Modernizing IT for Federal Government

Challenge

A federal entity was faced with challenges in expanding its fleet services due to the limitations of its legacy systems. To strengthen and improve the user experience, the organization has invested in a modernization program that embraces technical challenges through the perspective of the business outcomes. 

Solution

Guidehouse created a framework to understand the business problem, develop solutions, and validate the business outcomes.

Discover — The first step was to discover user needs and business objectives. As user needs were prioritized for development, we examined the personas and scenarios to reimagine the journey and test different paths through story boarding, workshops, and prototyping. We engaged with users to determine if a particular framing of the journey met their goals and objectives.

Ideate — We tested ideas through development of proof-of-concepts or prototypes. Many paths were explored, and additional ideas were generated when we presented them to users for reaction and validation. These ideation activities helped confirm the proper paths for building the new platform.

Develop — The Guidehouse team adopted various development methods to maximize the collaboration between the business customers, developers, and testers, and to create user requirements and acceptance criteria to improve clarity and assure common understanding. In addition, non-functional requirements were identified and developed, such as legacy integration, data migration, standing up environments, and implementing security measures.

Test — There are three testing phases: code assessment, usability and accessibility assessment, and integration assessment. During the code assessment phase, we tested the quality, functional completeness, and the security of the code using both manual and test automation frameworks to ensure complete test coverage. During the usability and accessibility assessment phase, we ran the code through automated Section 508 tests that check for the accessibility and compliance with the federal standards. Lastly, for the integration assessment, we leveraged a journey testing framework and automated integration tests on a production-like environment.

Deploy — Product features were deployed through feature toggling frameworks to manage the dependencies between features. During implementation, further performance tuning and enhancement will be conducted to ensure that user’s needs are met. 

Iterate — We iterate these phases to complete building out all the features to meet the success factors for the federal Fleet program.

Impact

• Minimized time to value and impact to current operations, while improving user adoption and engagement
• Continuous innovation, maximizing adaptability to the IT modernization initiatives
• Increased user and customer satisfaction through automation and re-imagined user experience will also increase efficiency, productivity, and revenue
• Improved quality and return on investment through frequent stakeholder involvement