Health Partners America (HPA) was in desperate need of a system administrator, project manager and more developers in their IT department. Our goal was to provide what our client needed, within budget, and without the need to hire more staff.

HPA needed a ninja consultant and pronto! We automated everything that we could in a short amount of time and documented everything extensively. Previous developers left the company in a very poor state. HPA was left with expensive, custom, poorly written applications that ensured that only the contractor would know how to operate them, and once the contractors left, it left the company handicapped. HPA is a small company and they had unknowingly hired contractors to build systems in place that needed at least 10 additional employees to maintain and truthfully…they didn’t need any of it.

System Administration: The first order of business was moving all of their existing clients and software to a new improved server. However, before we could begin work on the effort, we had to take an assessment of all the moving parts. Currently our client had no working documentation of any of the applications used nor how they communicated with other systems on the server. Once we were able to complete the current architecture design, it allowed us to easily move to managed servers with no downtime. In addition to moving their systems to a more secure, managed, location, we also added automated scripts which allowed the team to focus less on the server and more on their work.

Services Preformed:

• Migrated over 500 live exchange sites to managed server
• Prepared infrastructure for compliance with Service Organization Control (SOC) 3 & Marsh & McLennan Security Risk Assessment
• Automated Encryption of Personal Identifiable Information (PPI)
• Documented all system administrative processes
• Automated backups on servers and to additional offsite locations
• Implemented password policies on all servers (3)
• Performed penetration testing plan to eliminate SQL injection and brute force attacks
• Wrote and implemented plans to secure data upon employee terminations
• Integrated cPanel into Slack to alert the team of security breaches and back status

Project Management: The next order of business was implementing software development processes and procedures as none were in place. After evaluating the teams current processes of development, the following processes and procedures were implemented to help the the team work more efficiently and to be compliant with SOC3 and the Marsh & McLennan Security Risk Assessment:

• Document peer review & software development procedures
• Document coding standard
• Train team members of new development processes and procedures
• Add code to Git repository using SourceTree and GitHub
• Create a issue tracking system for all code changes
• Create a team wiki for storing team tutorials and instructions
• Integrate new issue tracking system into Basecamp

Once new processes were in place, we had to ensure that the team became self-managed so that they we could implement Scrum as their preferred software development methodology.

Software Development: Once our client’s data was transferred to a more reliable server and a software development plan was in place it was time to perform code clean-ups through-out all servers and begin developing software using object oriented design (OOD).

Previously, applications were built without using OOD nor adequate documentation. Code changes that would take a few seconds if OOD were in place, would take days with the team. Not only was senior development needed, the code had to be simplified and re-written so that it didn’t require a large team to maintain.

Services Preformed:

• Develop standalone web applications as needed
• Provide back-end development for all new applications
• Add new features to legacy applications (requests from account management)
• Replace poorly written legacy applications