The Problem

As projects prepare to Go-Live, they arrive in disarray. The Release Management Team is swamped with build failures, lack of testing, insistence on deploying without consideration of available windows or tech stack requirements. As gatekeepers, Release Management has to enforce an extended, costly delay as projects are readied for Production deployment at the end of the SDLC.

The Diagnosis

Release Management preparation is a step at the end of development rather than an activity during the project. Release Management Team is in react mode, unsure what to do, and does not feel empowered to be proactive.

The Solution

Prepare projects for Production deployment along the way, rather than as a step at the end. Engage support of the seven IT Vice Presidents to modify the SDLC and empower the Release Management Team. Lead sessions with the Development Directors to develop accurate, thorough yet easy to produce deliverables to suppport the Release Management function. Coach the Release Management team on what deliverables to require, at what stages of development, and how to use that information to plan and forecast upcoming Production deployments.

The Results

Saving $2.1M in labor costs annually. With a smooth, reliable, proactive Release Management process the Release Management was able to shorten the SDLC a week across an IT staff of 800.

At the heart of a $375M initiative to merge two financial institutions, Optimize manages the centerpiece, weekend-long systems conversion for the Operations area.

The Objective

Flawless execution of a three day non-stop ETL conversion, through perfect execution of the Sequence of Events plan.

The Challenge

There's only one shot at this. The conversion must be successful on the first attempt.

The Approach

Lead three mock converfsion weekends. Ensure defects are corrected. Review test plans of each application's test team. Lead the live conversion.

The Results

Successfully converted the Operations area, the most important part of the entire five-year initiative. Optimize coordinated the work of 520 people in one weekend – managing 60% of entire program staff and accountable for $1.7M in labor spend over 36 hours.

IT Capacity and Capability Improvement

The Objective

Save an additional nine lives per day by eliminating excessive production system outages (ranging from 1 to 2-1/2 days each work week) which prevented this non-profit from finding enough recipients to keep up with the supply of donors.

The Approach

Implement a broad set of improvements to achieve an IT Transformation.

The Improvements

Standardize roles and accountabilities and realign staff. Implement best practices and techniques from ITIL, 6-Sigma, PMBOK and TQM. Establish application owners. Create extensible, repeatable build scripts. Beef-up development environments and standardize their use. Implement consistent code branching and release numbering. Create a complete and consistent SDLC process.

Results Over One Year

An additional 9 - 10 donor matches performed each workday. Production uptime increased 28%. Defects in production down 30%. Severity 1 and 2 defects in production down 35%. IT viewed by the business as an asset rather than an expense.

When a wellness and disease management provider "can't justify our QA spend", Optimize is brought in to evaluate quality from an enterprise level, and develop a new strategy.

The Problem

Customers were reluctant to renew after their poor experiences at service launch and the first three months afterwards. New leadership found that despite a very busy Test Team, which ran vast amounts of automated scripts, the quality of software delivered to the customer was poor. Testing just prior to delivery was always a mad rush with lots of overtime, and sometimes deadlines were missed. Most of the bugs were found and resolved in the first three months after Go-Live.

The Diagnosis

Our investigation revealed that software delivery was a two step process. First a vanilla version of the software was created and tested by the Test Team. Then the Professional Services Team took the vanilla software and went through a proccess of tailoring a configuring it into a unique solution for each customer. Thus the work of the Test Team was ineffective, since no customer received what they tested.

The Solution

Optimize developed a new, end-to-end testing strategy which focused on the customer's experience. The Testing center of Excellence was dissolved, and a new forward deployed team was created, which aligned testing with the Agile development methodology used by the rest of IT. Testing of the vanilla product was eliminated, since no customer would ever receive the vanilla product. The two weeks allocated to the Testing COE was recouped and used to provide two weeks of System Test find-fix cycles prior to Go-Live.

The Results

Eliminating the Testing Center of Excellence resulted in NO discernable drop in quality. As the new Agile Testing team became accustomed to the new way of doing business, quality improved. Costs were lower since the Agile Test Team had fewer headcount than the Testing COE. Overtime hours on Go-Live weekend dropped from 240 to 6 hours, with an annual labor savings of $336,000. Risk was reduced and outcomes were more predictable. More new customers were signed.

