Case study: Working with RWS to drive its digital transformation

Read about how Acutest worked with RWS, a world-leading provider of technology-enabled language, content, and intellectual property services. This case study highlights how we provided quality assurance experience to help mitigate risks associated with a major migration project centred on MS Azure and M365.

Background

RWS is a global leader in language, specialising in helping organisations remove language barriers and unlock understanding with their audiences, anywhere in the world. Having undergone a period of rapid growth, the business needed to update its infrastructure so its employees could benefit from a consistent digital experience. It wanted to support the new corporate culture, encouraging collaboration and reducing costs by minimising operational duplication through the introduction of consistent tools and environments.

Why Acutest?

RWS turned to Acutest as a trusted long-term assurance and testing partner, having successfully delivered testing expertise to support previous RWS projects. With first-hand experience of Acutest’s ability to collaborate with internal teams and partner organisations, the business was confident that we could deliver a prioritised test approach. One based on an understanding of the underlying risks inherent in the migration project and the mitigation of those risks through testing.

The challenge

The project scope involved migrating the RWS global user base which included over 7500 users, located in over 100 locations, across America, Europe, and Asia. The migration involved moving identities and data from several legacy tenants into a new tenant, provisioned by Microsoft. The business  set ambitious timescales, and targets, ensuring absolute minimum end-user disruption. As part of the scope, Acutest worked alongside an international programme team. This comprised of remote internal teams spread across the EMEA, NASA, and APAC regions. Additionally, RWS brought in a specialist third-party supplier to manage the migration. Acutest utilised digital tools to collaborate effectively across this large project. The team was organised across six separate workstreams with specific focus on M365, networks, apps & data, security, EUC, and business engagement.

The solution

Acutest developed a programme approach to testing that brought structure and consistency to how the various technical workstreams conducted their testing. This approach allowed:

• The identification of appropriate testing.  Each internal team carried out the testing to validate the new tenant build.
• The development of a governance approach. Consequently, it harvested the outcomes from testing and built consistent reporting to ensure the programme identified any issues.
• Close collaboration with the third-party migration supplier to lead the testing of the migration process from legacy to the new greenfield tenant.
• The configuration of an instance of Azure Dev Ops hosted on the new tenant via RWS to consistently record testing and support the defect triage process.
• The definition of an approach, working closely with RWS, to validate user experience over the global deployment weekend and during the warranty period. Moreover, it allowed us to feedback any issues encountered by the users and provide a transparent reporting process.

Benefits

Despite a high degree of complexity, a disparate global team, and ambitious timescales the goal was achieved. The migration project was delivered within the time and budget parameters set by the business. As a result, RWS recognised Acutest’s contribution to this success. Key results included:

• The identification of issues through the testing Acutest managed. This avoided issues – missed or caught later – that could impact the progression of the project.
• Pre-cutover testing and risk analysis identified key issues in advance of the cutover weekend. It allowed us to prepare for these and put mitigations in place.
• Minimal business disruption. The migration of over 95% of users took place on the Monday following cutover, within two to three hours of their working day. The successful relocation of all critical apps took place within the cutover weekend itself.

“We set ourselves a challenging time scale for delivering this project and with Acutest’s help we got it done” – Dorte Schou – Group IT Director – RWS Group