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CAMS Change Management Plan

Source: vignettes/change_management_plan.Rmd
change_management_plan.Rmd

February, 2024

Purpose

The purpose of this Change Management Plan is to establish a framework for managing changes within the Catch Accounting and Monitoring System (CAMS), ensuring changes are warranted, effectively planned, communicated, and executed to achieve desired outcomes while minimizing potential risks and negative impacts. This document is intended as a guidance document for NEFSC, GARFO, Council and Commission staff (stakeholders) that utilize CAMS.

Change Request Definitions

  • Patches (example:Version 1.0.X): Issues that are impacting the functionality of CAMS that need to be fixed immediately
  • Minor Change (example: Version 1.X.0): update that enhances the system or fixes non-critical bugs but should not break well-written code and does not have major changes to business rules, processes, or outputs but can include new features.
  • Major Change(example:Version X.0.0 and beyond): update that breaks end user code and/or has major changes to business rules, procedures, or outputs. This includes new features requested by end users.

CAMS Entities

CAMS Coordinator

Role:

  • Oversee all CAMS related activities
  • Establish and maintain the project management framework using Jira
  • Collaborate with stakeholders
  • Develop issue resolutions and escalate as necessary to product owners

Term:

  • Assigned by CAMS Leaders to an indefinite term

CAMS Development Team

Role:

  • Identify patch, minor and major update priority levels
  • Collaborate with other project team members in the development and implementation of the project

Term:

  • Assigned by CAMS Leaders to an indefinite term

CAMS Leaders

Role:

  • Ensure effective engagement of the CAMS Development team
  • Ensures that changes are aligned with the program’s strategic goals and objectives
  • Assist the project team members in identifying additional relevant and necessary stakeholders
  • Deconflict competing feature priorities
  • Review and provide acceptance of project milestones and deliverables

Term:

  • Assigned by CAMS Product Owners to an indefinite term

CAMS Product Owners

Role:

  • Review and make determination of project change requests
  • Approves change requests based on their impact on the program
  • Obtain necessary resource commitments
  • Empower the development team and delegate decision making as appropriate to the lowest working level
  • Provide overarching guidance and expectations for the project
  • Make determination of issue resolution based on provided recommendations

Executive Leadership

Role

  • Provides sponsorship and support for change initiatives

Scope

This change management plan applies to all change requests addressing system patches, minor updates, and major updates including new components. Requests may include;

  • Corrections or changes to existing logic, programming, and outputs that are not functioning as intended.
  • Corrections or changes to existing CAMS outputs.
  • New components/products or functionality

This change management plan does not apply to:

  • Manipulation of Outputs
  • Analytical use of CAMS outputs in which augmentation or manipulation of outputs to produce customized products are the responsibility of the individual analysts.

CAMS External Dependencies

  • Data changes to CAMS Data Input Sources should be directed to the appropriate data steward.
  • Changes to data sources including the Observer Database System (NEFOP, ASM, IFS, and IFM-Herring programs), Dealer, Vessel Trip Report, and Account Management System should be submitted via the Fish Harmony Jira project to appropriate data system stewards.

Change Request Process

Any CAMS stakeholder may submit a CAMS change request by creating a JIRA ticket via the CAMSNR Jira project. The change request will be assigned to the CAMS Coordinator. Upon receiving a change request JIRA ticket,

  • The CAMS Coordinator will coordinate with the CAMS Development Team via JIRA or team meetings to categorize the request as a patch, or minor change, or major change, and assign a Jira priority (a relative rank among existing tickets).
  • The CAMS Coordinator may request further information from the requestor via JIRA.
  • The CAMS Coordinator will inform the requester of the team’s consensus (i.e. general agreement) if the request is or is not accepted via a JIRA ticket response.
  • If the team determines by consensus that the change is warranted, the CAMS Coordinator will inform the requester of the CAMS Development Team’s determination including a tentative time frame.
  • The requestor may follow the progress of the request via the JIRA ticket.

