity reporting suffers from a combination of disconnected systems, reliance on narrative and anecdotal information, and inconsistent terminology. TTA leaders in the Central Office and in the 12 Regions don’t have a clear or comprehensive view of TTA activities. Nor do TTA contractors and grantees have a reliable way to analyze and share information about myriad TTA needs, services received, progress indicators, or lessons learned.
The TTA Hub will be a new, secure, web-based system for capturing and reporting TTA data. The solution will provide real-time, accessible information on TTA needs, activities and progress indicators. It will aggregate the critical data that informs TTA activities. It will leverage existing systems' capabilities so that it is not itself another silo. It will be designed with regular and ongoing stakeholder input to ensure that what we build has value to the users and stakeholders.
The product vision is to build a solution that will greatly improve transparency and oversight so leaders can ensure that TTA is responsive to grantee needs, meets expectations for continuous quality improvement, and supports strong child, family, and grantee outcomes. This product will serve as the single source of truth for TTA activity, enabling Central Office and Regional leaders to draw from it the evidence they need to support the impact of TTA activities nationwide.
- The research we have done to date will inform the MVP and allow the vendor to meet the constraints mentioned below.
- Every user story has a Definition of Ready that ensures everyone is clear on what it means for the story to be finished and acceptable to the government.
- Every user story has a Definition of Done that serves as an additional quality checklist to ensure that delivered code is high quality, secure, and compliant.
- User research with real end users results in both better usability (when testing features already built) and is a powerful source of new user stories that reflect real user needs to be added to the product backlog.
- Close collaboration with the ISSO and wider IPT through participation in sprint ceremonies will ensure that security controls are accurately and completely implemented from the beginning alongside our user-facing features.
- An empowered Government Product Owner can select the highest value work to be completed by the team at the beginning of each Sprint, to ensure we're always working on the most important things.
The MVP of the TTA Hub must be functional as soon as possible, as the workaround system built in Smartsheet has workflow and data shortcomings. Meeting this milestone will ensure that new TTA stakeholders engage in an approved OHS system, rather than devise their own workarounds.