Agency Streamlines Operations with Cloud-First Modernization

Challenge

A government agency provides an enterprise-level fleet management solution to federal agencies and other eligible entities. Offering a fleet of safe, reliable, low-cost vehicle management tools, the agency delivers full management suites, including vehicle purchasing, short-term rentals, leasing, and marketplace.

Over two decades, the agency has operated its fleet services through a patchwork of 19 legacy applications. Each one was built on a different programming language and infrastructure and used its own separate data source. This complex system of applications resulted from multiple contracts being implemented separately, without a centralized effort to manage the massive amount of data used by the applications. The overall system effectively addressed business needs for a time, but the agency has grown and, with it, the challenges of maintaining legacy applications and infrastructure including:

• A need for improved cybersecurity
• The use of disparate data has caused an increase in human errors
• The effort to standardize data sources has become cumbersome
• Increasing expense of maintaining application licenses
• Lack of stakeholder visibility into the overall process

These challenges illuminate the importance of a single source of truth and the need to streamline business operations. The agency hired Guidehouse to consolidate its efforts and to optimize the user experience (UX) and modernize the fleet services to support transitioning operations and adaptation to shifting business requirements.

Solution

In this multi-year project, the Guidehouse team set out to modernize the large-scale multi-application legacy environment in a cloud-first architecture. To achieve this goal, the team used a human-centered design (HCD) approach as well as a product-based approach with Agile development teams.

HCD involves user interface and user experience (UI/UX) designers representing the juncture of user, business, and technical needs. Designers pursued this approach by gathering feedback from the business daily and performing qualitative research regularly. For instance, designers conducted user interviews with fleet service representatives (FSR), who serve as liaisons between the agency and customers to ensure that customer vehicles meet the requirements of each mission.

The designers then synthesized and created artifacts such as personas, sitemaps, and task flows, which fed into the product roadmap and vision. The team prioritized application inclusiveness and accessibility, ensuring compliance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. In addition, they enhanced U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) components to build a comprehensive application and improve UX across products.

The product-based approach is a cost-effective method for delivering new features continuously to meet the needs of the business and its customers. Using the scaled agile framework (SAFe®) cadence, Guidehouse business analysts formed Agile development teams to:

• Support product management
• Build out Agile release train (ART) backlogs
• Support product vision
• Build out roadmaps

The SAFe® approach involved identifying dependencies, roadblocks, and risks early in the planning interval (PI) among product teams to minimize risks and incrementally improve features.

Impact

By implementing the HCD and product approaches, Guidehouse is supporting a successful modernization journey including the ongoing transformation of a large-scale multi-application legacy environment in a cloud-first architecture. In addition to infrastructure savings, additional impacts of this project included:

• Increased transparency with higher quality of data — The client now has a single source of truth to manage vast amounts of data for decision making.
• Increased productivity — Customers no longer juggle multiple web applications and have access to current information.
• Eliminated duplicate resources — Redundancies were eliminated, and the discontinuation of unnecessary software has led to reduced maintenance costs.
• Improved security risk posture — Efficiently deployed features and improved UX.