Partnership

Dialog assists Centrelink through the delivery of a managed service named TBAS (Technical and Business Analysis) in which it supplies and manages teams of skilled and experienced professionals to meet the demand for upgrade, maintenance and development tasks. The TBAS service now includes Project Management Services for a “blended team” incorporating Centrelink and Dialog people. Dialog anticipates future significant development and support projects under the TBAS arrangements.

Dialog has been providing a wide range of services to Centrelink since May 2000.

Dialog also provides a range of Business Intelligence consultants to Centrelink’s Data Services section.

Dialog SAP CRM and ABAP consultants are working with Centrelink on their SAP CRM initiatives.

Outcomes based

Dialog’s support services are outcomes-based and linked directly to Centrelink’s quarterly releases.

A recent project: Referrals Redesign

Dialog provided a self-managed team of developers and testers in partnership with CSC to take phase 2 of the Referrals Redesign project from the Business Analysis stage through Development, Data Conversion, Systems Integration and Testing in a very tight timeframe to meet Centrelink’s quarterly release schedule. A team of Centrelink and Dialog people comprising:

• a project manager
• a business analyst/lead architect
• a conversion specialist
• five developers
• three specialist testing consultants worked as a “blended team” on this project.

The project commenced in November 2006, and Release 1 (the generic system) was delivered into production in March 2007. Release 2 was delivered into production in June 2007. The quality of the delivered system was evidenced by both releases reporting zero defects during the warranty periods.

M204 College

Model 204 (M204) is a database system incorporating a programming language and an environment for application development with the ability to deal with very large databases and very high transaction loads. It is one of Centrelink’s major underlying technologies.

Under TBAS, Dialog has committed to establishing an “M204 College” to develop the talent pool of M204 skills in Australia. Since 2007 Dialog has trained over 40 of its people in M204, greatly reducing risk to Centrelink through increased M204 skills availability.