The Objective

Rescue a high-profile initiative to create a new health plan in time for the government deadline for Obamacare, including setting up new servers, a new product, and configuring that product.

The Challenge

Lacking solid leadership and end-to-end expertise in insurance operations, the client requires an enterprise-level solution architect to organize and coordinate execution by a disparate set of siloed SME's within the organization.

The Approach

Assess current state of each workstream, identifying confustion and missteps, and taking corrective action. Coach and lead subsequent design sessions with an aim of fostering collaboration between client's silos.

The Results

After being five months behind schedule when Optimize arrived, the new health plan launched on schedule.

The Problem

A large non-profit has a few people performing software testing, not very well and not as a team, in a classic silo where code is thrown over the wall. Many problems are introduced before and after the testing stage, which slows IT productivity and wastes resources.

The Objective

The client needs a skilled department charged with ensuring software quality throughout the SDLC.

The Approach

Optimize implemented a comprehensive strategy and set of improvements, including:

• Creating job descriptions
• Skill gap analysis
• Recruiting a skilled Manager
• Training and replacing staff
• SDLC tools evaluation and implementation
• Developing workflows and QA processes
• Implementing Version Control, Change Management and Configuration Management

The Results

Defects are caught sooner, upstream from testing, resulting in faster and cheaper fixes. Quality of code coming into testing is greatly improved, allowing for more thorough testing and far better code being deployed to Production. Code from parallel projects is integration tested before getting to Production, greatly reducing Production downtime resulting from compatibility issues. Likewise, many compatibility needs and issues are identified and resolved during development, speeding development and reducing Production problems.

The Problem

An acquisition, a recession and excessive cutting by his predecessor left a CIO not just short on headcount, but missing vital leadership and core competencies. Optimize partnered with the new CIO to rebuild I/T's capabilities and help preserve the private equity investment. Employees must be highly skilled, dedicated to the long term success of the company, and a good cultural fit, at mid-market pay scale.

The Solution

Optimize met with Executive Leadership to understand their business strategies and objectives. We identified missing roles, gaps in leadership, missing skills and areas of understaffing. In collaboration with client leadership, we worked collaboratively to define specific positions and develop job descriptions. Then we identied the best use of existing staff to fill those needs.

For the remaining gaps, we used creative solutions to secure first-rate people at mid-market salaries. Then we proactively recruited, screen and recommended candidates for employment.

The Results

Optimize recruited and placed over 25% of the IT Department.

The realigned and reinforced IT Department thrived. One year later, new systems delivered within the required schedules included:

• New core application, which each enrollee uses on a daily basis.
• New incentives app, which tracks and rewards participation.
• New eMessaging app, which handles communications.
• Major rewrite of the triage app, which determines programs to enroll in.
• A changeover from Windows to Linux servers.

The Problem

A small User Acceptance Test team was overwhelmed by defects which should have been caught by offshore testers during System Integration Test. Go-Live dates were threatened and missed because UAT was doing nearly all the work, without the time or staffing levels to consistently achieve success.

The Diagnosis

The two offshore vendor companies, motivated to maintain profitability within thin margins, were doing limited testing while relying on UAT to catch what they missed.

The Solution

The testing work from Vendor A was given to Vendor B, while the testing work from Vendor B was given to Vendor A.

The Results

Now motivated to outshine each other through productivity instead of price, testing became highly effective, and defects found during UAT dropped 85% in two months. The UAT Team also experienced a 2/3rds reduction in overtime during product rollout.

Three related problems: developers blocked, developers thrashing, and developers testing in Production.

 

Problem 1: Developers Blocked

Developers are prevented from working 20-25% of each day by Pre-Prod environment outages. Staff is demoralized. Productivity below norms and dropping.

Problem 1: Diagnosis

The Pre-Prod environments are inadequate: insufficient processing power, missing apps and services, and they're down for sometimes days at a time. When they are up and running, complex data setups were frequently ruined because other developers used or configured the same tables and records. Builds occurred at any time, and bogged down or took down the environments. Environment outages were not communicated, and fixes were days in coming. Some development groups need the latest build while others need a stable build of each component.

Problem 1: Solution

Environments were split into pairs so each project has its choice of the latest build or the last stable build. Scheduled builds were introduced, at noon and 6:00 pm to coincide with typical meal breaks. Accountability was established for check-ins causing broken builds. A support team was created to own and maintain all Pre-Prod environments, with coordinated Incident Management. Implemented dashboard with environment information such as availability and scheduled maintenance. Mapped application dependencies.

