Technology Refresh: Agency of the U.S. Department of Treasury -- Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
Abstract
A IT Integrator servicing Federal and State Governments won a contract from the Treasury IRS to perform a technology refresh of the Information Technology (IT) Network. ThruPoint was engaged by the integrator to perform a sub-set of the required refresh.
Problem—ThruPoint was given three months to:
- replace over 720 devices distributed to over nearly 200 sites
- perform installation and acceptance testing of the new devices
- decommission legacy equipment
- provide as-built documentation
- oversee successful operations turnover
The Business Challenge
Asset tracking and security requirements kept the customer’s Technical Point of Contact (TPOC) for each site closely involved with the engagement. Coordinating travel to 199 sites across the United States presented a major challenge that required effective juxtaposition of the TPOC schedules and engineer on-site presence. At some locations, scheduling was further complicated by a requirement in some locations that the installation be performed after office hours.
How We Helped
ThruPoint immediately established a program management office (PMO) with a project manager, a project coordinator, an escalation consultant, and eight on-site engineers. The PMO implemented a peak-resource management scheduling process and identified a ready-team to act as back up and cover any site-engineer schedule conflicts.
ThruPoint developed the implementation schedule, working with the individual TPOC personnel and the client's Project Management team. We created work-packs containing device and site information for each location and distributed the work-packs to the site engineers.
We conducted weekly prep calls with the TPOC personnel to prepare them for the installations. Teams at the initial sites gave constant feedback to the PMO with information on lessons learned (e.g. “Site Engineers will need USB-to-Serial Converter on IBM T42 laptops to console into devices.”) The PMO disseminated such information quickly to the rest of the team to ensure efficiant delivery.
Results
ThruPoint completed the technology refresh in all the assigned sites with no revisits and no unscheduled downtime. TPOC personnel benefited greatly from the required orientation and the as-built documents, resulting in a very effective operations turnover.
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