D.C. picks McDonald Bradley for verification services

McDonald Bradley has won a $2.2 million contract to provide independent verification and validation (IV&V) services to Washington, D.C., which is implementing a new court case management system.

Kenneth Bartee, president and chief executive officer of the company based in Herndon, Va., said Washington officials will use the company’s QV2 methodology for IV&V to review and evaluate all software implementation for the new system. He said that Washington is using Maximus’ CourtView product for management of family, criminal and civil cases. The McDonald Bradley contract could last up to three years.

“The hard part is we’ve come into the middle of the project,” Bartee said. “We always like to be there in the beginning, and it makes things a lot easier, but they’re about half way through.”

Some entities bring in an IV&V vendor after a project is under way rather than from the beginning of the project because some think there needs to be something developed before any testing and tracking can take place, he said.

Although federal agencies are using more IV&V vendors for major information technology projects, state and local government agencies tend to use them less often, Bartee said.

“I haven’t seen them bring in independent testers very often, at least not in the last couple of years,” he said. “And I think that’s just a function of [tight] budgets the states and the locals have.”

The company has performed IV&V services for federal court systems, the Justice Department and local court systems in several Virginia jurisdictions.