A team of “6pmers” have rejoined their colleagues onsite at 6pm offices in Malta after a two and a half year stint in the UK working onsite with BT in central London and Sunbury. During this period a team of 12 6pm employees from Malta as well as the UK lived and breathed “BT” and worked alongside a delivery team of around 35 people.

Back in February 2008 BT brought 6pm in as an external consultancy firm to investigate the issues with an internally developed reporting solution being supplied for use across the London cluster of NHS Trusts. As a result BT invited 6pm to tender for the full, outsourced ownership of the project and by April 2008 awarded a design, quality assurance and testing contract to 6pm.

Skills sourced included those of project management and team leading, business intelligence specialists, data warehousing designers, testing, quality assurance management and client facing personnel.

“The BT IM Project within the London and Southern Health Programmes demanded increased deliveries to already tight deadlines and improved quality. 6pm developed an overall quality process including the extensive use of test automation within our IM Business Objects environment. The 6pm developed test package brought high levels of accuracy not seen before on this project together with substantial reductions in testing effort,” said Sam Pillai, at BT.

Once 6pm joined the BT development team within the BT’s Acute Programme, they immediately introduced a more robust and more disciplined quality control process than had previously been in place on that development. This realised significant, immediate and sustained benefits with defect levels dropping close to zero in all subsequent component releases.

BT is one of the world’s biggest providers of IT services and solutions to the healthcare market, helping to transform the way health professionals communicate and deliver patient care. In the UK, it is one of the largest suppliers of IT services to the National Health Service.

“This was a critical project for BT and the demand for continuous delivery remained constant. The 6pm Team immediately integrated well within the BT structure and various NHS Trusts. We are proud that 6pm was instrumental in the overall success of the project, a credit to all the 6pm team members,” commented Peter Bugeja who was the end-to-end release manager for this project.