Common Gas Management System
Business Objective
Redesign and deploy a Common Gas Management System and retire two (2) differing legacy Gas Management applications thus reducing duplicate system maintenance tasks/resources.
Project Overview
Our client, a holding company of numerous Gas Local Distribution Companies (LDC) with over $20 billion in assets and revenues in excess of $6.031 billion, initiated several Business Transformation Projects. One such project sought to redesign two (2) legacy Gas Management applications into a single cohesive application supporting common business processes.
Our project objective was to initiate the Business Transformation Project and provide overall project management, business analyst and application architecture roles. In the midst of the project, the client publicly announced a major out sourcing arrangement with IBM and the project was reviewed and deemed in flight and slated to continue under the new corporate structure.
At the request of both the client and IBM, we remained on the project as Lead Business Analyst / Design Analyst for the critical Gas Scheduling module. To date, we are nearing completion of the Business Requirements Statement and detailed design estimates.
Solution
Working closely with Business Subject Matter Experts located in two different geographic locations, we conducted various Joint Requirements Planning/Gathering sessions to match business rules between the two different work groups.
To produce the various requirements and design artifacts, we utilized Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect to house various OOA/OOD artifacts such as but not limited too
- Use Case Models
- UI Wire frames
- Activity Models
- Architecture Overview Model
To assist in UI prototyping, all User Interface prototypes were quickly built using the application framework designed and deployed for previous iterations. During requirements gathering and review, the Business community was thus able to see real-time .NET web based forms to help solidify user interactions and web form expectations.
Solutions Architecture
Technologies used to complete project objectives were:
- C Sharp, Visual Studio .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0
- NUnit
- NAnt
- OOA/OOD
- UML
- Enterprise Architect
- XML
- CVSNT
- Apache Forrest for documentation
- Eclipse
- PowerBuilder 8.0
- Oracle 9i
- Oracle PL/SQL
by M. Conneen