Case study: Keeping a critical project in check with Acutest
Find out how Acutest assured the delivery of Europe’s largest migration to Microsoft Office 365 for thousands of civil servants around the globe.
Background
A government organisation wanted to migrate from a legacy tenant to Microsoft Office 365 and needed a trusted testing partner to mitigate the whole raft of data-related issues and bugs which can arise when migration is not implemented correctly.
Acutest was appointed to provide testing assurance under a five-year strategic partnership. Our team of experienced consultants managed the organisation’s test assurance and ran user trials to ensure the seamless transition to Microsoft Office 365, supporting the varied and complex needs of service personnel and civil servants throughout the world.
The challenge
The migration was challenging from the outset, involving a large user base of over 200,000 employees with varying time zones, geographical locations and networks. As well as determining a way of working which overcame these challenges, Acutest needed to accommodate for the wide variety of user preferences, requirements and a wide variety of app, software, peripherals and devices usage – all of which needed to be tested thoroughly and effectively.
Many of the user groups developed their programmes in silos, which meant Acutest needed to break down barriers and find a way to work collaboratively to effectively assess and evaluate the risks involved and determine the best path for migration.
Not only this, but it was critical that the software supported the transfer of documents between official, secret and external systems effectively.
The client knew the importance of transferring team members across the world to one unified platform, and recognised there was a skills gap internally from a testing perspective – which is why they turned to Acutest as market leaders in this field.
The Solution
With such a varied and complex migration project ahead, for such a critical organisation, the starting point was to beak the programme down into projects and sub-projects so it could be managed more effectively.
Taking the same approach no matter the size or scale of the organisation and project in question, Acutest’s experienced consultants applied its three principles to the tackle the challenge ahead, which includes:
Fail Fast
Finding out as quickly as possible the faults and defects in the system, in order to address them.
See through the customers eyes
Understanding the user experience, rather than looking at the basic requirements.
Begin with the big risks
Understand the big risks and address those first.
Benefits
Despite the critical nature of the project, close collaboration with the client and third parties and identifying issues early on in the development process ensured the successful migration of Microsoft Office 365. Project highlights included:
- Executing a supplier build and test – creating test plans and completion reports and arranging demonstrations to stakeholder groups.
- A collection of user stories was collated early on, to help drive understanding and identify any big risks early on in the development process.
- A trials phase was introduced to report on findings and highlight user issues.
- An early roll out was implemented to check product stability, provide guidance for key users and to replicate issues of concern.
- A file transfer tool was developed to transfer data between domains with in-built virus scanning software to manage official, secret and third-party documents effectively and securely.
- Supplier assurance was delivered as concerns were uncovered and addressed very early on.
