Legal and Tax Services Business embarked on a multi-year billion-dollar digital transformation of all of its customer facing, data and back end systems.
The Situation
The US transformation was completed and there was now a requirement to move other business units onto the new platform. All customer facing, data and back end systems were required to be migrated to the new platform in the cloud.
As law and tax requirements are local to regions, there was also a requirement to enable the Business Units to localise the products as required to support their markets. Most other Business Units would follow an adopt and adapt approach to the migration, however due to the advanced nature of the existing UK products they would need to achieve parity in the new systems prior to releasing to customers.
The transformation was also time critical as the server farm that all the services were hosted in was being shut down on a set date. Any movement past this date would require a costly lease extension. The strategic plan was to migrate applications to the cloud.
The Task
I was tasked to Programme Direct the delivery UK in their transformation.
This included the application of governance controls globally, ensuring that there was transparency across the group of delivery and the progress being made against the required outcomes.
I needed to ensure that we did not disrupt the existing BAU and that as changes were delivered that we pro-actively updated operating models to support the new ways of working.
I also needed to ensure that any opportunities for cost saving in the business were analysed and opportunities were exploited where possible.
Ultimately, we needed to ensure that we achieved the strategic goal to be out of the server farm in the specified timeframes.
The Action / Approach
Working with the various teams we built out an incremental roadmap, building in any known dependencies and risks that we were aware of at the time. I then worked with the business to prioritise the backlog of work to understand which projects would need to be started first.
I then worked with the technology group to build out a resourcing model to execute against the roadmap and got the teams to work on the highest priority items.
As this was a multi-year programme of work, we needed to constantly review the outcomes to ensure that we were still driving toward the required strategic goals and that I was taking into account changes in market conditions or the existing product to support customer needs and ensuring parity with the current products.
I ensured that milestones all had data led metrics to report on to ensure that data driven decisions could be made if required. I also ensured that the teams clearly understood how the work that they were delivering added to the strategic goals of the business.
The Result
Due too rapidly changing market conditions in the North American market, key resources kept being moved from the project which meant that due to the systems architecture it was difficult to deliver the required outcomes. The programme continued to limp along delivering what it could, mostly delivering cost saving measures.
After a period of time with the UK being deferred, we carried out a delivery analysis and realised that even if we pumped significant funds into the UK to increase delivery capability there was a very high risk of not achieving the transformation in the required timelines. Failure to deliver in the timeframes came with a significant financial impact to the UK.
I worked with the various teams and stakeholders to analysis the problem space and identify alternate options with associated risks with each option. These were then broken down into easily consumable chunks and presented back to the Global CEO with a clear recommendation. The recommended option was to move the UK applications onto a different server farm to ensure we achieved the timelines required and strangle out the old UK code which enabled us to update the products in an incremental basis. This meant that we could ensure parity for the UK customers and de-risk the UK transformation.
This solution was accepted by the board and we successfully migrated the UK applications out of the old server farm in the required timelines, at the same time strangling out the some of the old code and moving to the new code to the cloud.
