The NIH has undertaken the consolidation of several information technology systems, including network operations. This initiative required the development of a single website to manage the gathering, analysis, and reporting of network infrastructure data.

Background

The Division of Network Systems and Telecommunications contacted us in the summer of 2004 requesting the development of a portal that would link to a variety of different tools used to monitor network activity and report on problems. Eight different functions were identified. In some cases, a third-party product was already in production or under evaluation to manage a particular function. Other modules required custom development.

An added requirement was that at least a portion of the system had to be in production by November 1. The final system needed to be integrated with NIH Single Sign On for authentication and include access restrictions at multiple levels.

Our Approach

All of the modules were evaluated against two main criteria:

1. Delivery priority: Does it need to be in production by the November 1 deadline? Is it dependent on the prior completion of another module?

2. Development required: All modules were broken into three levels of development
   1. Custom application and DB development
   2. Custom development against an existing DB
   3. Integration of third-party products into the portal with NIH SSO.

This information was used to develop a project plan to prioritize the modules and establish incremental delivery dates as milestones. Three different developers were each assigned various modules to allow for parallel development, with one developer acting as the technical lead to ensure that a standardize approach was maintained across all modules. Other members of the team included a Systems Analyst, User Interface Designer, and a UNIX programmer to write a custom Perl script needed to pass data from one system to another.

Weekly status meetings were held to insure issues and questions were addressed immediately so as not to delay the development effort.

Results

The production website was launched on September 27 to allow IC staff one month to register all network devices. This information was required to feed several other modules that needed to be on line by the deadline.

On November 1, the four most critical modules were released into production.  Since the launch, two other modules have been brought on line. This system is used extensively every day and has performed without incident.

https://cnms.nih.gov/