OLM Systems improves customer satisfaction

Founded in 1991, OLM Systems delivers market-leading solutions for the care industry. With over 600 customers, including 131 local authorities and 37,000 practitioners, OLM Systems is a leading supplier of technology and support services to adult and children’s services and the health sector. Headquartered in Teddington, Middlesex, OLM Group employs over 240 staff with local offices in Brighton, Cwmbran, Glasgow and Oxford.

Jumping off the waterfall
After being unable to maximise development efficiency with its traditional ‘waterfall’ methodology – in which software design, development, testing and delivery occur in sequence – OLM Systems decided that it needed to address inefficiencies in its workflow.

“Over the last few years, the size and complexity of our suite of applications delivered as part of our Universal Services Platform has grown rapidly,” says Steve Townley, Head of Application Development at OLM Systems. “Our solutions now cover commissioning, case management, mobile working, finance management, integration and citizen personalisation portals. In the past, due to the fact we only tested at the very end of a project, it was difficult to assess the quality of the finished product until the software was almost ready to be delivered to the customer.

“If issues arose before release, we’d have to go back and re-work the code. Last-minute changes can create unanticipated bugs that creep into the product after a fix or upgrade. It was hugely frustrating for us and for our customers.”

OLM Systems’ largely manual methods of managing and executing software tests involved a 12-person team, and the whole testing process was complex and expensive.

“We decided that best course of action was to adopt an Agile workflow,” explains Steve Townley. “We adopted an Agile methodology, in which software is coded, tested and proven to work in two-week ‘sprints’.”

OLM Systems found that it was less complex and expensive to address customer requests throughout the project with Agile, rather than dealing with a large number of them simultaneously at the end of the project with waterfall.

Shortly after OLM Systems transitioned to Agile, it became clear that its legacy software was not up to the task. “Immediately after the switch, we were still using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for our test management tracking and reporting,” says Steve Townley.

“We soon found that Agile required a lot more testing than we were capable of doing with our old manual processes. It simply wasn’t possible for us to perform redundancy checking manually between two-week sprints, so we had no assurance that a new function hadn’t broken something else. Regular releases are absolutely vital to the Agile methodology, so we needed an effective solution quickly.”

To continue to drive the release of stable and reliable products, OLM Systems wanted to use the Agile methodology to increase customer satisfaction and product quality. In order to achieve this, the company needed to replace its manual processes with a suite of software that supported automatic regression testing.

A comprehensive solution
“We looked at a number of vendors before we decided on a suite of IBM Rational software,” says Steve Townley. “Ultimately, we decided that IBM had the only set of products on the market that was able to meet our requirements.”

OLM Systems installed a suite of IBM Rational software featuring IBM Rational Quality Manager software for test management, IBM Rational Functional Tester for automated regression testing and IBM Rational Team Concert to support Agile management, source control and automated builds.

IBM Software Services for Rational acted as project managers to facilitate the smooth deployment of the solution, and provided training to OLM Systems staff.

“The close collaboration between the IBM and OLM Systems teams really contributed to the smooth running of the implementation,” says Steve Townley. “Migrating our entire environment was always going to be a nerve-racking process, but the expertise of our project team ensured it all went off without a hitch.”

Progression, not regression
Since implementing its new IBM Rational solution, OLM Systems is able to fully apply the Agile methodology to its development workflow.

“Thanks to IBM, we’ve realised our business aim,” says Steve Townley. “We now run automatic builds and regression tests every night, which goes a long way towards proving that a newly developed feature hasn’t broken a pre-existing functionality. In fact, since we started using IBM Rational software, we’ve had a 77 percent reduction in regression issues, and a 54 percent reduction in service desk calls.”

In addition to the automation provided by IBM Rational Team Concert, the IBM Rational suite includes customised dashboard reports on the status of all projects, giving developers 360-degree awareness of deadlines and progress.

“IBM Rational really helps the development team to manage their own workload,” says Steve Townley. “Today, our Product Managers are able to focus more on ensuring customer requirements are understood and feeding these back to the development team, which is a far more valuable activity. Because of this increased communication, we’ve seen a 37 percent reduction in known issues at the time of software releases, and a recent customer satisfaction survey showed that 84 percent of our customers believe that product quality had improved in the last 12 months.”

Looking to the future
OLM Systems was so impressed by the solution that it is now rolling out IBM Rational software across all of its development offices, and is continuing to look for new ways that the solution can streamline its workflow. “We’ve made great progress, but we believe there’s always room for improvement,” says Steve Townley. “After we roll out Rational in Cwmbran and Glasgow, we’re going to review a backlog of manual scripts for existing functionalities to see if they can and should be automated.”

There has also been interest in the Rational software and Agile methodology from parts of OLM Systems that are not directly involved in software development. “Other people in the organisation have seen what we’re doing with this new workflow, and they’re understandably intrigued by it,” concludes Steve Townley. “For example, our service delivery team are looking to use the methodology and software to work with customers to create new services.

“Ultimately, the success of an Agile methodology is contingent on having the right tools at your disposal. For us, Rational was the perfect, integrated solution we needed to give complete end-to-end traceability of our workflow process.”