Executive Summary and Challenge
My client, a large entertainment organisation required an overarching architecture assessment of 25+ of its core business applications legacy estate. A programme of projects was in flight, some projects were on track, other tracking significantly behind, a full review of its state of operations were required to address gaps in service to its user base and to uncover key blockages to progress.

An initial assessment revealed the team size and structure were not suitable for the scale and size of the operation, the same teams had to deliver both support as well as development tasks with often high priority day to day production issues taking precedence over delivery of releases resulting in impact to business users and projects. Equally business critical projects were tracking significantly behind on budget and delivery dates. A significant turnaround was required to help restore business confidence, define a new IT strategy as well as target operating model.

Approach

The SEE Director was drafted in as an interim to identify and remedy the gaps to service. Building IT and Business relationships were key as part of an initial phase. This was mainly to identify first-hand as to what the key issues were and then rank the issues by priority. Business and IT stakeholders were interviewed, a set of workshops then followed. This helped to uncover further blockages, identify ways forward and define a first draft of the target operating model and a transformation roadmap with digital transformation core to the model. A deep dive of the IT estate was also conducted during this initial 3-month audit period.

Challenges
Key challenges included a lack of technical documentation for legacy estates, this proved to be challenging to identify the “one source of the truth” for the IT application estate. Teams were working in silo’s and unaware of business confidence levels and change-related challenges were prevalent throughout. Communication to the business and management of expectations required significant improvement and ensuring teams worked to one set of agreed priorities.

During this period 4 key projects were brought back on track for delivery. The results of the first phase identified a short, medium- and long-term roadmap with priorities ranked to address gaps. Key priorities revealed addressing shortages in key skills, maintaining the cloud-first plan, ensuring fixable but critical digital projects were brought back on track. These included but not limited to an application migration to AWS cloud solution, delivery of a digital solution ticketing solution, GDPR and highly critical financial settlement first production release, all which served to restore a level of confidence to stakeholders and help the team along their journey. This was just a part of the wider journey of work that needed to be sustained over the 6-month period. The audit of the application estate ranked challenges and opportunities with each of the core applications with an associate RAG status along with recommendations. This work with full documentation was handed over along with recommendations for a newly enhanced proposed organisation structure.

• Purpose to Portfolio