We are presently working with a client to deliver performance assurance for an IT service that is critical to its business operations. Interestingly the IT service is developed by a third party based in another country. A massive peak in business operations occurs every January and in every previous January there have been stability and availability issues, resulting in discontented staff and disruption to the business.
The CEO of the client is the sponsor of a project whose remit is to ensure that January’s peak passes without incident. We were engaged to deliver performance assurance including testing and modelling. At the start of the project I conducted performance analysis of last year’s peak. It became apparent to me that there were multiple issues at play. The infrastructure was sub-optimally configured, as was the application itself. Perhaps the most pressing issue was the poor performance of the application; with only one user in the system the best possible response time for a key use case was 8 seconds.
Having spent four months working with the third-party to performance tune the application and with the client to ensure the IT infrastructure was optimally configured, we thought we were in a good position. Two days into the peak period (which lasts approximately 28 days) the client discovered that some of the application performance tuning had introduced a functional defect. This was discovered on Monday afternoon; the next major peak was expected noon on Wednesday.
What followed was a rapid response; the third-party delivered a fix to the functional defect at 21:00 Tuesday, the client completed UAT testing at 02:00 Wednesday, we completed performance testing 11:00 Wednesday and the code was live in production in time for the peak period noon Wednesday. The peak period passed without incident and we received positive feedback from the users. In such situations our responsiveness and an ability to work tightly with the client and its supplier is critical to the success of the project.
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