Project Charter

Refer to “Project Charter - Agile Project”, “What Should an Agile Project Charter Contain?”, and “A Guide to the Project Priorities (Prioritization) Matrix” for additional guidance.

Vision

Why do this work? What challenges do we face?

To enable trusted, seamless, and secure research collaboration by providing a federated identity platform that connects researchers, institutions, and scientific services across organizations and borders.

Objectives

What will this project do? What’s our mission?

To provide a secure, standards-based federated identity and access management platform that enables researchers and collaborators to seamlessly access shared scientific services using their home institution identities. It will simplify onboarding, identity lifecycle management, and authorization while strengthening security through centralized policy enforcement and phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA).

To deliver a portable, automated, and interoperable platform that can be consistently deployed across diverse environments using Kubernetes, Helm, and OpenTofu. By adopting open identity standards and federation best practices, it will enable trusted collaboration between research institutions and support the long-term growth of regional and international research ecosystems.

Success Criteria

What effects or outcomes should this project have?

The platform consolidates business processes for managing the entire user lifecycle.

The platform streamlines onboarding for NIAID International Program scientists and staff.

The platform supports phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA) that is compatible with step-up authentication.

The platform enables faster removal of user privileges when staffing changes occur within virtual organizations.

The platform automatically detects and alerts administrators to anomalous user activity at the collaboration management platform level.

The platform Helm chart can be deployed through a CI/CD pipeline such as GitHub Actions.

Project Priorities

How is this project constrained?

	Time (Schedule)	Cost (Budget)	Scope (Boundary)
Constrain (Not negotiable)			✅
Accept (Difficult to Change)		✅
Enhance (Negotiable)	✅

Risks

What might make the project exceed a constraint or alter a priority?

Inconsistent user experience for researchers and collaborators that access services in both platforms CORTEX and NDCP.

Stakeholders

Who depends on the project’s success?

Mike Tartakovsky

NIAID Chief Information Officer

Matt Eisenberg

NIAID Clinical Informatics Branch Chief

Chris Whalen

IBRSP International Program Manager

Nicholas Mbonimpa

RENU Chief Executive Officer

NIAID ICERs in Mali, Uganda, and Cambodia

NIAID International Program data centers, laboratories, and field research stations

RENU

Research and Education Network for Uganda

ACE-Uganda

African Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Data Intensive Sciences