FitzSoft Consulting Client CalSTRS

Teacher California State Teachers' Retirement System (CalSTRS) is one of the largest retirement plans in the United States. It provides retirement benefit services to teachers in the State of California and currently has a membership of over 750,000 and in excess of $128 billion in assets.

The plan is comprised of three benefit programs each of which is designed for different groups of educators and subject to differing rules and regulations. Avery brief discriptions is given here but full details can be found on the Member page at the CalSTRS website:

Defined Benefit (DB) program for teachers who perform creditable service for an employer under the plan.
Defined Benefit Supplemental (DBS) established as a complement to the DB program for full-time teachers.
Cash Balance (CB) program for substitutes and part-time teachers who do not qualify under the DB program.

In mid 2004 FitzSoft Consulting joined the team integrating the Cash Balance program with the START application at CalSTRS. In four phases of project deliverables, the legacy CB manual member benefits process was mapped and integrated with the automated payments process used by the other benefit areas at CalSTRS.

Retirement systems such as that at CalSTRS rely on timely and accurate updates of client contact information such as phone numbers, mailing and payment addresses, and email ids. FitzSoft Consulting

investigated and evaluated services (MapPoint) for address deliverability and optimization to USPS CASS standards to improve the accuracy of client address data;
investigated and evaluated services for change of address notification (FastForward) that utilize USPS NCOA Link technology to automatically keep abreast of client address changes;
investigated and evaluated services to assist in the location (Accurint) of address data where no verified address is on file.

FitzSoft Consulting provided a number of services to CalSTRS in the furtherance of these projects:

Impact Analysis: The first rule in integrating a manual process with an existing automated business process is to do no harm.
In the case of CalSTRS' benefits payment process, the functionality, performance, and accuracy of the Defined Benefit and Supplemental plans were not to be adversely affected by the introduction of Cash Balance payments into the accounting processes. FitzSoft Consulting analyzed the production code to identify potential risks in integration and developed strategies to overcome them.
Requirements Definition: Requirements describe what a system should do to satisfy the needs of the business user, organizational unit, and end client stakeholders. Viewed from these various perspectives, FitzSoft Consulting provided a clearly defined set of project deliverables to maximize usability for the business user, map functionality to the business processes of the organizational unit, and provide reliability of service to the end client.
JAD Facilitation: The Joint Application Development (JAD) process focuses the attention of stakeholders on the up-front portion of the development lifecycle thus reducing the likelihood of errors that are expensive to correct if not discovered until User Acceptance testing. Bridging the language gap between the functional and the technical, FitzSoft Consulting facilitated JAD sessions to identify what the business needed and illustrate how the technical design would best meet those needs.
Functional Design: Functional Specification documents describe the features of the software product. It includes the purpose, process, inputs, and outputs of the function being described. Using the templates provided by the SDLC team at CalSTRS, FitzSoft Consulting pulled the disparate ideas from the JAD process together into coherent and comprehensive functional design documents.
Screen Prototyping: The prototyping process demonstrates what is functionally feasible to the customer and provides an efficient mechanism for early validation of specifications and designs. As part of a team of developers, FitzSoft Consulting worked with the business to determine the usability of the anticipated system design thru screen prototypes that mimicked the proposed processes.
Test Scripting: A test script defines a set of actions to carry out in order to conduct a test and it defines the results that are expected so that any deviations can be identified. FitzSoft Consulting provided detailed testing guidelines that served as a framework for the integration and acceptance testing efforts.
Technical Design: No system exists in isolation, least of all one being integrated into an existing application. FitzSoft Consulting produced or reviewed the technical design documents that ensured the software developed adhered to the standards and best practices of CalSTRS and the I.T. industry at large.