Jessie Martinez served as Senior QA Project Manager at UCI Medical Center with more than 25 years of experience with technology projects. He's an expert in software process improvement, with intimate knowledge of healthcare information management best practices and standards.

The scope of the project was very large and involved more than 50 internal systems. The project team was widely distributed and consisted of 50 full-time people and more than 100 part-time consultants, executives, physicians and staff. There were more than 4,000 requirements and hundreds of test cases, issues, documents and change requests. Getting all of our data captured correctly and structured in an organized manner that provided traceability and visibility was a daunting prospect.

First, it is cloud-based. The ability to access project data 24/7 from anywhere in the world was a huge benefit for our large and distributed team. Second, it was tremendously convenient to have a single repository for all of our data. All of our project information was organized, searchable, and reportable. Workspace.com eliminated the need for version control of Word docs and spreadsheets, and saved all the time typically wasted searching through emails, documents and status updates. Finally, we really liked the idea of having all of our data linked together on a single platform. The automation features and traceability reporting that came from having change requests, requirements, tests and issues all linked together saved time and improved quality.

We had previously cobbled together a combination of Sharepoint, Word, Excel, and email and that just didn't work. Having a complete solution like Workspace.com was a very positive experience, and I've used it on other engagements as well. Not only was the project a success, which you don't often hear with large enteprise projects, there is now also a wonderful archive documenting the entire project.