Solutions Provider Adopts Common Platform for Productivity, Customer- Service Benefits

Overview “The adoption of Microsoft development and collaboration Country or Region: United States technologies at SunGard Public Sector was clearly a move in Industry: Professional services the right direction.” Customer Profile James Harris, Senior Director, SunGard Public Sector SunGard Public Sector provides solutions and services for local governments, public safety and nonprofit organizations, and state and SunGard Public Sector provides a broad range of software federal agencies. It is based in Lake solutions and services to local governments, public safety Mary, Florida, and is part of SunGard Data Systems, which employs 20,000 agencies, and nonprofits. In 2007, the company decided to people. expand its product line to serve a growing number of customers Business Situation who want solutions in the Microsoft environment. SunGard SunGard Public Sector needed tools Public Sector launched a major development initiative and and technologies to support its launch of a new product line. simultaneously transformed its process methodology from waterfall to agile/scrum. To support this endeavor, the company Solution SunGard Public Sector implemented implemented the Microsoft Visual Studio development system Microsoft Visual Studio and other and other Microsoft development and collaboration Microsoft technologies to create a common development platform. technologies. Today, the firm enjoys higher productivity, stronger collaboration among widely dispersed teams, Benefits Easier team management dramatically shorter “time to peak productivity” for new hires, New-hire training time cut by half Ability to match talent with focused and more timely communications with customers. development sprints More timely customer contact

Situation supporting communication, More than one in three residents of the collaboration, and workflow for United States lives in a city, county, or development professionals distributed state that relies on public administration among 10 teams at sites in four widely or public safety software and services dispersed geographic locations.” from solutions provider SunGard Public Sector. From its headquarters in Lake Solution Mary, Florida, and offices in California, To address these challenges, Harris and Pennsylvania, Washington, and India, his colleagues decided to migrate the SunGard Public Sector builds and company’s software-development supports software solutions for local processes from a traditional, sequential governments, public safety and nonprofit waterfall methodology to a more flexible organizations, and state and federal and iterative agile/scrum methodology. government agencies. The company now In accordance with this methodology, known as SunGard Public Sector has SunGard Public Sector organizes the roots that go back 30 years, and since work of ONESolution developers 2003, it has been part of Philadelphia- according to a staggered schedule of 20- based SunGard Data Systems, one of the day “sprints,” in which a team applies 200 largest privately held business solutions to 300 hours of work toward providers in the world. development and testing of a given feature and then submits that work for In 2007, SunGard Public Sector launched review. an initiative to build a comprehensive product line, known as ONESolution, that To support the agile/scrum runs on the Windows operating system methodology, Harris’s team briefly and employs a service-oriented considered using Axosoft OnTime scrum architecture (SOA). Starting with a core project-management software, but they group of 50 developers, the ONESolution turned instead to the Microsoft Visual initiative grew to encompass more than Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite 300 development professionals working development system. “We liked the idea at all four SunGard Public Sector of supporting our process methodology locations. through the same tool set we would be using for development,” Harris says. “We From the start of the initiative, the also felt that, compared with OnTime, company faced multiple challenges, Visual Studio Team System Team Suite according to James Harris, Senior would provide a stronger approach to Director at SunGard Public Sector. “We organizing current and backlogged work were launching a major new product line and reporting on work as it moves while continuing investment in and through different teams, quality control, support of our current, flagship product and release management.” line—the one on which we built our company reputation,” he says. “On top of For Harris and his colleagues, another this, we faced the added complexities of reason for selecting Visual Studio Team

26 System Team Suite was its flexibility with time zones. “From feature planning, respect to process templates. “In development, testing, and document preparing for our move to an through release management and agile/scrum methodology, we attended customer-issue tracking, Visual Studio training offered by a company that supports an integrated and transparent produces an excellent agile/scrum process for all stakeholders,” Harris says. process template,” Harris says. “We were happy to learn that Visual Studio Team For example, taking advantage of the System Team Suite accommodates that product’s support for continuous builds, template as seamlessly as it does the SunGard Public Sector has established an process templates from Microsoft.” alert system that automatically notifies any developer whose code has broken Yet another factor behind the decision to the daily build. The company also uses use Visual Studio Team System Team Team Foundation Server to organize test Suite was the prospect of interoperation plans and test suites, track testing, and between that technology and other streamline other tasks associated with Microsoft technologies for coding, testing, quality assurance, communication and collaboration. A support, and more. In addition, couple of years into the ONESolution developers and other SunGard Public project, Harris’s team upgraded from Sector employees whose work is focused Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team on the company’s current products are Suite to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 using Team Foundation Server for all Ultimate, which includes Microsoft Visual tasks except source-code control. Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Microsoft Visual Studio Test To further team collaboration on the Professional 2010, among other ONESolution initiative, SunGard Public companion products. Sector has paired Team Foundation Server with the following Microsoft The team also implemented Microsoft technologies: SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft Project Server 2010 to help manage Microsoft SharePoint 2010, for processes surrounding quality, and disseminating design artifacts and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 to support supporting distributed collaboration, hotfixes and alert-tracking processes. In change alerts, and other important early 2012, the team will upgrade to development process communications— Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. an essential practice, according to Harris, in an organization that has Today, SunGard Public Sector is using developers working in three different Visual Studio Team Foundation Server time zones, separated by as much as 11 2010 to implement continuous hours Microsoft Dynamics CRM, for agile/scrum planning into a fully supporting customer-case management integrated software-development life with a uniform tracking method that ties cycle, across multiple teams, offices, and multiple cases to a single Team

