The Client
Department of Homeland Security
This agency aimed to transform its core IT infrastructure through Agile and DevOps software development methods. They selected our prime integration partner to help them modernize and maintain 70 enterprise applications.
This partnership is part of the agency’s efforts to adopt the federal government’s “Cloud First” and “Mobile First” approaches for technology and applications. This contract also aims to re-engineer and re-platform the technology environment with the goal of standardized application architectures.
The Technology
SharePoint
- SharePoint version 2007 and 2013
- Agile Methodology
The Challenge
Our partner had established aggressive staffing plans to build over ten Agile teams. Each team would consist of four to five team members – two/three developers, one tester and one scrum master. Because of the compressed timeline market demand for talent, our partner was struggling to identify and hire SharePoint developers that met their specific needs.
To add to these difficulties, all qualified candidates also had to undergo a rigorous background check. This process took four to six weeks and added a layer of uncertainty that slowed the process down.
The Solution
Our dedicated Account Manager worked closely with the hiring team to define the specific requirement using our proprietary In The Perfect SpaceSM methodology. We also introduced our concept of Active Pipelining to ensure that there are an adequate number of clearable candidates to ‘get ahead and stay ahead’ of the projects ambitious staffing plans.
As a next step, our recruiting team quickly identified a number of SharePoint Developers that were “clearable” and whose availability mapped to peak periods for building the sprint teams. This was an important detail, because the candidates were employed while the background check was completed.
Using our Active Pipeline approach, we had four SharePoint candidates in the cue and during the process three of them cleared the background check and were successfully started on the project where they are contributing today.
We continue to leverage this approach to support our prime integration partner which is in the process of expanding by adding new Agile teams. The Active Pipeline approach is also meeting important through having cleared candidates ready to go to backfill positions on Agile teams should a member leave project.
The Success
Our SharePoint developers have hit the ground running and have been involved in a number of important initiatives:
- Transitioning the SharePoint applications from version 2007 to version 2013
- Developing new applications and modifying existing applications
- Assisting in the transition from custom SharePoint to .NET
Our team is playing a very important role in the Agency’s transformation to adopt Agile methodologies. With this new development environment, our team is playing an important role to ensure that mission critical applications are running smoothly and are modified to meet the end users’ ever changing needs.
