Large Government Healthcare Agency 

Our client serves millions of veterans and provides a wide range of medical, surgical, and rehabilitative services in facilities located around the world.  Their portal offers veterans a single point of access to benefits information, health information, and special programs through a unified interface. The portal also provides veterans with personal and secure online journals and health information logs.

The Challenge

Our client desired to re-establish a portal architecture function and foundation for its Web Portal.  As part of this effort, we believed that it was important to:

• Engage the client and serve as the lead architect who interacts with multiple Government Agencies, their staff and third party organizations.
• Enhance the current architecture defined for the Web Portal.
• Enhance existing processes and tools to align and work within defined tools and software engineering processes of the client.
• Support the portal software engineering and integration architecture, and to position the portal to integrate into the new architecture.

The Solution

Our client engaged Ironworks Government Solutions to establish a team of architects to provide the expertise necessary to re-establish an architecture foundation where it had strayed beyond the boundaries set forth by the overall enterprise architecture. Specific tasks included:

• Refining architectural processes and standards including the development or improvement of programming and design guidelines, user interface and usability guidelines, and quality assurance tools, processes, and guidelines.
• Providing portal development technical support that included developing architecture and design templates and conducting architecture reviews.
• Evolving architecturally significant portal mechanisms and functions and delivering new portal mechanism designs, documentation and implementations.
• Re-factoring the portal's Integration Toolkit, developing the guidelines for its use, and training the development community on integrating it into the portal.
• Enhancing the System Engineering and Integration Architecture process to establish best practices for continuous integration, builds and SE&IA toolsets.
• Enhancing the Portal Testing Architecture Processes and Tools and deliver a test automation framework.
• Developing and executing upon a plan to align the portal architecture’s patterns, tools, and processes and with those of the client’s overall enterprise architecture.

The Results

• Established and defined going forward roles for: Lead Architect, UX Architect, Framework Architect, SEIA Architect, Portal Architect, and architecture QA functions
• Documented the AS IS architecture baseline and the current release architecture
• Delivered architecture review board charter and led ARB meetings
• Developed architecture mechanism and review templates and led requirements and design reviews for architectural significance and compliance
• Developed the “Heracles” architecture framework, ported the problematic Atlas framework to Heracles for pre-production testing, developed architecture documents, and provided training
• Developed the client’s architecture alignment plan, participated in the client’s architecture “Hard Hat” conferences, presented architecture topics at TechTalk, and developed multiple tool waivers for driving compliance with the client’s toolset and enterprise architecture
• Delivered SE&IA process, continuous integration scripts and build artifacts for all portal components
• Delivered a new Test Automation Framework, MHV Programming and Design Guidelines, User Experience Guidelines, and portal mechanisms and documentation
• Provided architecture expertise and guidance to all development efforts for the portal
• Led effort for approval of the Ensemble real-time messaging and service bus.
  Aligned architecture efforts with the portal CMMI initiative