Independent Project Oversight Report (IPOR) Rating

Green
- Satisfactory, no corrective action necessary.
Yellow
- Caution, risks/issues exist. There may be a need for corrective action in the near future.
Red
- Escalated for immediate corrective action. There is a significant risk to the health of the project.
Blue
- Not enough data is available to make a determination about the project health.
No Report Available - Indicates that a Report is not available for publishing for the reporting period.

0555-018 California Environmental Reporting System Next Generation (CERS NextGen)

The California Environmental Protection Agency, California Environmental Reporting System (CERS) NextGen, will implement a new solution or move the current version of CERS to a supported platform and introduce enhancements to re‐align CERS with current business processes and to meet current and future Unified Program needs.

Project Details

Agency / State Entity	Legislative, Judicial, and Executive / Secretary for Environmental Protection
Total Cost	$39,568,985
Last Approved Start Date	02/17/2026
Last Approved Finish Date	05/03/2027
Criticality Rating	Medium

IPOR Reporting Period	Overall IPOR Rating
06/01/2026 - 06/30/2026	Red

Independent Project Oversight Dashboard

Key Questions

Is the project on track to satisfy the customer's business objectives?Yes

Is the project on track to achieve the objectives in the approved timeframe?No

Is the project on track to achieve the objectives within the approved budget?No

Project Overall Health	Comments
Red	The overall project health rating remained Red (Escalated) due to existing risks and issues that require corrective action in the immediate future. • The project is no longer on track to achieve its objectives within the approved budget and approved timelines, and will require a Special Project Report (SPR) and System Integrator’s (SI) contract amendment. • The SI’s proposed high-level schedule reflects a go-live date that extends well beyond the approved baseline of May 3, 2027, and includes a request for five additional resources. • The executive team approved proceeding with the SPR, initiating the baseline process for a revised Phase 2 Go-live date and adding additional resources. • The IPO Manager recommends that the Project Management Office (PMO) establish decision timelines aligned with project needs to mitigate further risks to schedule and cost.

Project Overall Health

Comments

Red

The overall project health rating remained Red (Escalated) due to existing risks and issues that require corrective action in the immediate future. • The project is no longer on track to achieve its objectives within the approved budget and approved timelines, and will require a Special Project Report (SPR) and System Integrator’s (SI) contract amendment. • The SI’s proposed high-level schedule reflects a go-live date that extends well beyond the approved baseline of May 3, 2027, and includes a request for five additional resources. • The executive team approved proceeding with the SPR, initiating the baseline process for a revised Phase 2 Go-live date and adding additional resources. • The IPO Manager recommends that the Project Management Office (PMO) establish decision timelines aligned with project needs to mitigate further risks to schedule and cost.