36 Foundation Server work item interoperation of Team Foundation Microsoft Project Server 2010, for Server 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010, managing complex schedules for SunGard Public Sector gives developers customers who want to take advantage and others a powerful platform for of cloud services, in which they can enhancing productivity. access ONESolution and other SunGard Public Sector products through This is especially the case for developers software-as-a service licensing who collaborate across the 11-hour time difference between the company’s In the future, SunGard Public Sector will California and India offices. “When teams integrate Team Foundation Server with a must work together while lacking any third-party solution that the company overlap of the standard work day, a now uses for source-code control on its common platform for collaboration is current product line. This move will vital for enhancing productivity, or even enable those employees who support just maintaining it,” Harris says. “Through the current products to use Team Team Foundation Server and SharePoint Foundation Server to the same extent as 2010, we finally have that common their colleagues who focus exclusively on collaboration platform.” ONESolution. Expediting New-Hire Training Even besides the time differences, Benefits SunGard Public Sector faces a major At SunGard Public Sector, hundreds of productivity challenge when bringing development professionals are changing aboard new developers. But with the the way they work for the better with the help of effective training and a common help of the Microsoft development and tool set, process methodology, and collaboration technologies the company collaboration platform provided through has implemented. For the first time, the Microsoft technologies, SunGard teams across all four offices enjoy a Public Sector is mitigating that challenge common collaboration platform. New significantly. employees are productive much faster than before. Developers can work on the “We find it much easier to train new scheduled development sprints where hires on running sprints, testing, their talents are most needed. And managing bugs, and so on,” Harris customers are receiving more timely reports. “As a result, we have reduced support. the time required for new employees to reach their peak productivity by more Uniting Developers Across Time Zones than half—from eight weeks down to SunGard Public Sector uses Visual Studio just three weeks.” Team Foundation Server 2010 and other Microsoft technologies extensively to Matching Talents with Needs streamline and simplify the management For new hires and long-term employees of its widely distributed development alike, SunGard Public Sector is also environment. In particular, through the making far better use of professional

46 skills and talents. For example, in the Chris Harrington, Customer Support past, no matter how well a given Operations Manager at SunGard Public developer’s skills might fit with the needs Sector. ”Customers now can receive far of a certain sprint, if that developer did more accurate status on change requests not work at the same offices as others on and notification of when a given change the sprint, he or she could not be is complete and ready to install.” assigned to it. Harris concurs. ”From helping manage a “The problem of colocation—requiring widely distributed development that developers on a given sprint work in environment to raising productivity and the same geographic location—is customer satisfaction, the adoption of widespread among software- Microsoft development and development firms, and historically, collaboration technologies at SunGard SunGard Public Sector was no Public Sector was clearly a move in the exception,” Harris says. “But now, with right direction,” he says. our common collaboration platform, geographic location plays little, if any, role in matching developers with sprint teams. Instead, we can apply individual specialties where they are needed most, strengthening teams and boosting employee satisfaction.” Serving Customers Better With its move to a common development and collaboration environment, SunGard Public Sector can also keep customers better informed by alerting them to code changes more promptly. Specifically, with the customer case-management system implemented through the interoperation of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Team Foundation Server, case owners have earlier knowledge of when and how a given work item has been resolved and can inform customers that much sooner of when they can expect a given update.

“This method provides a more efficient approach to alerting customers than the company’s prior method, in which the different business units used different ways of handling change requests,” says

56 Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is an integrated environment that helps simplify the entire development process from design to deployment. Unleash your creativity with powerful prototyping, modeling, and design tools that let you bring your vision to life. Work within a personalized environment that helps accelerate the coding process and supports the use of your existing skills, and target a growing number of platforms, including Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and cloud-based services. Also, work more efficiently thanks to integrated testing and debugging tools that you can use to find and fix bugs quickly and easily to help ensure high-quality solutions.

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