MedicAlert UK

The previous legacy system had been in operation for over 6 years and consisted of over 150 million rows of database data, member communications and sensitive documents. There was no technical support for the legacy system; the existing supplier merely hosted the solution because the original supplier had ceased trading. We undertook considerable research and investigation in order to understand the old system and to be able to migrate all of these sensitive data to our new system with confidence. All migration tasks and rules derived were entirely re-executable, allowing us to run the migration process repeatedly during multiple test phases to ensure data correctness and entirely avoid any data loss or corruption.

During the consultation and design stages (and even well into implementation of the solution) there was considerable scope movement driven by change requests. This is a problem for most projects but especially so with this one, as a) we were working with a highly-complex and proprietary legacy system that was not technically supported or documented and we had a freehand to improve upon it when the opportunity arose and b) as the customer began to understand what could really be achieved with our new technology framework, they wanted more…

Methods to reduce risk on the project involved:

• An early website prototype demonstrating design concepts and branding definition in the form of all possible content types, layouts and visual controls was delivered for sign-off.
• Our customer-facing support and ticketing portal allowed all change requests to be prioritised, costed and assigned to an individual; providing a transparent (but fully audited) communication mechanism between ourselves and the customer.