Problem 1: Results

Increased Pre-Prod uptime to 99.9%. Testing focused on impacted systems rather than diluted across all applications.

"Prior to (these improvements), system outages were the #1 productivity issue in App Tech. Now it's a non-issue." – App Tech Development Director

 

Problem 2: Developers Thrashing

Developers thrashing when assigned to multiple projects at 100% allocation, and simultaneously pulled back to finish projects which were declared complete but far from it. Refunds to customers for broken functionality and missed dates exceeding $20M annually. Customer frustration growing and goodwill dropping.

Problem 2: Diagnosis

Insufficient time allocated to complete a project before developers assigned to a new one. Leadership competing over the best developers would each assign a developer 100% to simultaneous projects. VP's compensated based on when projects were deployed into Production rather than when they were completed, so unfulfilled requirements were logged as bugs and fixed post Go-Live by developers now assigned to other projects. This stalled the new projects while the old ones were being finished, and resulted in fewer projects completed over the course of a year and thus lower VP bonuses.

Problem 2: Solution

Extended the length of each project three weeks to contain the vast majority of defects within the projecct itself, before go-Live. Stopped allocation of developers to projects without considering what else was on their plate. Convinced VP's that keeping the team together until the project was done, then deploying, would increase department velocity and thus increase their bonuses.

Problem 2: Results

Better, more accurate forecasting. Virtually eliminated developers being pulled back to finish previous projects. Projects truly completed before Go-Live. 3-4 more projects completed per year. Higher bonuses for VP's.

 

Problem 3: Developers Testing In Production

With unuseable Pre-Prod environments and applications placed into Production that were incomplete or bug laden, developers opted to test in the Production system, with sometimes dire consequences.

Problem 3: Diagnosis

Test environments were incomplete and inconsistent, with some services available only in specific environments, and some servers vastly undersized. Equally important, there was virtually no test data. With major contention over what environments were available and no good way to test even if an environment was obtained, projects routinely tested in Production after their deployment date.

Problem 3: Solution

Optimize increased test data from 3% to 100% of Production data, using FlexClone technology to provide virtual test environments for each developer and tester, without the overhead of replicating large amounts of test data. Repurpose former Production servers to upgrade and provision the test environments so they were complete. Build new servers using new tech at a fraction of the cost of traditional blades.

Problem 3: Results

Eliminated testing in Production, greatly reducing Production defects and associated risk. Increased available test data from 3% to 100% (Previous attempts estimated cost at $8-15M. We did it for $2M). Virtualized environments so each developer and tester can work freely without stepping on each other.

"Your ideas were very implementable." – Operations Director

The Problem

On a major project involving the purchase and integration of hardware and software packages, six of the vendor firms wanted to be in charge.

The Diagnosis

Vague assignment of roles and responsibilities among vendors, each with overlapping capabilities, are seeking to increase their footprint or hold on to their existing business.

The Solution

Individually, and later as a group, Optimize had each vendor identify their core competency and take ownership. Then taking what was left, we reached group concensus as to who should best own what. Finally Optimize asserted that we had ownership and responsibility for coordinating handoffs between groups, setting the schedule, and settling disputes. As an ongoing task, we held weekly status meetings which reinforced each vendor's accountability to each other.

The Results

With clear scope and ground rules, the infighting was over and each vendor focused on completing their responsibilities. The project was a success and the primary customer couldn't be more pleased.

The Challenge

A government agency has hired two software vendors to supply and integrate their offerings into a unified workflow automation solution. Looking to reduce costs, they want interns to perform the testing. Our challenge is to turn interns, many of whom were not even computer majors, into an effective Test Team able to handle the rigors of the largest IT project this client has done in over a decade.

The Approach

The interns need a way to visualize immediate and multi-year workflows across the enterprise, in order to design functional tests. The interns then need a way to analyze each point of input and develop a suite of positive and negative test cases. Finally, they need a way to string together workflows into cross-department, end-to-end tests which the business could buy into.