Governance

If the CAMS Development Team cannot come to consensus on a request, the request will be forwarded to the Product Owners. Product Owners will review the change request and discuss potential resource needs and or program impacts with affected Division Directors, Assistant Regional Administrators, and Branch Chiefs as needed.

  • Product Owners may request additional information regarding the request from the CAMS Team Leaders, the CAMS Coordinator, or Requestor.
  • Product Owners will inform the CAMS Coordinator via the JIRA ticket when a decision is reached.
  • Should the Product Owners not come to an agreement, the request will be forwarded to Executive Leadership for determination.
  • Once Executive Leadership has made a decision, Product Owners will inform the CAMS Coordinator via the JIRA assigned to the request.

Development Cycle

The prioritization of all patches, minor and major updates are dependent on available resources, competing priorities, and dependencies that may be outside of CAMS’ control. The CAMS Development Team will determine the priority and timing of each change which may result in a deviation from the stated timing cycle.

  • Patches: Patches will be addressed immediately as resources allow (generally rolling out to users on Mondays to allow rerunning all affected data over the weekend)
  • Minor Updates: Minor updates will be addressed on a quarterly basis (First day of February, May, August, November)
  • Major Updates: Major updates will be addressed on an annual basis as needed, jointly with the scheduled minor update (First of May)

Testing and Documentation

Minor and major updates will be tested in a CAMS test/development environment to allow confirmation of the changes, evaluation of change impacts, and perform any other best practice steps prior to implementing the change in the CAMS production environment.

  • Any related testing/verifying should be documented in the JIRA ticket.
  • The requestor may be expected to participate in the validation and documentation of the review and final CAMS changes
  • The CAMS Coordinator will ensure the documentation of all CAMS changes.

Communication

  • All change requests will be tracked via the corresponding JIRA ticket created via the CAMSNR Jira project (see Change Request Process above).
  • For changes that have been approved for development by the CAMS Development Team, the CAMS Coordinator will inform the requester via a response to the JIRA ticket.
  • The CAMS Coordinator will provide notice and a brief description to all stakeholders of any planned, upcoming, and implemented changes to CAMS.
  • Council and Commission points of contact will be included in the CAMS email distribution list and they are responsible for informing their respective staff of the changes.
  • All stakeholders are responsible for informing appropriate external end users (i.e., Sector Managers) of the changes impacting their systems utilizing CAMS.

Access to CAMS

If you need access to CAMS data submit a ticket to the CAMS JIRA Board requesting access to CAMS_GARFO. Please assign the JIRA to the CAMS Coordinator who will coordinate access with the respective DBA for each organization. Include the database associated with your Oracle account and user name, for example:

  • NEFSCDB1. Please include your Oracle user name.
  • DB01P (NERO.WORLD). Please include your Oracle user name.
  • Note: New CAMS users will need to complete a non-disclosure agreement

Documentation

CAMS documentation can be accessed at https://apps-garfo.fisheries.noaa.gov/cams/cams-documentation/index.html (public)

Documentation includes “quick start guides,” which provide table relationship information and common SQL query examples at: https://apps-garfo.fisheries.noaa.gov/cams/articles/relationship_diagrams.html.

The CAMS Coordinator will be responsible for documenting all changes to CAMS.

Background

A CAMS Peer Review was conducted 17-19 January 2023. The background information in the Summary Report provided during the meeting serves as a useful overview of CAMS.

The individual Center for Independent Experts (CIE) review reports are available here.

Questions

CAMS related questions may be submitted via email to the CAMS service account at or to the NEFSC or GARFO CAMS Team Leaders (see Appendix A).

