Case Study: Working with RWS to drive its digital transformation

Read about how Acutest worked with a world-leading provider of technology-enabled language, content, and intellectual property services by bringing its Quality Assurance experience to help mitigate risks associated with a major migration project centered on MS Azure and M365.

Background

RWS is a global leader which specialises in helping organisations remove barriers to communication and find better ways to connect with their audiences, anywhere in the world. Having undergone a period of rapid growth, the business needed to update its infrastructure so its employees could benefit from a consistent digital experience, supporting its corporate culture, encouraging collaboration, reducing costs by minimising operational duplication through the introduction of consistent tools and environments.

Why Acutest?

RWS turned to Acutest as a trusted long-term assurance and test partner, having successfully delivered our testing expertise to support previous RWS projects. Having experienced first-hand Acutest’s ability to collaborate with internal teams and partner organisations, the business was confident that we could deliver a prioritised test approach based on an understanding of the underlying risks inherent in the migration project and the mitigation of those risks through testing.

The challenge

The project scope involved migrating the RWS global user base which included over 7500 users, located in over 100 locations, across America, Europe, and Asia. The migration involved moving identities and data from several legacy tenants into a new tenant, provisioned by Microsoft. The business had set ambitious timescales, and enacting targets, ensuring end user disruption was kept to an absolute minimum. Acutest orked alongside an international programme team comprised of remote internal teams spread across the EMEA, NASA, and APAC regions, and a specialist third-party supplier was brought in to manage the migration. We utilised digital tools to collaborate effectively, as due to the size and scope of the work the team were organised across six separate workstreams with specific focus on M365, networks, apps & data, security, EUC, and business engagement.

The solution

We developed a programme approach to testing that brought structure and consistency to how the various technical workstreams conducted their testing, aligned to our principles. This approach allowed:

• The identification of appropriate testing which was carried out by each internal team to validate the new tenant build.
• The development of a governance approach that harvested the outcomes from testing and built consistent reporting to ensure the programme identified any issues.
• Close collaboration with the third-party migration supplier to lead the testing of the migration process from Legacy to the new greenfield tenant.
• The configuration of an instance of Azure Dev Ops hosted on the new tenant via RWS to consistently record testing and support the defect triage process.
• The definition of an approach, working closely with RWS, to validate user experience over the global deployment weekend and during the warranty period. This allowed us to feedback any issues encountered by the users and provide a transparent reporting process.

Benefits

The migration project, despite a high degree of complexity, a disparate global team, and ambitious timescales was delivered within the time and budget parameters set by the business. Acutest’s contribution to this success was recognised by RWS. Key results included:

• The identification of issues through the testing Acutest managed that would have overwise been missed or caught later impacting the progression of the project.
• Pre-cutover testing and risk analysis identified key issues in advance of the cutover weekend, allowing us to prepare for these and put mitigations in place.
• Minimal business disruption with the migration of over 95% of users taking place on the Monday following cutover, within two to three hours of their working day. All critical apps were successfully migrated within the cutover weekend itself.

“We set ourselves a challenging time scale for delivering this project and with Acutest’s help we got it done” – Dorte Schou – Group IT Director – RWS Group