A team of ‘6pmers’ have rejoined their colleagues at the 6pm offices in Malta after a more than two-year stint in the UK working on site with BT in Central London and Sunbury. In the last two-and-a-half years 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 in April 2008 awarded it a design, quality assurance and testing contract. Skills sourced included 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. It developed test package and brought high levels of accuracy not seen before on this project, together with substantial reductions in testing effort,” commented Sam Pillar, at BT.

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

“6pm has continued to ably contribute to the management, design governance and quality assurance activities of this reporting solution, which has matured and grown as a successful product since those early days. 6pm has at all times shown great professionalism, unwavering commitment, and genuine ownership of the responsibilities that they have been assigned by BT. Their attention to detail is admirable, their planning robust and their delivery record has been excellent. I would not hesitate to recommend them in a similar role in the future” commented Kevin Pretorius, at BT

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 (NHS).

“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.