The Nebraska Department of Roads (NDOR), Business Technology Support Division (BTSD) is the designated information technology applications and services development and support division for the state transportation agency for the State of Nebraska. Through partnering with their customers, they develop and support information technology applications and services to help meet their business needs in order to achieve the mission of the department.
They are mandated with the following:

• Leverage Technology – Develop and implement appropriate technologies to support Department operations and ensure transportation efficiencies in Nebraska.
• Improve Department Business Practices – Improve our internal and external business relationships and processes through teamwork and partnering.
• Develop the Workforce – Provide a workplace that allows employees to grow in their careers, by providing appropriate training and mentoring. Recruit, hire and retain the best talent available.

The BTSD brought in QAT Global to assess the current status and future readiness of the resources and skills being utilized to maintain the applications. The assessment was focused on the goals of the organization to optimize the utilization of resources through iterative improvement of resource allocation, tools, and methods.

QAT Global’s Approach

QAT Global’s assessment of the technical and staffing provided a snapshot of the current environment, revealed challenges, and provided a set of recommendations for future activities. This assessment provided both long and short-term recommendations. These recommendations were developed based upon on-site interviews, written questionnaires, application profiles, competency ratings, and experience and skill set profiles of the managers, team members, and contractors in the Operations, Engineering, Finance, GIS, and Engineering units of the BTSD division of NDOR.
The assessment identified ten critical current issues.

1. The common themes affecting all unit operations revolve around a workforce population that is becoming increasingly retirement eligible during a period when the work is becoming increasingly complex
2. Like many other employers, BTSD faces the issue of staff retention. The societal stigma associated with multiple career changes during the course of an individual’s lifetime has diminished, resulting in a much more mobile workforce
3. The increasing complexity of tasks and volume of workloads impact the quality of customer service as well as employee morale
4. Many functional and technical channels
5. Custom applications and software packages need to be integrated/accessed
6. Response times for user requests need to be guaranteed
7. Transactional integrity in long-running workflow scenarios needs to be ensured
8. There are multiple technology stacks, stovepipe architectures, and convoluted interfaces
9. There is valuable data and business logic in systems that have been developed under tight budget and scheduling constraints that need to be available to other systems/applications
10. The technology is constantly changing; requirements, technology, environment dynamics

Based on the critical current issues QAT Global discovered, recommendations were provided to help the BTSD better retain their employees, improve their training, and optimize their utilization of resources.