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Government-adjacent agency: vendor replatform on a fixed window

Problem

A legacy vendor stack reached end-of-support. Citizens depended on self-service for time-sensitive filings. The legislature had already announced a hard decommission date tied to budget cycles.

Constraints

WCAG accessibility mandates, bilingual content parity, and oversight bodies that required traceability from requirement to test to production change. “Move fast and break things” was not on the menu.

Approach

We separated data migration, application cutover, and content migration into parallel workstreams with shared release trains. Accessibility testing ran continuously—not as a gate at the end. Cutover used blue/green at the edge with a static fallback site tested monthly.

Rollout

Dry runs happened in production-like sandboxes with masked citizen data. We rehearsed rollback to the old vendor read-only mode twice. Communications templates for outages were pre-cleared with public affairs.

Risks mitigated

• Political fallout from downtime: transparent status page and scripted updates
• Vendor disputes: objective acceptance criteria tied to payments
• Knowledge loss: paired delivery with internal staff from week one

Outcomes (illustrative)

The cutover met the legislative window with planned read-only hours communicated in advance. Post-launch defect backlog was smaller than the prior vendor’s baseline within sixty days.

Lessons

Evidence is a product. When oversight could see the same dashboards engineering used, meetings turned into decisions.