Committee and Agency Debate ADS dashboard bill, agency proposes quarterly reporting and technical fixes

The House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee on Feb. 9 heard Agency of Digital Services staff explain how the state's enterprise project dashboard works and recommended adding quarterly narrative reporting and technical refinements before changing statute.

Stacy Gibson Granfield, director of the Enterprise Project Management Office at the Agency of Digital Services, told the committee the bill's reporting requests focus on projects in the execution phase (phase 4) of ADS'project lifecycle. "The dashboard requests in the bill really are just aligned to that phase 4," Gibson Granfield said, explaining that the state captures many dates and estimates earlier in exploration and initiation phases that are not execution milestones.

Why it matters: committee members said they want clearer, actionable dates and reasons when projects slip from schedule or budget. ADS staff said some information is already available but hard to present useably from the current tool chain and that changes to the dashboard without fixing underlying data and tooling risk producing an unhelpful public view.

Key details and technical limits

Gibson Granfield and ADS Chief Financial Officer Kate Slocum described the current dashboard as a Power BI front end that is manually assembled from a proprietary project management tool. Gibson Granfield told the committee the vendor data model "does not play well with Power BI" and adding fields requires a data analyst and tests; she said enterprise-grade tools were priced in the millions while the current dashboard solution cost about $70,000 per year.

On that technical constraint she said directly: "Power BI just won't won't do it." ADS staff offered to inventory what fields exist and to confirm whether a contract-start or execution-start field can be added to the dashboard; Gibson Granfield committed to report back about feasibility "within a few days" and said end of next week was a realistic latest date for an answer.

Short-term reporting and oversight proposals

ADS recommended stepping up reporting before amending statute. Agency staff proposed issuing the statutorily required annual report and, in addition, quarterly committee reports (calendar quarters) to provide iterative snapshots and narratives about red/amber/green project status and change orders. Staff said they can produce a one-page project-level snapshot (percent complete, time elapsed and a change-order table) but cannot currently surface that automatically on the public dashboard.

Committee direction and next steps

Committee members and ADS staff agreed on several near-term actions: ADS will (1) determine whether a contract/execution start date field exists or can be added to the dashboard and report back by the end of next week; (2) provide the committee access to the SharePoint site that hosts project artifacts for directly appropriated projects; and (3) issue quarterly reports beginning with a March snapshot while the committee continues to refine the statutory language. The committee scheduled a formal committee discussion and markup of draft committee bill 25-0896 the following day at 1:00 p.m.

What the committee considered for the bill

Legislators outlined four response paths: pass the bill as written; pass with committee-recommended language; oppose the bill but accept agency commitments; or hold the bill while ADS and the committee refine requirements. ADS suggested holding the bill to let the department run several quarterly cycles, refine the dashboard and then return statutory language that meets legislators' oversight needs.

Ending

Members asked for an interim package of deliverables (the field feasibility check, SharePoint access and the March quarterly report) before deciding on statutory change. The committee tentatively adopted the path of further work with ADS and scheduled a follow-up markup the next day.