Occupational Lead Poisoning Prevention Program

The Oakland, CA-based Occupational Lead Poisoning Prevention Program teams with Claresco to provide focus and accountability for an in-house software development project. Claresco, Inc. announces an engagement with the Occupational Lead Poisoning Prevention Program (OLPPP), a branch of the California Department of Health. Claresco will providing project management for the Public Health Institute (PHI), which is designing and implementing a critical software upgrade for the OLPPP. The mission of the OLPPP is to track the lead levels of at-risk workers to prevent lead-related diseases in workers and their families. The OLPPP maintains the Occupational Blood Lead Registry, which tracks laboratory reports of individuals with elevated levels of lead in their blood. The relational database, called “ELVIS,” monitors all California employers who are required to comply with the lead protection program. The program identifies workers who have tested for high levels of lead, helping the organization to provide them with information on preventing lead-related diseases. The database also keeps track of employee lab results, communication with doctors and all employers in the Occupational Lead Poisoning Protection Program. The OLPPP originally assigned a technical development staff from PHI with the task of importing the registry into Visual FoxPro. OLPPP’s challenge was one that many firms face: a nontechnical manager was responsible for managing a technical project, and something was getting lost in the translation. So the OLPPP called Claresco for assistance. After sitting down with OLPPP executives, Claresco CEO Brett D’Ambrosio put together a plan designed to help OLPPP’s in-house technical staff deliver the project on schedule. The plan sets out the scope of the project and a delivery schedule for deliverables, analyzes the technical challenges of the project, and provides a deployment plan for the new database. “In my experience, there are always communications challenges between non-technical management and technical staff,” D’Ambrosio says. “We help bridge that gap by making the relationship between staff and management both nonconfrontational and productive. The biggest challenge is that software development often proceeds from the bottom up – in other words, there isn’t anything to look at until the end of the project. With some forethought, however, you can come up with a series of milestones which are not only achievable by the developer but measureable by the management.” OLPPP project manager Susan Payne echoes D’Ambrosio’s comments. “Claresco was very helpful,” Payne says. “We have a team now where we didn’t before. Under Claresco’s supervision our programmers came up with a plan and a schedule for deliverables that I can understand.” D’Ambrosio says Claresco’s status as an outsider helps the firm to effectively manage outside projects. “We are a neutral third party,” he says. “We’re not on anyone’s side. We get respect from programmers because we’ve been in this business for 25 years, and we get respect from management because we speak plain English.”