arouault/usda-snap-pa

USDA SNAP Path Analysis

USDA SNAP Path Analysis

Project Description

The USDA's Food and Nutrition Services (FNS) contracted with vendors to build a system to improve the process for States requesting waivers related to administering Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. With this system, they intend to reduce the time in the waiver decision making cycle, reduce inconsistencies across states, and increase customer service quality. The system would replace what is currently a paper process.

Unfortunately, work produced by the vendor did not meet FNS's requirements and FNS terminated the relationship. The incomplete work that had been performed is sitting in pre-production servers. 18F will help FNS assess whether any of the work that they have is usable. We will also help set a path forward for a functioning system and for successfully managing it in the future.

During this phase, 18F will provide FNS with the following:

• Problem definition and potential partner impact: The explicit objectives to achieve the organization’s goal(s), based upon an investigation, and the level of impact felt by the Requesting Agency or their user base.
• Strategy, recommendations, and concept: A stated approach to achieve an outcome based on the organization’s unique position, including but not limited to its mission, context, resources, and risks.
• When appropriate, limited prototypes, wireframes, data, or other documents generated by 18F.

18F Team

• Nikki Zeichner, Strategy @nikzei
• Roger Steve Ruiz, Engineering @rogeruiz
• Olesya Minina, Engagement Manager @ominina

USDA Partner

• Michael Ribar, [email protected]

18F Team Process

• Stand-ups: Daily in Slack, #usda-snap-pa 9:30 PT / 12:30 ET
• Co-working: Daily in Hangouts / Meet, 1 hour
• Shipping News: Update document during the week, submit on Fridays. You can find all the shipping news documents in the shipping-news directory.
• Tracking work: Github Projects (note that since this is an 8 week engagement, we are breaking up our work into 1 week sprints)
• USDA + 18F check ins: Weekly video meeting with client, Tuesdays 3-4 ET
• Slack, 18F + USDA: #partners-usda-snap-pa
• CPS + 18F check-ins: weekly to discuss budget and overall progress/blockers
• Retrospectives: Bi-weekly

Read more about the Team Process in the TeamProcess.md documentation.

Path Analysis Timeline

Week 1 4/16-4/20	Week 2-3 4/23-5/4	Week 4-6 5/7-5/25	Week 7-8 5/29-6/8
Prep Kickoff	Kickoff & Research	Additional Research & Prototyping & Documentation	Synthesis & Final Presentation

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING for additional information.

Public domain

This project is in the worldwide public domain. As stated in CONTRIBUTING:

This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.