Data Centre Migration for Leading ManufacturerManaging Organisational Change amidst a Large Programme of Technical Change
Acensys was instrumental to setup and govern the programme, design the target data centre from top to bottom, implement new ITSM processes and systems and manage large portions of the migration of customer applications. This allowed the customer to exit their current supplier and achieve significant cost savings while maintaining service levels.
challenge
One of the challenges was the amount of change we were introducing into the organisation while in parallel setting up a new data centre and migrating applications to a new private cloud within a set timeframe. We faced change management challenges within the organisation as we layered in the organisational and process changes in parallel to the technical virtualisation and application migration.
- Internal Resources and Teams were challenged by the amount of Change:
The existing teams were largely a governance lead organisation and with the outsourcing taking on most IT functions, had an eroded delivery capability. In a multi-sourcing environment, the client takes on the role of system integrator and to achieve this, significant change in processes and resources was required within the organisation. - Missing and Out of Date Knowledge and Documentation:
Much of the knowledge about the existing systems were lost over the previous years since the time when they outsourced their IT Functions. Documentation was old and out of date and the systems were highly inter-related and some were out of support. - Incumbent Supplier :
The incumbent supplier was using a shared data centre (including shared components) with streamlined and highly leveraged teams. To achieve the migration, they would have to become a partner in our programme leading to their own exit. Finding a solution within a reasonable budget with a supplier that was still pushing to remain was not easy.
solution
Over the course of the first year, and through a series of pilots – we built up a programme of change. It included enhancing the customers existing methodology to include an end-to-end discovery and design approach which was inclusive of their functional, security and architectural teams (the latter of which were being ramped up in parallel to the programme). The real support from within the company came after the pilots were live and when we included key internal resources in the setup of a “factory model” which industrialised the migrations through a series of repeatable and well known steps staffed by trusted internal employees. After the first year, we also further integrated with the existing operational teams and programmes which unlocked support from key areas of the business and IT departments.
We largely focused on moving to a virtual estate in parallel and upgrading versions of software where we could which delivered business benefits such as better perfomance on a refreshed platform; thus unlocking more support and helping to accelerate the programme.
results
Costs have been significantly reduced and the business case was met. The customer was able to successfully exit the incumbent supplier on-time and within the budget set in the original business case.
The Customers employees are now more empowered and knowledgeable about their platforms. A muti-vendor capability is in place providing more competition across the infrastructure and application layers.
The most important change was that the customer now controls their own destiny. With a team and culture now more delivery oriented combined with a virtualised estate in a multi-vendor environment, additional change and faster deployments are now possible. We have enabled
- better documentation about the as-is estate
- a refreshed technical stack to enable further application upgrades and enhancements
- virtualised architecture for migrations to the public cloud (if desired) or to ever cost effective solutions within the private cloud
- more off-shoring capability since processes are better established and understood
The effort vastly improved the company’s flexibility in an ever more competitive and cost challenged industry.