With strong executive support and funding secured for the project, the next level of support and resources to be mobilized was the business owners and system users from the core administrative functions to be addressed by the system. In order to develop and implement standard business processes across the core business functions, a standardized collaboration process was developed to guide the interactions of the Imagine PA team and these stakeholders.

The key to the Imagine PA team’s success in this area was a well-structured project management process for system evaluation and change initiation. The key players in this process were the stakeholders themselves, each of which had specific roles and responsibilities:

• User Groups – Comprised of end-users who represented all areas of functionality of the ERP. Provided advice and feedback on both individual ERP functionality issues and general enterprise-wide and ERP-system related issues.
• Implementation Leadership Committee – Comprised of 12 Deputy Secretaries for Administration. Reviewed all the information provided by user groups and forwarded the business process related issues to the relevant business process owners.
• Business Process Owners – Comprised of HR, Budget, Accounting, Payroll, and Procurement managers. Provided operational guidance within their specific functional areas.
• Project Teams – Comprised of IT staff and project managers from the Imagine PA team. Provided knowledge and ability to configure and customize, if necessary, the system to meet the business owners’ functional requirements.
• Steering Committee – Comprised of the Deputy Secretary of the Budget, Deputy Secretary for Comptroller Operations, Deputy Secretary for Procurement, Deputy Secretary for Information Technology, Deputy Secretary for Human Resources and Management, and the Deputy Secretaries for Administration for the Department of Public Welfare and the Department of Corrections. This body provided operational guidance and direction to the project.⁹
• Advisory Board – Comprised of the Secretary of Administration, Secretary of the Budget, and Secretary General Services. These three cabinet-level officers of the government were the sponsors and executive-level business owners of the Imagine PA project.¹⁰

Two types of User Groups engaged in the system change control process. The Knowledge Sharing Workshop was comprised of end-users who represented all areas of functionality of the ERP. This group provided feedback on general enterprise-wide and ERP-system related issues. The Functional User Groups represented end-users who provided advice and feedback on individual ERP functionality issues.

Feedback from both user groups was reviewed by the Implementation Leadership Committee (ILC), which comprised the 12 Deputy Secretaries for Administration. The ILC reviewed all the information provided by both types of User Groups and forwarded the business process related issues to the relevant Business Process Owners. Any system related issues were forwarded to the Imagine PA Project Team. Both the Business Process Owners and the Imagine PA Project Team assessed the information and forwarded the actionable items to the Steering Committee for final approval or re-evaluation (see Figure 5).

One other key aspect of the Imagine PA team’s approach to effectively engage with the key stakeholders and mobilize support for the project occurred external to yet in parallel with the implementation strategy. Early in the project, the Imagine PA team conducted a thorough legislative review to determine whether any existing legislation would impact the project. While determining that no existing legislation would negatively impact the implementation, the review did reveal the need to change the law that governed how Local Earned Income Taxes under Act 511 of 1965 were withheld for Commonwealth employees. The result was passage of legislation that allowed alignment of the legacy payroll system local tax withholding process so that the employee’s would not be faced with a major shortfall in withholding requiring filing of quarterly tax payments or face a large tax due at year end. This effort reinforced the Imagine PA strategy of using technology as just one of several enablers to bring about improved government business processes and apply best practices to government operations that ultimately serve the citizens.