Enhancing National Disease Surveillance System

Scope: Manage four workstreams to accomplish the main goals of enhancing the system and making it more stable. The project scope included:

1. Upgrade system to the current version of software
   Loblolly established a repeatable process of testing the next version of software in a test environment and securing sign-off from user acceptance testing (UAT), conducting a go / no go meeting with the project sponsor and with that approval, promoting the change to production. The Loblolly team created a standard deployment plan that was used to predict how much planned outage would be required.
2. Create cloud-hosted environment for the system
   The legacy system was hosted in an unconsolidated data center which did not provide sufficient system and network maintenance and support for the system. The leadership direction was to prepare an environment in a government cloud-hosted environment. Loblolly managed the process to assess the necessary capacities of each system server and implement the three environments required (development, testing and production). Loblolly provided program management oversight of the vendors selected to perform the migration, and managed a successful migration of the legacy system to the cloud-hosted environment that minimized the required down time.
3. Create system documentation
   The national disease surveillance system ecosystem is a mixture of applications and data flow processes. Loblolly managed the process to assess the overall architecture of the ecosystem and document each application, data flow and business requirements for the system processes. Loblolly documented all of the scheduled jobs and created a run book of these jobs, documented all of the data transformation routes used to ingest the health lab reporting data, and implemented a change control process to ensure the system documentation would be kept up to date when system modifications are completed.
4. Create a Request for Offer (RFO) for a vendor to maintain the system
   Loblolly created a Request for Offer (RFO) to select a vendor to support and maintain the system. Loblolly worked with the client to create the statement of work (SOW) and establish the service level agreements (SLA). Loblolly managed the process to file the proper documentation as required to publish the RFO. Loblolly managed the review and approval process, assisted in the final steps to publish the RFO, and assisted in responding to the vendor questions to help keep the selection process on schedule. The client was responsible for the final selection of the vendor and conducted contract negotiations with the selected vendor.