TCG and other federal leaders presented developments, resources, and technology solutions for the federal budget process at the 23rd Annual Budget Line of Business (Budget LoB) Spring Forum. A recording of each session will be made available to those who registered for the Forum and to the wider budget community.
TCGers that presented and co-presented at the Forum include Dayne Engler, Sarah Mackintosh, Brendan O’Meara, and Danielle Royal. They led the following discussions:
Budget LoB Smorgasboard
Presenters: Dayne Engler, Sarah Mackintosh, Danielle Royal
The Budget LoB offers a wide variety of tools and applications for automating the budget processes. During this session, the presenters demonstrated solutions for tracking performance measures, managing communications, streamlining approval processes using SharePoint, and improving the review process for Congressional Justifications (CJs). The audience viewed demos of solutions to some of the biggest pain points identified by Budget LoB partners that will dramatically enhance the speed, reliability, and efficiency of these select processes.
An Introduction to MAX Services
Presenter: Brendan O’Meara
The MAX Federal Community is the largest collaboration platform in the government, with over 200,000 users, and has become invaluable for dozens of cross-agency communities of practice to accomplish their work. The MAX applications are proven data collection, analysis, survey, and inter-agency collaboration tools. They replace the old method of emailing documents and eradicate the problems of limited communication between agencies. This session is an introduction to all of these game-changing capabilities.
SharePoint 101
Presenter: Sarah Mackintosh
SharePoint can be a valuable tool to help with developing documents, records and knowledge management, internal team collaboration, automating processes, and much more! This session reviewed basic SharePoint terminology and features and demonstrated a potential solution using SharePoint to automate the Inter-Agency Approval (IAA) process.
Improving Data Management and Audit Performance at VA
Presenters: Greg Herrick, Rob Merenyi, Andy Pavord, Danielle Royal
The VA’s Office of Budget (OB) budget database was implemented in coordination with the Budget LoB. The Director of Budget Process and Data Management discussed the long-term comprehensive build, including detailed data mapping exercises, report reviews, and workflow process improvements, plus so much more! This discussion also included an overview of VA’s approach to collaborating with partners, like the Budget LoB, to take on projects.
Reporting Capabilities with MAX Tools
Presenters: Dayne Engler, Sarah Mackintosh, Paul Malone, Andrea Wood
How many times have you wanted a dashboard or a formatted export from MAX.gov but weren’t sure about what could be provided or how long it would take? Audience members learned about the five different reports that the Budget LoB PMO can provide, including Document Assemble, Stylesheets, CTools Reports, Ideal Forms, and BIRT. Each of the reporting capabilities are compatible with one or more MAX Tools, including MAX Community, MAX Collect/Collect Forms, MAX JIRA Forms, and MAX Survey. This session covered system compatibility, the different publication formats, the required timeline for development, and the best use case, including a sample of each report.
An Introduction to Pivot Tables in Microsoft Excel
Presenter: Dayne Engler
Over the past few years, the Budget LoB has offered a series of courses on using Microsoft Excel to manage and manipulate data for the budget community. One of the topics that attendees are consistently most interested in is pivot tables. Pivot tables are a great way to deal with unmanageable datasets and create meaningful information from them. Dayne Engler showed the audience how to create pivot tables and demonstrate different ways to display, group, and summarize your data. This session also included live demonstrations that showcase the basics of pivot tables and end with a couple of useful tips and tricks.
The Budget LoB works together to develop modern, adaptable, and cost-effective solutions for the federal budget community’s process, technology, and human capital needs. They are a collaborative community that brings fresh ideas and innovation to budget offices across the Federal Government.
About TCG
TCG (https://stage.tcg.com) delivers the positively distinct IT and management advisory services that propels America forward. We help government agencies achieve the amazing, saving taxpayers more than $1 billion.
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