The client had a stalled project with many changes to an existing system; there were several areas of new functionality, but they were not completely trusted. There was considerable concern regarding the reliability and performance of the database, and in some senses the database was seen as the whole problem.  Not only had this set of changes stalled, but minor fixes had also stacked up waiting to be released and all were dependent upon the main project.

The Project

As well as resolving the overall concerns of a database, 42 IT Solutions Limited (42ITS) was tasked with driving the project forward to delivery.

Actions

Initial performance tuning of the database demonstrated that the general transactional aspects of the system were actually quite fast. There were some issues with reports – primarily related to inefficient use of Linq queries in VB; but the development team were able to resolve the issues quickly.  Analysis of the database did, however, reveal that there was some incomplete implementation of Service Broker, and again, once identified was reasonably straight-forward to resolve.  A considerable aspect of the project became communicating these performance and reliability improvements to the client and the development teams to rebuild confidence and to overcome past lethargy.

Delivery of the project took on a considerable aspect of project management from then on.  This had not been envisaged at the commencement of the contract (nor do we aim to provide a Project Management service) but it became necessary as there was no other resource to drive the project.  In the end, utilizing a broad skill-set and a desire to see a positive end-result became more important than fastidiously restricting the work we did to that anticipated by the contract.

Additionally, we specified and configured Rackspace Cloud Servers and networking to improve the resilience and safety of the system.

Results

Delivery of the project reinvigorated the business. Not only could the sales team sell a product that was actually available now, but new opportunities became possible as changes could be delivered to live more quickly. Furthermore, the business could start to address the process problems that had caused the problem in the first place – namely that development on the main trunk of version control is unwise.