Client Overview

The Lancashire County Council (LCC) is a local governmental body covering approximately 1.5 million people and around 1,200 square miles.

Business Needs and Objectives

LCC did not have a formal testing and quality assurance function and testing was only just being recognized as a discrete discipline performed on an ad-hoc basis by developers and business users. Their testing was unstructured and informal in nature and was rarely scripted. It was not auditable, or traceable to business requirements, and their tests were not reproducible.

However the council had to deliver a significant and high profile IT program that involved migrating their two in-house social care systems, for adults and young persons, utilizing COTS packages from 2 different 3rd party providers. The business critical nature of these systems meant that there was no tolerance for errors in the delivery.

The Qualitest Solution

We provided a Test Process Improvement review and were engaged to provide the organization with a formal, documented test approach, tailored to suit the social care migration program requirements/capabilities. While the budget did not allow for a professional test team, we provided the Program Test Manager and mitigated this risk by providing formal training for the council’s business testers as well as additional test consultants to mentor and support them during test preparation and execution. This also ensured that the council’s business representatives were upskilled and better able to support future implementations.

Social care systems can’t fail, and we were up for the challenge of introducing effective testing processes and utilizing social workers as the primary testers for these two significant system migrations.

Key Benefits

  • Our client was given a tailor-made test approach and associated document templates aligned to the needs of their organization as well as industry best practice
  • Our client had a clear view of the areas where they needed to improve to deliver more effectively and efficiently
  • We provided the testing governance, program test management and test support
  • Key stakeholders for the social care projects for both the adults and young people were engaged in testing much earlier than would typically occur
  • Risk-based testing maximized the time available and enabled our client to deliver critical systems that were fit for purpose
  • Our test approach created business experts/champions for the new solutions who were able to train and support the users in the field
  • Both systems went live with no significant issues and the Young Persons Social Care Project won the 2014 BCS award for IT Project Team of the Year

Testimonial

“[QualiTest] provided expert assistance in training and guiding us through the whole life of the project.”  — Andrew, Business Transformation Lead