About the Engagement

In June 2013, following the occurrences of Hurricanes Irene and Lee, and Superstorm Sandy, a state-level disaster recovery organization was created to focus on recovery and rebuilding efforts for effective areas of New York State. The agency’s aid focused on four areas: housing recovery, small business, community reconstruction and infrastructure. They were tasked with distributing billions in federal funds to homeowners, small businesses, and municipalities.

Business Problem

The clients’ technology solutions and processes were developed quickly, and in silos because they needed to immediately begin releasing funds/benefits. Therefore, the client sought a partner who could re-engineer the complex architecture of dozens of disparate systems that needed to be maintained or rearchitected.

Challenges

The common challenge across the agency was a lack of centralized strategies, techniques, and frameworks which presented unique complexities. Examples of these include varying customer service and support strategies for both staff and applications, varying frameworks and processes (or the lack thereof) resulting in missing quality assurance and quality control procedures for critical applications and departments, and maintaining varying agile, hybrid-agile and waterfall software development lifecycle approaches, since multiple systems, or lack of, were used daily, but were not maintained appropriately.

Project Impacts and Outcomes:

The engagement team led the complex change management and training initiatives within the technology team and supported or led the new software development process (design to implementation) for dozens of applications. The team initiated the engagement in the role of IT organization current-state assessment and future-state recommendations, while also supporting the implementation of numerous software. This created the optimal environment and structure to enable agile delivery, to truly understand the on-the-ground needs, and to pivot as the client’s needs changed. This assessment also included focusing on external program-facing initiatives – the process points that required collaboration and communication between the technology and business.

The team provided agency-tailored technical portfolio, project management, business analysis and quality assurance services, including strategy, training, coaching and hands-on delivery. By the end of the project, project managers and business analysts were maintaining a consistent hybrid-agile framework, leading to on-time and prioritized software delivery. Quality assurance and testing was thorough and comprehensive, ensuring applications were delivered bug-free. The IT team maintained a transparent and aligned portfolio of initiatives.