Essex County Council (ECC) is a local authority that serves a population of over one million people within the non-metropolitan county of Essex in England, UK.
When they realized the limitations their on-prem architecture was placing on their operational capacity, ECC embarked on a program of work to migrate their IT systems from their existing data center to a new hosted data center.
With contractually binding migration dates, they needed efficient, independent, and objective testing to de-risk the data migration. Qualitest was asked to work alongside the new hosted data centre supplier for and on ECC’s behalf to provide independent and objective quality assurance, quality governance and testing of the migration program.
“I valued the independence and objectivity which the Qualitest team brought to the Essex County Council data migration program. The Test Planning, Test Preparation, Test Execution and Test Reporting have been delivered to an excellent standard and the Test Progress Reporting provided project reassurance and the honest view required.”
– Rob Brown, Data Center Migration Program Test Manager, ECC
Having undertaken many migration and infrastructure projects with large telecoms providers, government departments and utility companies, Qualitest would need to quickly identify which of its extensive domain knowledge, skills and experience in business-critical migrations – including CRM and billing applications and the associated databases – would need to be deployed.
There was a requirement to plan, analyze, and design an effective and efficient approach to ECC’s data centre migration testing.
Qualitest’s extensive portfolio of prior work on large-scale data migrations, combined with holistic testing of complex infrastructure projects, provided the assurance blueprint. This included detailed visual reporting to support informed risk-based decision-making points throughout the program lifecycle.
On the ground, Qualitest moved quickly to implement a project team with strong leadership experience and to establish a collaborative approach with the business users, server, and network experts. The team brought extensive expertise in assuring Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) processes, in leading ETL tools and in data migration best practice.
“The Business feedback has been excellent, and the Test Team have engaged the business effectively and managed their expectations well. Qualitest have engaged very effectively with Essex County Council; they are easy to do business with and have delivered everything we have asked to a very high standard and added value above our expectations. If there has ever been a demonstration to ECC of the importance and benefits of structured testing, DCM is it. The disciplines Qualitest embedded within the project were, without doubt, one of the major contributors to the project’s success.”
James Jordan, Program Manager, Information Services & Programs, ECC
The team was led by Qualitest’s Operational Acceptance Test Manager, focused on data quality and integrity from the user perspective and also coordinated configuration management activities, environments, defect tracking and defect management.
Working closely with the ECC data migration program team and the new hosted data center supplier, Qualitest developed an efficient risk-based approach and plan for the quality assurance, quality governance and testing of the ECC data migration program: from the assurance of the data itself to the validation of the data in the target applications for the assurance of the business users.
“The test deliverables the team have produced have been to the highest standard, and the team has the trust of the client project, business teams and Test Manager alike. The Qualitest team provides an honest yet considered viewpoint and only escalates when absolutely necessary – all actions/decisions are carefully thought through. The Qualitest Team have added value throughout the project, been pivotal in the smooth go live and have required very little management.”
Rob Brown, Data Center Migration Program Test Manager, ECC
At each point in the project plan, Qualitest’s expert evaluation provided key decision-making information to ECC about their readiness to progress to migration and any outstanding risks, their impact, and mitigation recommendations. This proved a popular mechanism with the Client.
“The weekly reporting of project risk and the tenacious efforts to mitigate the risks and resolve the defects has been a major factor in the success of the Data Center Migration Program, which has gone very smoothly with no business impact after go live.”
James Jordan, Program Manager, Information Services & Programs, ECC
The quality method of operation devised for this migration resulted in:
“The Qualitest Team has contributed significant value to the successful delivery of the Data Center Migration project. This project represents a significant milestone for us in ECC, and the entire organisation was relying on us for successful delivery. The efforts of the test team to de-risk the data center migration by honestly reporting the risks and issues and pushing to get them resolved was a major factor in our success.”
– Mark Briggs, Chief Information Officer, Information Services, ECC
