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01 Background and introduction
The Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) is part of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). OPRE organizes and executes research that supports many of ACF’s programs (like Head Start). This includes evaluations of existing programs, explorations of innovative approaches to helping low-income children and families, research syntheses, and descriptive and exploratory studies. They largely contract out for these research services.
OPRE staff plan and manage research, evaluation, and data projects to build evidence to improve the lives of children and families. This work involves administrative responsibilities related to procurement, budgeting, portfolio management, and workforce planning. The information and workflows they need to fulfill these responsibilities are spread out across numerous HHS-owned systems and manually-compiled documents, and require coordination among several people & multiple steps. This is cumbersome, inefficient, and error-prone, taking time and bandwidth away from mission work.
MAPS (Management and Accounting of Projects System) is a back-office web application created in 2012 for OPRE to centralize and simplify procurement- and budget-related activities so that staff could spend more time focused on research. MAPS allows OPRE research, management, operations, and budget staff to communicate about planned and in progress procurement actions and agreements, authorize payments, and track spending.
It is not a system of record, but rather consolidates all this information into one place to streamline procurement and budgetary activities.
OPRE explains MAPS (45-min video)
This is an overview of MAPS with screenshots of the legacy system.
OPRE’s Research Portfolio management System (OPS) is the new system replacing MAPS.
While MAPS is infinitely better than the system it replaced, OPRE has grown and its procurement and budgeting needs have evolved from the time when MAPS was built. In addition, OPRE lacks a comprehensive system to support its portfolio management and workforce planning activities. MAPS was not designed to grow or scale in the ways OPRE needs.