Overview
AusTender is a whole of government solution that provides a centralised procurement management facility for 150 Commonwealth agencies and 60,000 suppliers. It is also the primary compliance mechanism for these agencies to meet their obligations under Australia's free trade agreements with other nations.
Due to developments in the procurement arena, such as free trade agreements and a major overhaul of procurement policies, a fresh look at AusTender was required.
The AusTender II project was a comprehensive redevelopment of AusTender with a large focus on providing improved reporting functionality and expanding the footprint of the system in the broad procurement/business process to include contract disclosure (i.e. contracts that the govt had with other parties need to be advertised - a transparency in Govt initiative).
The three primary stakeholders; Federal, NSW State Government and Gruden formed an exemplary team who managed to strike a balance between business requirements and development pragmatism. The project took four weeks scoping, 10 months building and testing the application with an additional 1 month preparation and execution for an extensive legacy data migration. The 'AusTender II' system went live in April 2007 with the majority of the developed functionality presently live. Due to business-specific reporting cycles, a portion of the new functionality has been held back from production release at the end of financial year.
Positive changes were introduced through redevelopment of code and structure of the system Gruden removed ad-hoc coding patches and changes that had been applied over the lifecycle of the application and rebuilt a new layered application architecture and a scaleable design to allow for future modifications to comply with shifting government policy.
Scoping
The project team set out on a scoping phase to reengineer the original scoping document, that had been left on the shelf for 18 months and written by a third party no longer participating in the project. A series of stakeholder workshops were run throughout the scoping phase to prepare a current and comprehensive specification (encompassing both functional and non-functional requirements) document.
A key success was to engage the ideas of front line staff who answer support calls from business users and who use the application on a daily basis. A series of screen mockups were drafted representing viable solutions, these were crucial in bridging intangible software design concepts, and feedback from all stakeholders was collaborated to arrive at a series of wireframes to be used in development.
Aside from the traditional deliverables, the scoping phase served to create confidence in channels of communication, and establish an effective change control process. This provided a mechanism to deal with evolving business requirements so, if necessary, solutions could be re-evaluated throughout the development lifecycle.
Development
At kick-off all parties were primed to maintain communication through a document sharing wiki and issue tracking software. These tools provided a central repository for both process and application feedback and reduced a perceived barrier of distance between Sydney and Canberra.
Gruden adopted a development process that required constant stakeholder participation to avoid issues which could stall future development & timeframes. The development lifecycle was broken up into smaller phases, at the end of each phase a module was released for stakeholders to test & QA.
The Functional Specification was tagged from the beginning as a 'living document' and stored in the document sharing wiki, whenever changes were effected; this document was updated allowing for visibility of all changes to project documentation.
Launch
All modules were integrated and full application testing undertaken. The application was deployed to new hardware configuration and signed off, it was released for training with the only schedule shifts arising from changes in core functionality agreed to by all parties through the specified change process. After 6 years of legacy tender data was migrated we would be ready for go live.
Legacy Data Migration
A series of workshops discussing treatment of data under a wide range of scenarios was conducted. With the success of the application development, the outlook for total delivery was positive; however the migration was expected to present challenges.
The month preceding the agreed go live date was spent running trial migrations with a large sample set. Such a large amount of data required a complicated succession of parallel threads, particularly considering time restrictions. A government tender site must satisfy a high level of availability; the development team had a weekend of downtime to perform the migration. At the flick of a switch the automated process ran and gigabytes of data slotted neatly into the new AusTender II application.
DNS was cutover to the new hardware and we were live. Two weeks passed after the go live date and as expected some errors were uncovered on the fringes of the application, whenever needed however, the failover process worked effectively and the application patched to repair the fault.
A month on and the ship has become steadfast and fully seaworthy, celebration completed and project sponsors are all smiles.
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