Hello, you are receiving this information as your organization’s Agency Liaison for Florida PALM. The Florida PALM Team will be sharing Project information with you on a regular basis. Please make sure this information is shared within your organization as appropriate (e.g., newsletters, targeted communications, meetings). The channel and timing of message dissemination up to you, however, it may be helpful to distribute different components of the message throughout the quarter.
Leading Change Workshop
We are looking forward to attending the Florida PALM Leading Change Workshop planned for January 13. The workshop will give us tools to facilitate internal change discussions between CMS end users and direct supervisors. These conversations will describe internal changes that will take place after CMS Wave implementation (July 2021), the reason for the changes, and the next steps in preparation. It is important for end users to know their direct supervisor understands the changes and will be available to support them through it. There will be an office hour held the following week for us to discuss any questions we encounter as we begin facilitating conversations on the changes our agency will be taking. This is an important step for us in our transition to Florida PALM at the CMS Wave.
Security Access Manager Training
Each agency has identified a Security Access Manager or SAM who is responsible for granting Florida PALM access to agency end users based on end user job duties and responsibilities. To support their roles and responsibilities, web-based training will be provided to all identified SAMs in early February. This training will provide an overview of security access within Florida PALM and the SAMs will learn how to:
  • create and inactivate Florida PALM end user profiles;
  • add and remove Florida PALM end user roles; and
  • review end user access, to include any Separation of Duty (SOD) conflicts.
Completion of this training will help agency SAMs prepare for participation in Identity and Access Management or IAM testing activities and User Acceptance Testing.

(Agency, use this section to introduce your SAM)
Testing
Florida PALM testing is underway! With Connectivity Testing complete (ensuring agencies can connect to Florida PALM and access files), seven agencies and four third parties are currently conducting interface testing because they will be directly connecting through interfaces to Florida PALM at the CMS Wave go-live. System testing is nearly complete, is on target, and is producing better than expected results. Conversion testing is more than half way complete and is also producing better than expected results.

Coming this spring, the Florida PALM Project will begin User Acceptance Testing (UAT) for Florida PALM before the CMS Wave go-live in July 2021. A sample of end users from numerous agencies will be completing a thorough set of scripts and scenarios representing business activities in Florida PALM. The goal is to confirm that expected business processes and functional expectations are achieved, thus leading to a successful deployment to the wider user community. This will serve as major point of achievement when the UAT is complete.
Preparing for Central Wave
While the CMS Wave implementation is around the corner, we are already preparing for the Central Wave implementation.
  • In January, we will begin to inventory our process and procedure documentation that will require updating as we transition to the Central Wave. We will identify where changes should be made as we journey towards Central Wave implementation and learn more about our impact through Readiness tasks and workshops.
  • We are invited to the Office Hours scheduled in March 2021. This will be a continuation of the office hours series that followed the October 1, 2020 Interface and Conversion Workshop. Here, we will have the opportunity to continue our conversation with the Project Team on planned Central Wave interfaces and web services.
  • Over several months in the spring of 2021, a reporting workgroup made up of representative agencies will review our reporting needs for the Central Wave. This will tell us the available reports in Florida PALM at the Central Wave transition. 
  • After confirming our role mapping worksheet for the CMS Wave in January, we will begin the process again for the Central Wave. In July/August we will assess roles, workflows, and separation of duties for the Central Wave. We will attend workshops and complete a Role Mapping Worksheet specific to the Central Wave, just we as did for the CMS Wave.
It is exciting to see our journey to the second implementation. 
Standardized Business Process Models
The Departmental Wave implementation in 2024 will have a significant impact to agencies and enterprise partners. In order to give us plenty of time to prepare for a successful transition, Updates to the Standardized Business Process Models to include process changes for the Departmental Wave will be shared with us for collaborative review. We will have the opportunity to review and share feedback for the process models in March 2021 through interactive office hours. It may seem early, but steps taken now will help us for upcoming changes. During this time, we need to also consider our reporting needs, agency business systems, internal process changes, and budget requests.
Florida PALM's Updated Website
Take a look at the Project’s updated website. The website’s structure remains the same, but now has a new look and feel and offers increased efficiency. As a product of this transition, you will notice a few small changes: 
  • The Navigation bar has switched to the right side of the page. Additionally, the Homepage now has six quick-links leading to the Project’s most frequently visited pages.
  • MRW tasks have a new layout for viewing active, upcoming, and archived tasks.
  • The Meetings & Workshops page has a new layout for viewing materials. It also operates with a date-based format and will display the newest events at the top of the page. 
  • The website is mobile-friendly, making it easy to navigate on the go.
PALMcast Episodes
Don’t forget to check out the latest episode of PALMcast on the Project’s website. A new episode is published every six to eight weeks with guest speakers on various topics. If you have topics of interest you’d like to request or share, contact FloridaPALM@myfloridacfo.com. Continue to tune in to learn more as we journey closer towards our first go-live.
 
If you have feedback or questions about these topics or anything else, please contact FloridaPALM@myfloridacfo.com.
Thank you,

Florida PALM Project
Florida Department of Financial Services
 
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