Challenge:  In mid-2005, QSMI was awarded a new five-year contract to conduct a full technology refresh on a program, planning, budget, and executing (PPBE) system for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). Our primary task was to perform upgrades and maintenance to the legacy system that had been developed by the incumbent contractor. However, we soon discovered that the system software never made it into development and, when we conducted system testing, it failed. QSMI was ultimately faced with an application that didn't function correctly, that was not in compliance with coding and enterprise standards, and that had become increasingly difficult to troubleshoot and maintain. Contractually, we were only obligated to work on the legacy application and make the Java platform fully functionally. Nonetheless, we were committed to delivering a quality system to the customer. We also realized any efforts we undertook had to be managed extremely carefully because we were working under a fixed-price contract.

Solution:  After interviewing support personnel and conducting a software “code red team," our project team unanimously agreed that rebuilding the system from scratch would be far more cost effective than fixing it. Our new challenge was to maintain the legacy system and develop a new standards-compliant system while maintaining a high level of customer service. We ended up throwing away the old source code and re-writing the entire application, incorporating new business rules. The end product was a new Web-based application that's available via the OSD intranet. The application has a new, cleaner look with enhanced features that streamline the budget process, make the system more user-friendly, and provide more meaningful reporting and analysis. Other benefits include:

• Ease of maintenance.
• The ability to support COTS products (such as database or operating system version upgrades and patches).
• A security management module with strict access control that enables organizations within the OSD community to manage and view their own office's budget.
• Additional support elements to aid OSD in managing and tracking its budget as well as financial travel actions.

Result:  By going above and beyond the scope of the contract, QSMI was able to successfully build and deploy a PPBE system by the end of the first option period. The new system is compliant with the architecture, coding, and security standards set by the chief information officer. Overall, it has improved functionality, is easier to use, and enables individuals within OSD to generate reports more quickly and efficiently. It is also significantly easier to maintain, reducing routine maintenance costs; this has enabled QSMI to devote more of the contract resources to producing system enhancements and improving functionality.

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