Focus Area/Rating	Comments
Governance Green	This focus area is Green (satisfactory). • The project has an established formal Executive Steering Committee (ESC) to meet regularly to provide clear project information and timely decision-making. • A defined governance structure is in place to support active involvement of program and business representatives and ensure delivery of value to end users. Governance controls support disciplined decision-making, appropriate escalation, and alignment with CalEPA’s strategic objectives throughout Phase 2 implementation. • Continuing to proceed with the execution sprints without an agreed-upon schedule reduces transparency into execution commitments and constrains the effectiveness of governance oversight and change management. • The IPO Manager recommends that the CalEPA leadership prioritize finalizing the schedule and related funding decisions as early as possible to mitigate any risks to project stability.
Time Management Red	This focus area remained Red (escalated) in this reporting period. • The project is no longer on track to achieve its objectives within the approved baseline timeframe. The latest version of the proposed high-level schedule has extended the project end date to November 2027. • Project sponsors have directed the PMO to initiate the process to baseline a new project schedule and provide a roadmap of the required key tasks. • Proceeding with development activities without an approved schedule baseline reduces the project’s ability to effectively manage schedule performance, evaluate the impact of change, and maintain clear accountability for delivery commitments. • The IPO Manager recommends prioritizing decisions and actions necessary to establish and approve the new project schedule baseline. • The IPO Manager also recommends the project to ensure backlog development captures enough detail to validate the schedule with confidence, while avoiding premature decisions that could limit adaptability as the team continues to progress into sprint-level planning.
Cost & Contract Management Red	This focus area remained Red (Escalated) due to the project no longer being on track to achieve objectives within the approved budget and contractual terms. • Project sponsors approved the schedule extension and additional resources; cost estimates and funding plans are still being finalized. • The project will require an SPR and SI contract amendment to rebaseline the costs. • The IPO Manager recommends that the project prioritize finalizing cost estimates, securing funding, completing required governance actions, and establishing a robust schedule baseline to restore cost control and improve project health.
Scope Management Green	This focus area is rated Green (satisfactory), trending toward Yellow due to potential scope changes associated with replacing legacy middleware; impact analysis is still pending. • The project completed Sprint 0.2 user stories and successfully demonstrated Sprint 0.3 user stories and completed UAT. • The project continued to work on organizing/add/validate user stories into defined deliverables to ensure that the final system solution meets all regulatory and program-specific expectations. • The SI proposed a 12-sprint development schedule to deliver Phase 2 scope and Phase 1 carryover work. Concerns exist that the planned scope may exceed what can realistically be delivered within the proposed schedule, as there is no apparent increase in delivery capacity to support the expanded workload. • The IPO Manager recommends ensuring transparent reporting, enabling governance bodies to understand planned refinements and material changes, expectations for sprint outcomes, and supporting effective oversight without impeding delivery velocity. • The IPO Manager notes that going too far into detailed requirements at this stage creates concerns, and it might be worth confirming with the team that current discussions are not intended to finalize or lock requirements at the story level and that there is still room to iterate and refine during execution.
Resources Yellow	This focus area is rated Yellow (caution) due to ongoing staffing risks and contractual limitations identified in previous reporting periods. • The SI contractor has identified a critical need for five additional resources to manage specialized workstreams like Tableau reporting and automated data migration, which were not achieved in the previous phase. • The project sponsors have approved the proposed additional SI resources that will require a contract amendment to formally authorize the additional capacity. • The project continues to rely on the Project Manager (PM) to fulfill both responsibilities of the state PM role and the Business Analyst (BA) role in execution, increasing the risk of downstream impacts to delivery and governance with increased likelihood of late clarification, rework, or solution misalignment. • Resource constraints can force teams to multitask excessively, rush deliverables, skip peer reviews, testing, or documentation, resulting in an impact on quality with increased defects and rework becoming more likely. • The IPO Manager suggests that CalEPA leadership conduct a formal assessment of internal subject matter experts (SME) bandwidth before approving the SI contract amendment to ensure the state can maintain proper resources as development velocity increases, and to determine whether the department can effectively support the additional SI resources.
Quality Yellow	This focus area is Yellow (caution) as the project continues to execute with significant non-functional quality and maintainability concerns. • The program team is concerned that defect resolution efforts are being driven primarily by issues arising from manual deployments and internal testing activities rather than Product Owner priorities. This situation may impact delivery throughput, delay resolution of critical defects, and increase the risk of recurring regression issues. To address these concerns, the project has logged Issue #53, Issue #54, and Risk #87. • Lack of coordination of the testing schedule, along with limited awareness among program resources, risks the effectiveness of user acceptance testing (UAT), and introduces timeline risk, as defects may be identified later than planned. • The IPO Manager suggests that the project team implement routine environmental health checks and strengthen monitoring processes to detect external platform-driven changes before they impact scheduled UAT activities. • The IPO Manager recommends that the project establish clear checkpoints for data validation and business sign-off to ensure Salesforce work is not marked complete until it has been successfully validated against migrated data.
Risk And Issues Green	This focus area is Green (satisfactory). • The project utilizes a formal Risk Register and Issue Log to ensure that all identified threats and obstacles are proactively tracked and updated throughout the project lifecycle. • Project team members are encouraged to identify risks and issues at all levels, ensuring that process-driven concerns are escalated to the appropriate owners for mitigation. • Two new risks and three new issues were logged during this reporting period.
Transition Readiness Green	This focus area is Green (satisfactory). • The project team is successfully executing knowledge transfer sessions, with Independent Verification & Validation (IV&V) and oversight partners actively participating to document technical clarifications and monitor readiness risks. • Organizational Change Management (OCM) efforts were recently highlighted by the delivery of successful product demonstrations at the 2026 Certified Unified Program Agencies (CUPA) Conference, reaching hundreds of key stakeholders in the Unified Program. • CalEPA has strategically decided to assume responsibility for all OCM activities internally using available Unified Program resources (staff continuing to be onboarded). • Moving forward, the project plans to proactively focus on the iterative development of training materials and the evaluation of post-deployment operational procedures, ensuring that the department remains well-prepared for the eventual system cutover, even as the team works to stabilize the long-term project schedule.
Conditions For Approval Green	• There are no conditions for approval.
Corrective Action Green	•There are no corrective action items.

Project Approval Documents