Governance & Project management

Although the project was the first joint IT project between the agencies, staff had been working in close association for many years.

Consequently, there were good working relationships between individuals and teams and a good understanding of each other's requirements and problems.

In some respects, the IT system required to offer importers a single point of entry was already in place. Customs had an electronic interface for the data; risk assessment models were already in place; and alert messages could be sent to MAF.

For its part, MAF also had a comprehensive risk assessment process of long-standing and a sophisticated communications system with Customs and importers. It only lacked the electronic data entry point, which was paper-based.

After assessing the Customs' system, MAF concluded that it could be integrated with the Customs infrastructure. In essence, the project was to add new fields to the Customs interface to capture the data required by MAF, then move that additional data from the Customs IT system over to the MAF IT system, for which a new interface had been built.

As a precaution, an assessment of the legal issues was undertaken which concluded there were no legislative or regulatory impediments to making the changes.

Early in the project a critical decision was made to use a cross-agency, stand-alone governance body - the Business Steering Group (BSG).

Beneath the BSG each agency had its own project team, staffed by specialists with a high level commitment to the task.

Both agencies agree in retrospect that the project had few major problems and those which were encountered could have been avoided by earlier agreement on standards and project implementation methodology. In this instance, the process took time, as each agency had different perceptions of the project. Customs believed it was a business processing project. MAF viewed it as a data transfer project. Sometimes it was difficult for both parties to let go of their perceptions.

Further, project management at Customs was undertaken using a British methodology known as Prince2, which described the project and how it was to be implemented. MAF used an American package for the same purpose called PMI. Although the methodologies had the same objective, the templates and the languages used were different.

Muddying the waters a little further, was the absence at that time of common IT standards and protocols across the public service for this type of business process integration.

Once those issues were resolved, the project proceeded in a reasonably straightforward manner. On only one occasion was an issue escalated from the IT project teams to the joint steering committee.

The integrated system was launched October 2004 at the Port of Tauranga. In November, it was rolled out to all other ports.