Forming the Structure for Change Management in Virtual City Projects

For implementation of virtual city projects, there are a lot of things that should be considered technically and a comprehensive analysis of all necessary requirements for the target organization should be done. All existing systems also should be studied and possibilities to keep existing systems and integrating them in a new solution or migration plan should be prepared.

But there is one thing in front of implementing and even before that, which is a pre requisite for all these activities. That is change management and preparation for it.

In such projects, a change management plan should be designed in advance and before starting the project, possibility of this change should be evaluated which helps and guarantees success of the project in next steps.

Risk Management Plan

The general structure of risk management plan for virtual city projects is consisted of Risk Identification, Risk Analysis and Risk Mitigation.

            Risk Identification

            Risk Analysis

·        Qualitative Risk Analysis and Mapping All Risks to Quantitative Risks

      Risk Mitigation

·        Risk Response Planning

·        Risk Monitoring and Control

Risk Identification

Each department has weekly meetings in which they will talk about all received data from the project during the last week and if there is a risk that would affect the project, it will be notified. This risk would be evaluated with the risk management team and will receive an importance grade. There are four distinct levels that are described as follows:

·        Level 4 risks are not considered as a risk and are only open questions to be evaluated by the responsible team and then put in one of the levels 1 to 3.

·        Level 3 risks are minor problems

·        Level 2 risks can affect the quality of the project or may delay the project

·        Level 1 risks are risks that may stop the project.

This table should be filled weekly by the risk management team:

Risk Analysis

For risk analysis, we simply consider transform any qualitative risk to quantitative risk. Each of the level 1 to level 4 has a value. We have given below, the basic points for each risk level.

Level1: 8 points, Level2: 6 points, Level3: 3 points, level 4: 0 points

With above basic scores we animate the overall situation in different weeks during the project and make a graph which can show the total problems as well as the solutions proposed in the system in each period of project and it is possible to classify the risks for each department as well. It will be used further in management meetings. Of course for monitoring there are other scores that would be mentioned in monitoring risks in more details.

The qualitative analysis is done in the weekly meetings and each problem will be categorized under each risk level with above mentioned definitions.

Risk Mitigation

Risk Response Planning

This step includes proposing solutions for each existing problem and will be traced in weekly meetings, but can be proposed anytime before weekly meetings as well.

Risk Monitoring

There are four states for any risk level and in each state a special value would be assigned for better monitoring the risk management process:

Of course graphs on each of the four states of risks during the project life would be used by the risk management team.

Intoduction to Large Scale Projects Necessities 

Small to Medium size projects may not need so much resources and of course development architectures may not affect such projects trmendously. But for large scale projects, it is different.

They should be well managed and have a clear architecture for development. Also the methodology behind, should facilitate the system design and analysis. Such systems should be very flexible in terms of users demands because the users in front of them are not few people and many people with different demands and interests are waiting to see the system functionality and expect to have their demands answered.

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) also is another part of large scale solutions that may bring a real added value to such systems and solutions. Without a clear BPR may be the exisitng systems or manual processing is much better even.

Connectivity between different exisiting databases and possibly maps is another keypoint for developing solutions for semi-automated systems.

In this part we are going to explain about these issues and try to clarify and note about available tools and their importance for developing large scale projects, specialy in e-government and virtual city projects.

“Virtual City” is a GIS based integrated urban management solution which provides a unique environment for urban services management, and a user friendly environment with leveraging latest available technologies and special tools and technologies which are introduced for the first time by Safa Rayaneh.

“Virtual City” is a GIS based solution for municipalities and any other urban services organizations or large scale developers. Automatic processing of constructional plans, delivery of all municipality services, such as granting any constructional permits and CF, managing and monitoring private sector businesses, urban properties and projects in city electronically are part of “Virtual City” services.

A 2D/3D interface shows city in its latest form using updates from responsible urban organizations, and citizens receive property related services with just clicking on their home and can search for other favorite services in their neighborhood. “Virtual City“ also covers three layers of urban information pyramid and supports policy makers, managers and executives with MIS, BI and DSS extensions and 42 integrated sub-systems for property related services.

“Virtual City” is an environment and is not just a group of applications. It is because of components that are delivered with the core applications. Its Service Oriented Architecture and unique components which are designed for property management and related urban services add flexibility for customizing the solution. Workflow, Rule Engine, Code Generators, SODAL and AVL systems are part of core components in “Virtual City”.

“Virtual City” enhances transparency in governance and facilitates automatic implementation of laws and regulations and provides equal chances of access to society opportunities by sharing information.

Implementation strategy of “Virtual City” has proved its success with coverage of over 3Million properties so far. It acts as a catalyst for e-Government projects with sharing 80% of data with any other urban services organization, improving their performance and helps growth in urban economy in large scale. Doing the jobs 50 times faster than before with automating activities and with sharing  owners and property data among different urban services organizations and municipality departments reduces costs and creates interactions between different governmental bodies which brings huge added value for society.

“Virtual City” is result of twelve years of sole research, development and implementation on this system by Safa Rayaneh MSC SDN BHD. We are a strategic partner of MSCMS [MSC Management Services SDN.BHD]  and ready to deliver this solution directly or through our active partners worldwide. We are also a member of OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium).

Transferability

Transferability of this solution is guaranteed with SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and special components such as “Workflow” and SODAL Generator, that enable this solution to be customized very easily for any other municipality or any urban service organization.

This solution is now working in more than 40 cities and fast adaptability and flexibility of this solution is proved with successful implementations. It is a scalable solution and is implemented in cities with 50,000 to 2.5M citizens and existing experiences can be transferred to other Metropolises.

SODAL generator makes integration among any database possible and also any changes in processes can be easily managed in a visual environment in “Safa Workflow” and related changes in codes, entry pages and reports will be done automatically with linked code generator and report generators. Also there is possibility of changing security levels and access to different data and processes with the integrated “Safa Security” component.

Of course transferring the system to other metropolises is possible through training special project managers to take care of different steps of implementation and detail of activities and data should be collected and maintained with the team in other Metropolis members. Special teams for making maps GIS ready or GIS team for map updates, Hardware support, Software Support and Integration team and Data Collection and Archiving teams are basic teams that should be arranged for running examples of this project.

Innovations and Technological Competitivness

It can be studied from two aspects one from technological side and from knowledge sharing point of view

·         From technological point of view,

o   the system activities and work flows are managed through a visual environment named “Workflow” component which makes management of work flows very flexible both for development of system and also for maintenance that helps non-programmers  to mange it easily.

o   SODAL Generator is a component which is developed for connecting existing databases with different engines through creating objective data access layer. For example if there would be some databases in Oracle and some other in SQL server or any other database engine, they can communicate after integration using this tools in the final integrated system. This technology is developed just for this solution and has no example anywhere in the market

o   “Rule Engine” is another tool which enables easy declaration of laws and regulations which translates all of them directly from natural language to computer code. This is a unique tool both for classification of rules and also applying them easily in form of code which removes the need of circular letters and removes the possibility of self judgement on different cases. It reduces corruption and increases transparency about rules and regulations in all systems for citizens or all users.

o   Map processing components that processes GIS maps and data from databases and rules and regulation engines and produces reports about all possible violations from governing rules and regulations