The Solution

Develop a simple diagramming technique which leverages drawing skills to turn written requirements into flowcharts with loops and negative tests as well as happy path. Teach the team in small groups how to diagram (e.g. analyze and decompose requirements) and identify test cases covering all likely paths. Encourage self- and peer-group accountability through analysis of each other's diagrams, with a final review by business SME's. As interns become accustomed to creating test cases from the diagrams, encourage them to skip the diagramming step and create test cases directly from the requirements.

The Results

Interns were creating meaningful, effective, business-approved test cases within a month. Test execution was fast, easy, and a predictable routine. As skills and business acumen grew over time, they were able to create highly detailed and specific business scenario based test cases, again with very positive business approval, which represented the full impact of business events across departments over a five-year event lifecycle. QA became "the team to be on" and began volunteering to participate.

The Objective

Reduce the duration of the 90 day business cycle from Closing the sale to Go-Live, in order to increase the number of prospects closed and to to earn revenue faster.

The Challenge

A 90 day close to cash cycle is a standard in the Wellness industry, and firms go to great lengths including massive overtime just to meet this standard. We had to do better to gain competitive advantage for our client.

The Solution

Optimize met with line managers and staff, building a map of deliverables, handoffs and general workflows. Wait states were identified and eliminated. Unnecessary work was eliminated. The critical path was simplified and optimized, handoffs were improved, and work was moved upstream wherever practical. Siloed workers were made aware of how their deliverables fit into cross-functional workflows, leading to collaboration and further improvements.

The Results

The industry standard 90 day critical path was reduced by 15 days, resulting in a significant competitive advantage and more sales conversions.

When a claims processing startup realizes a lack of subject matter expertise and test management skills is jeopardizing Go-Live, Optimize makes it right.

The Objective

Ensure new product is ready for launch and test results are ready for Audit by addressing medical data knowledge gaps and testing skills gaps so team can be effective.

The Approach

Give Test Team a crash course in medical claims concepts, terminology and business rules. Introduce testing best practices. Focus team on what's important.

The Improvements

Consolidate tests using medical expertise, ensuring broad coverage in a realistic timeframe. Refocus testing from GUI to underlying business logic. Correct and update test data to broaden test coverage. Migrate to HP Quality Center and streamline reporting of test results. Prepare test cases for future automation. Streamline reporting of test results.

The Results

Application was ready for Audit and Go-Live. Better documentation meant less-experienced testers could run tests. Tests could now be automated in QTP. Test Team now self-sufficient and client able to go forward without additional assistance.

Optimize organizes, revives and motivates a failed testing effort, after a real-time VOIP system integration project proves too much for testers used to functional testing of applications.

The Objective

Turn around and organize testing efforts for multiple mission-critical projects. Eliminate testing "headaches" and establish standardized procedures and forms for reuse by subsequent projects in the department.

The Approach

Assess test team capabilities, skills and tool familiarity. Identify root causes of team thrashing and resolve. Determine what team needs to succeed and see they get it. Study system architecture, conduct FMEA, and develop risk-based test strategy.

The Improvements

Instilled end-to-end "systems thinking" across vendor partners. Introduced and used Model-Based Testing techniques. Clarified job responsibilities and deliverables. Standardized procedures and forms. Established issue log and drive issues to resolution. Reworked project plan with realistic estimates and meaningful task structure. Raised team morale, productivity, accountability and self-reliance.

The Results

All team functions are now routine, and team performs with minimal attention or supervision. Team is empowered, effective and self-sufficient. Management has excellent visibility. Analysis and decision making are greatly enhanced since activities and deliverables are consistent and predictable. All tests are tracable, standardized, prioritized, and easily rerun. Testing went smoothly.

"Thanks for your help being an advocate for the business. I appreciated having you in my corner." –– Call Center Manager & Primary Customer of the Project

Tasked with reducing Production downtime and increasing IT productivity, Optimize helps the Testing Team succeed.

The Objective

Rapidly increase the capabilities and effectiveness of an existing Test Team.

The Approach

Perform a quick assessment and identify gaps. Introduce two or three best practices a week, in training sessions toward end of work day. Organize and coordinate team's activities and deliverables. Put strong players in leadership positions and assign responsibilities across the team.

The Results

Within four months:

• Defects found in production down over 15%.
• Severity 1 & 2 defects found in production down almost 20%.
• System uptime increased over 10%.
• Test Team morale and productivity increased.