The Challenge

Based on a Secretary Directive, the NOAA NMFS Office of Protected Resources (OPR) and Office of Habitat Conservation (OHC) required replacement and modernization of their legacy Public Consultation Tracking System (PCTS), which incorporates the business workflow, data tracking, management, and measurements supporting the NMFS Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) Consultations process. A major focus of this work was re-platforming certain components of the system to a cloud environment.

Our Approach

The ECO system was designed and implemented by TSPi leveraging the Appian Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud-based environment. Our team used Agile Scrum development methodology on this project and used Jira to capture user story requirements and manage development progress. The selection of Appian as the development platform allowed NOAA to leverage the existing Appian FedRAMP authorization as well as base product security, scalability, and robust UI/UX features. TSPi rapidly configured & coded a modernized system that met NMFS business needs.

Results

The modernized solution, the Environmental Consultation Organizer (ECO), provided NOAA with improved usability and functionality, and facilitated more effective management of the workload for documenting, tracking, and reporting NMFS Consultations. Specific functionality delivered included: secure interface, search capability, complex reporting capabilities, regional specific configuration options, role-based dashboard capabilities, public facing portal, and GIS capabilities including integration with the NOAA ESRI GIS system.