Appendix A

CAMS Roster as of February, 2024

Role Individual Affiliation
CAMS Coordinator Daniel Hocking GARFO
CAMS Development Team Susan Wigley NEFSC
Leona Burgess NEFSC
Brant McAfee NEFSC
Geret DePiper NEFSC
Ben Galuardi GARFO
Kris Winiarski GARFO
Ashley Asci GARFO
APSD Senior Program Analyst (vice-Clifford) GARFO
CAMS Team Leaders Michael Lanning GARFO
Chris Legault NEFSC
Product Owners Michael Simpkins NEFSC
David Gouveia GARFO
Executive Leadership Michael Pentony - Regional Administrator GARFO
Jon Hare - Science Director NEFSC

Appendix B

DRAFT Addendum to the CAMS Change Management Plan

Policy on New Data Input Streams and Methods

06 June 2024

This addendum to the CAMS Change Management Plan clarifies the process for adding new data streams or methods to CAMS. It deals with situations beyond the normal updating and improvement of CAMS that are described in the main document.

The goal of CAMS is to provide a single, comprehensive source for all catch in the Greater Atlantic region (landings and discards) for quota monitoring, stock assessment, protected resource estimation, ecosystem modeling, and other needs of GARFO and the NEFSC in a fully documented relational database with appropriate user views and tables. There are currently many sources of data that contribute to the estimation of landings and discards in CAMS. However, there may be additional sources of information that become available in the future. This addendum provides guidance for how to add new data streams to CAMS to improve the estimation of landings and discards.

Any new data source to be considered for use in CAMS must meet federal standards (https://resources.data.gov/standards/concepts/#data-standard) including for data management (https://sciencecouncil.noaa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2020-Data-Strategy.pdf). “NOAA data management is an end-to-end process that includes acquisition, collection, documentation, quality control, validation, reprocessing, storage, retrieval, dissemination, and long-term preservation activities across all NOAA line, staff, and corporate offices” (https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/66032). Of note, data must be documented including standard metadata, readily available (with possible confidentiality requirements), have a data steward identified to answer questions and ensure continued delivery of new data as appropriate, and be at a sufficiently detailed level for estimation at a trip, or preferably sub-trip, level.

The life cycle of the data should be clearly defined so both developers and end users understand the time period the data cover, the planned timing and duration of new data updates, and the time period of inference affected by the data. Avoiding holes and double counting of data is a priority in CAMS, so the scope of the new data stream needs to be fully identified relative to the current CAMS process. The new data stream must also be provided in a format that allows automated uptake by CAMS, meaning emails of spreadsheets do not qualify. The Atlantic Coastal Cooperative Statistics Program is an example of a data warehouse that currently provides data to CAMS in an automated, documented, and stewarded manner. Contact ACCSP if proposing new data from state and other non-federal partners. Existing federal data for new use in CAMS can be proposed through standard change management procedures via Jira (https://apps-st.fisheries.noaa.gov/jira/projects/CAMSNR/issues) or email to .

New estimation methods are also possible for CAMS, especially when new data streams are incorporated. Similar to new data, new methods need to be fully documented, peer reviewed, and able to be automated within the CAMS system. Of particular note, CAMS is a live system that updates estimates weekly at the sub-trip level to allow for quota monitoring. So new methods should be able to do so as well. CAMS is not intended to serve as a data warehouse of estimates provided from outside the system. Anyone proposing a new method for inclusion in CAMS should expect to spend time with the CAMS development team to ensure the method is correctly implemented and fully tested before use in production. Once implemented and tested in the development system, the new method can be brought to the CAMS Development Team, and CAMS owners if necessary, for final approval.

CAMS is expected to continue to evolve over time to include new data sources and estimators. New data and data streams generally represent major changes to CAMS therefore would follow the rollout timeline associated with major releases as identified in the change management plan. The short and long term benefits of a new data stream or method should be clearly explained at the start of the process. To begin the process, contact the CAMS team through the nmfs camshelp - NOAA Service Account providing a short summary of your suggested change and why you think it is needed. The CAMS Development Team can then provide feedback on next steps. This addendum provides guidance on how to facilitate this evolution and will be updated as experience is gained.