Transitioning to production

Chalfont partnered with the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment (DAWE) to develop their new system to manage export documentation.

Despite several years of development the Agriculture Export system faced challenges transitioning into production. Achieving success, necessitated adopting an innovative and robust service readiness and cutover approach that aligned with the scale of the change being introduced.

The Chalfont team conducted a rapid review of the project context, existing plans and processes, solution designs and implementation approaches, known risks and dependencies. A pathway forward was designed focusing on four critical areas for success:

• Plans and process for implementing successful service management from service design, to transition and operation. With a dedicated focus on early life support measures, incident management, monitoring and alert processes, service continuity, backup and recovery, and implementation and rollback.
• Solution design for understanding the application and its dependencies, documenting infrastructure details and application system pathways. A key focus was placed on operating systems, backup method and frequency, security vulnerabilities, monitoring configurations, and system ingress channels and pathways.
• Risk prioritisation, mitigation and addressing vulnerabilities through the upgrade of virtual servers, replacement of hardware and installed systems and software updates to maintain currency. As well as addressing and resolving issues in data backup processes.
• Shared environment management improvements with clear processes enabling development teams to adhere to patterns and workflows. A dedicated focus was put on minimising the introduction of regression into the application, dependent components, and shared services. Enabling maintenance of application version and configuration management supported alignment of production with lower environments.

Acknowledging previous project challenges, Chalfont applied innovative and robust processes to quickly resolve issues resulting in a smooth transition, delivery of outcomes and successful ‘go-live’ within four months.