State office identifies risks and improves election system with project governance assessment
Learn how a government office improved voter testing capabilities, identified risks and achieved cost savings through a project governance assessment.
Client background
The client is a Secretary of State office and election division responsible for managing and maintaining an integrated Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS).
The business challenge
Since the system’s inception, SVRS data had been hosted in a secure, off-site environment. With the tremendous growth and change in the computer and data technology industry, there was a need to modernize the hosting infrastructure through a cloud migration to improve service reliability, increase hosting infrastructure capabilities like expanded testing functionality and reduce operational costs resulting in significant savings for the state and state’s taxpayers.
Strategy and solution
As a result of past success as the system implementation and program management office lead for the SVRS, Baker Tilly was selected to lead a project governance assessment as an independent verification and validation (IV&V) and testing partner to assess the health of the hosting migration project. We recommended improvement opportunities, identified risk and risk responses given the project impact to all counties, including over 500 voter registration and election officials and over 4.5 million voters that reside across the state.
The Baker Tilly project team reviewed testing artifacts produced by the application developer, including the test plan, test cases, migration execution activities, defect reports and progress status reports and identified key risks, risk mitigating options and facilitated key decisions in relation to testing and the documentation of test results. Baker Tilly also conducted over 600 application and online voter registration portal test scripts across two cloud applications and one public online portal and reviewed load and performance testing results to confirm satisfactory service levels with the new hosting provider.
The hosting migration project was successfully achieved by the original go-live date, on budget and without any major issues to counties or voters. The anticipated new testing capabilities resulting from the new hosting environment were rolled out to individual counties and led to an annual cost savings of 18%.