Press
Release
May
14, 2007
MetaVista
Wins Best Solution Award at GTC West 2007
Sacramento, CA – May 14, 2007 – A cost estimating model developed
by the MetaVista Group has been honored with a Best Solution
award at this year’s GTC West Conference, being held today through
May 18 in Sacramento, California. This award-winning solution
was developed for the California Department of Consumer Affairs,
Bureau of Automotive Repairs as part of the Next Generation Electronic
Transmission (NGET) Project.
Best Solution awards are awarded
to companies who create solutions that result in significant
benefits for a customer.
Accurately estimating the
cost of changes to complex software systems is a challenging
task, even for experience software engineers. Since many public
agencies do not have personnel with sufficient technical expertise
to reliably perform independent cost estimates over the life
of the system, cost estimates presented by the contractor in
response to software changes requests are often negotiated
and accepted with limited understanding regarding whether the
estimates are reasonable and justified.
MetaVista’s solution
provides an inexpensive, reliable software estimating tool
that can be used by agency staff, IV&V consultants,
and others – including those with limited knowledge and experience
in formal cost estimating methodologies.
For the IT projects
and programs using this model, the benefit is that during the
operations and maintenance phase, which may last five to ten
years, project team members will be able to generate their own
independent cost estimates of change requests, based on their
specific IT system and system contractor. These estimates can
be used to verify the reasonableness of a contractor’s proposed
costs and to support negotiations over change request hours.
The accuracy of the estimates
produced by the model actually increases over time. The model
provides the ability to analyze the difference between the
model’s estimates and what the contractor agrees to for the
costs of individual changes. Through this analysis, the model
can be tuned for the specific contractor as their maturity
at maintaining the IT system software, staff skills, domain
knowledge, etc. improve. Accuracy increases with the increased
data available on accepted cost/hours for previous change requests.
Ultimately, the model provides
significant long-term value to the project and program and
to its stakeholders, including taxpayers and control agencies,
by demonstrating the programs performance of due diligence
in evaluating contractor cost proposals. As a result, the model
helps to reduce the total cost of ownership for complex IT
systems.
GTC is the largest
technology conference for state and local government. Held
annually in Albany, New York; Austin, Texas and Sacramento,
California, GTC hosts over 25,000 public sector professionals across the country every year.
About MetaVista
Since 1996, MetaVista has specialized in delivering high-quality,
cost-effective professional IT consulting services for medium
to large-scale projects in both the public and private sector.
Services include project management, data center consolidation
and relocation, database design and development, IV&V, IPOC,
QA, project management training, and other related offerings.
MetaVista holds a California Multiple Award Schedule (CMAS) contract
with the State of California, and is a Certified Small Business
Enterprise (SBE).
Contact: Charles Ritchie,
PMP
101 Parkshore Drive, Suite 100
Folsom, CA 95630
Phone:
916-932-7186
info@metavista.com
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