April 8, 2020

Apportionment App Named Igniting Innovation Award Finalist

The Budget Line of Business (LoB) Apportionment Manager has been selected as a finalist for a 2020 Igniting Innovation Award. As a finalist, the Apportionment Manager will be exhibited at the ACT-IAC Igniting Innovation Conference on August 3rd and will compete for the innovation award.

The Apportionment Manager is a web-based shared service created by the Budget LoB to help agencies manage and submit apportionments—plans for using budgetary resources. The tool provides functions that streamline and automate workflows and processes around apportionment, offering a replacement for the email and paper-based systems that are often used internally to manage the process. Apportionment Manager has helped create transparency, accountability, and decreased processing, among other benefits. It can be tailored to fit the unique needs of any partner agency, and is based on the Atlassian Jira platform for easy portability. The development and operation and maintenance of the Apportionment Manager is overseen by the Budget LoB Project Management Office, hosted at the Department of Education, in collaboration with partners across the budget community, including the MAX.gov program.

Demo view of the Budget LoB Apportionment Manager

Among other functions, the Manager provides a dashboard to track workflow, automated notifications on items that require actions, tracking of status in the process with OMB, an auditable trail of signatures for individuals approving apportionments, and document management (generation, direct editing, submission), and can be used remotely.

Cost/savings analysis for Apportionment Manager shows that the initial implementation was approximately $500k cheaper than a traditional acquisition activity could provide, and was completed in less than half the expected time. In addition, the tool offers estimated savings of approximately $1M for each agency, while being fielded in less than a quarter of the time (approximately 3 months on average).

The tool was nominated and selected as a finalist for the ACT-IAC award because it transformed the apportionment process in several areas, including enhanced data quality and accessibility, accountability, transparency, improving customer experience, sharing quality services, and innovation in acquisition. One of the keys to its success is that the solutions were developed in collaboration with partner agencies that have voluntarily contributed to the Budget LoB for a wide array of support, including budget-focused process studies, training materials, and conferences and training events, as well as technology support.