Performance Transformation & Application Development Case Study:
The Business Challenge
The materiel command at a major service branch had a requirement for an automated system to support the unclassified but limited component of its war and mobilization planning and contingency activities. The planning system had to support collaboration and information sharing by a stake-holder community at location across the U.S. and overseas. The Command had legacy systems that managed elements of the war and mobilization planning, but no single system that supported stakeholders and decision-makers in their contingency planning and mobilization exercises. These legacy systems also did not support collaboration and information sharing in a real-time basis.
QSMI provided the Government sponsor with a technical briefing of our understanding of the requirement, and a live demo of our technology platform hosted in our Corporate IT Lab. After discussions, they obtained QSMI’s services via our GSA MAS IT Services.
QSMI’s Approach to the Solution
QSMI’s Project Team approached this business challenge from a business perspective, rather than a technical one. We fully engage with civil service and uniformed mission mobilization professionals, executives and managers, as well as the third-party information technology hosting field activity that maintained the unclassified but limited environment. Our Team employed CMMI Level 2 processes for quality and Agile development practices to drive a rapid cycle of software product deliveries.
The two major deliverables were a business process validation report and a mature war and mobilization planning system. The system enables war planners to locate any and all support capabilities – the basic building block of a capability is a unit, the composition of which is already defined – assemble and deliver a “package” of capabilities needed to support a given mission, determine the minimum number of each type of unit necessary to perform respective missions at the various physical locations, and assess the impacts of the mission. Impacts might indicate when reserve units should be activated. This enables war planers to physically locate all support units, and ascertain how many units can be moved to support new, emerging, planned missions, in addition to support the production of mobilization scenarios.
QSMI launched Version 1.0 in under seven months after award, and engaged in a rapid cycle of software product releases featuring new and emerging customer requirements gathered as the end users became more familiar with the system’s capabilities and our Team’s knowledge of the business process grew, through customer engagement and end-user training.
Throughout this program, QSMI demonstrated management discipline as we consistently met deadlines, ascertained customer requirements in a mission-critical environment, and deliver high quality services and solutions to personnel who support the warfighter. Our cost control processes are automated to enable management and accounting staff to discern potential problems far ahead of time, and make the necessary adjustments to ensure that tasks remain within or under budget.
Benefits to the Customer
In well under a year the Customer went from relying on several different legacy systems that weren’t well aligned with the rapid pace of the nature of mission-critical war and mobilization planning efforts, to using a simple, user-friendly Web based system that housed real-time data and supported collaboration across the globe. Previously, the experienced customer personnel bridged the functionality gaps with labor-intensive manual processes. After system deployment, these business processes were automated, enabling the planners to focus on “what if?” scenarios and weigh the trade-offs of various scenarios.
This system was easily administered by the third party field activity with 99.9% up-time, thus demonstrated reduced cost of ownership. This program also demonstrates QSMI’s technical leadership and management approach to software development.