SPAWAR ITC

SPAWAR ITC Achieves Higher Re-Use, Reduced Costs, and Improved Quality With Serena Dimensions

Executive Summary

The Space and Naval Warfare Information Technology Center (SPAWAR ITC) provides business improvement IT solutions for the Navy and Department of Defense. Faced with a complex heterogeneous environment and a combination of legacy applications and new systems under development, the center needed to replace a cumbersome manual system with a robust Change Governance™ solution that would centralize management and circumvent the difficulty of operating disparate systems. SPAWAR ITC implemented the Serena® Dimensions™ soluiton as its standard.

Serena Dimensions provides SPAWAR ITC with an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution that enables the center to visualize, orchestrate, and enforce processes across its enterprise development environment. As a result, SPAWAR ITC has been able to achieve its goals of establishing reusable processes, components, and code, as well as developing high-quality standardized products, while reducing development costs.

Customer

SPAWAR ITC, based in New Orleans, LA, is an Echelon III Command under the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. Its mission is to improve the Department of Defense (DOD) readiness and operational capability by delivering enterprise-wide, integrated information technology solutions and life cycle support that reduces the cost of supported functions.

Challenge

This center needed to replace a cumbersome manual system with a robust Change Governance solution.

Solution

Serena Dimensions

Results/ROI

Achieved a standardized approach to build solution systems for customers
Increased substantially its re-use rates of code, processes, and competencies
Reduced costs by eliminating redundancies and duplication of information

Challenge

SPAWAR ITC needed to support IT solutions for the Defense Integrated Military Human Resources (DIMHRS) and the Navy Integrated Personnel (NSIP) Systems.

"Our goal was to manage our development activities holistically via a common approach in order to achieve re-use of processes, components, and code and to develop standardized products for customers," said Dale Galloway, Director of SPAWAR ITC.

To succeed, SPAWAR ITC needed to manage the complexity of its legacy applications and the new systems under development in an environment characterized by a mix of mainframe, UNIX, and NT platforms.

As a result, the organization had to find a way to circumvent the difficulty of operating unconnected systems, which were hard to maintain and curtailed its ability to deliver multiple solutions at a time.

"Our challenge was to coalesce some 100 smaller systems into larger systems," said Mel Quitt, SPAWAR ITC Quality Assurance Manager. "However, we could not complete this task with the manual and cumbersome configuration management systems we had in place."

Solution

SPAWAR ITC's evaluation of Dimensions validated that this technology suited its selection criteria for an integrated process, version, and change management solution in a complex cross-platform development environment.

"We integrated Dimensions into our operations not only to satisfy the needs of individual systems but also to serve as SPAWAR ITC's change management standard in managing these solutions," explained Galloway.

"This move supported our plans to break down our enterprise development activities into small increments and to manage these components via Dimensions. We believed that this was an effective way to address the complexity of our environment and to implement a common process-based change management approach across teams and projects."

"Along the way, SPAWAR ITC relied on the expertise the Serena team provided in answering the toughest questions on how to manage complexity and how to establish a success path for process improvement," said Quitt.

SPAWAR ITC also found that the Serena support team was always ready to solve the most difficult puzzles, with a fast turnaround. In addition, the organization made use of various integrations provided for Dimensions and was thus able to operate a successful Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

"Serena proved to be a strong partner, empowering our goal in change management," commented Galloway.

Conclusion

SPAWAR ITC reported that the adoption of the Serena solution played a supportive role in furthering its mission in many ways, highlighted in the milestones below.

SPAWAR ITC developed a standardized method to build top quality systems.

It enforced its business rules organization-wide via process workflow

It dramatically boosted its re-use rates of internal processes, competencies, code, components, and best practices across teams and projects

It kept track in Dimensions central repository of the activities undertaken to build solutions for customers, a practice which facilitated the re-building of standardized applications

It reduced costs by eliminating redundancies and duplication of information.

"The Serena products will continue to play a role in serving the expanding needs of SPAWART ITC and its customers," said Galloway. "This provides us the ability to gain four strategic benefits: Re-use, cost effectiveness, high quality, and standardized products. We are able to ensure customer satisfaction, which is an essential measure of success in fulfilling our mission."