The CalSAWS Project achieved a momentous milestone on September 27, 2021 when the 39 counties working in the C-IV consortium joined Los Angeles in CalSAWS in a single cutover event. There was high interest in our county to be able to observe and assist a C-IV county in the first two weeks following the cutover—19 staff volunteered to travel, and ultimately five were selected by the CalSAWS Project for the opportunity to visit a C-IV county.
Our five travelers graciously shared their observations so that as a county. Read on to benefit from the lessons they learned!
Riverside County:
Mara Valencia, Eligibility Supervisor at BSC
“This was a great opportunity to see firsthand the implementation of CalSAWS and to get an understanding of what we need to do as a department to prepare for this massive change.”
Mara was on the ground day one on 9/27/21 and spent that entire week in Riverside; she came away from her experience with great suggestions for how we can ensure a smooth transition:
- High level of organizational buy-in and collaboration across all areas of the department that will be impacted—EW, IT/Security, AOP, DBS, CES, Fiscal, Management.
- Clear communication and resource sharing between all office locations and programs.
- FAQs, How-To documentation, and troubleshooting tools that are centralized and easily accessible and easy to understand.
- Specialized teams with expertise in areas such as scanning, eligibility functions, IT/Systems, Call Center (to name a few) for support, hands-on troubleshooting, and centralized issue reporting during the first few weeks after cutover.
- Develop a highly structured implementation plan.
- Excitement about change balanced with realistic expectations regarding what the system will deliver and when we can expect to be functioning at full capacity.
Napa County:
Dalet Alvarado, CalSAWS Project DBS
“Napa is a lot more laid back as far as structure in how to ask for help.”
Dalet traveled to Napa the week of October 4th, spending four days on site. She chose to shadow workers in the areas of imaging, intake/tasks, and workload management. Dalet noted that Napa is a small county with no banked caseloads and no Call Center. Napa does use kiosks but they were not working (a Napa issue rather than CalSAWS issue). On day two of the second week, all 39 C-IV counties experienced a CalSAWS outage that lasted about five hours.
Dalet’s observations:
- Imaging was a problem-sometimes they couldn’t image at all, and when they could, the images were often poor quality and unreadable.
- The CalSAWS system was slow, and workers were timed out of CalSAWS while attempting to scan (due to slowness of imaging). By day three of this second week, performance speed was greatly improved.
- Issues with warrant printing so workers opted for “rush” print.
- Scanning SAR-7 barcode was not working, requiring manual input into CalSAWS to avoid clients losing benefits.
- NOMI timeframes were incorrect, forcing manual printing to issue correct notice.
- Pop-up blockers were interfering with accessing NOAs.
- E-signature/text for phone interviews is an efficient feature.
- For imaging, counties must set up their “routing rules” in order to automate scanning.
- Work Schedule Profiles must be set up by counties in CalSAWS to use automated appointment functionality.
- Many employees did not complete web-based training, thinking (erroneously) that C-IV and CalSAWS were very similar—many problems encountered by workers could have been avoided if they had completed their assigned training.
Marin County:
Gloria Herrera, CalWIN & Automation Support DBS
“Even though Marin County did not have many workers on site, the time spent listening in to the post-deployment calls was priceless!”
Gloria traveled to Marin County the week of October 5th, and noted that she was invited to participate in many calls for the region, county-specific, and all C-IV counties which she found very informative. A best practice she noted was the quick response by the CalSAWS Team to develop Fact Sheets from the frequently asked questions during post-deployment calls. The issues observed by Gloria include:
- Overall system slowness and the 5 hour outage experienced by all of the C-IV counties on 10/5/21.
- Imaging was a major issue, and staff did not feel that the Web-Based Training for Imaging was enough to prepare them for the change or allow them to become familiar with the functionality.
- Correspondence numbers changed in many cases and created challenges for workers.
- Warrant printing was problematic.
- Security profiles not properly or completely set up created access problems.
San Bernardino County:
Benita Ibarra, Staff Development Coordinator
“The vibe I got from the workers I spoke to was their county put a lot of
stock in that C-IV and CalSAWS were very similar so they didn’t have to train
the staff too much, but the staff said the system was different.”
Benny Ibarra spent the week of October 5th in San Bernardino and was able to observe in two of their offices as well as their Training Center, which of course, is of special interest to Benny. She noted that San Bernardino is planning to revamp all of their training materials to incorporate CalSAWS functionality. San Bernardino’s next Induction Training will happen in January 2022.
Other observations from Benny:
- Imaging did not work well and staff were not trained well for the functionality. They did not have reference tools available to help with imaging functionality. Response time for images to render often took anywhere from 15 minutes to hours to appear in the case.
- A high percentage of staff did not complete their Web-Based Trainings.
- Security profiles that were not set up correctly caused problems for staff.
- Response time for Help Tickets was slow.
- Information flow to workers was lacking—there were tools from the Project that seemed to bottleneck with supervisors or managers.
- E-signature functionality was not working for everyone and this was true with Correspondence as well.
- Kiosks went down in one office, creating a lobby full of people needing assistance to scan documents.
- The office setup for BenefitsCal was not correct, resulting in approximately 500 electronic apps being sent to one small office.
San Bernardino County:
Julian Valdez, AOP Supervisor at BSC
“As documents are scanned or uploaded by clients, anything not recognized and uploaded by the system will be sent to the exception queue for AOPs to index (or in docSTAR-speak, create templates and assign). Assignment will happen automatically. Initially it will be a full time job but the AI (artificial intelligence) is supposed to learn what we do and over time, be less time consuming.”
Julian also visited San Bernardino County but was assigned to their Call Center from October 6th through 8th. He tended to notice technical things, like a mismatch between monitor aspect ratios not aligned with screen size, creating overflow from one monitor to the next when viewing pages in CalSAWS.
Other observations by Julian:
- Image viewing was plagued by very slow download speeds, often timing out and with an odd error message: “pairem token needed.”
- Live chat is monitored by four employees at a time and is used to assist customers with general questions such as how to apply, or how to access resources.
- Document uploads from BenefitsCal were not working correctly; view of documents is supposed to be real-time but it actually took days to appear in CalSAWS.
- C4Yourself accounts didn’t always migrate to BenefitsCal.
- Workers were being logged off CalSAWS after 20 minutes of inactivity, and learned that keyboarding is not considered active. So for example, if composing a Journal entry took 20 minutes, it could cause this.
- The Call Center utilizes a pop-up call log with the caller’s case data—this was not happening.
