Making I.T. Work Again
The Situation
A managed services and telecom business had been under-investing in their IT department and internal technology for many years.
This had brought about a high turnover of staff and rock bottom IT performance with mission critical services being down for days with some regularity.
There had been a CIO, but after they left they had not been replaced. This role then fell onto an IT Manager, who also left and for the last couple of years IT had been run by an IT Project Manager.
The Task
I was hired to rescue the IT department, stop the downtime and bring it back to a manageable state as the CEO was in the process of trying to get the business sold.
The Action / Approach
Fast track implementation of IT best practice frameworks and processes (ITIL, ITSM) to start to be able to track IT performance and properly trace issues and problems.
‘Re-imaged’ the entire laptop and desktop estate with a “standard” core image that had been thoroughly tested.
Consolidated six data centres down to two; primary and disaster recovery.
Embarked on an aggressive “sunsetting” strategy to reduce the number of applications, servers, databases etc. that were live.
Created a “centre of excellence” in the data centre where applications and data would only be moved into it, once they were patched, documented and under change control.
Completed multiple concurrent company-wide upgrades (including Office365, SharePoint, Skype for Business, ServiceNow, server consolidations etc.), to get away from legacy and poorly performing solutions whilst giving employees access to the latest technologies.
The Result
Initial work in the data centre combined with best practice frameworks and consistency of process, led to ticket levels falling by over 60% and unplanned downtime all but eliminated within six months.
Re-imaging the laptop and desktop estate meant that users were suddenly able to get on with there work rather than fight issues with performance or degraded operating systems. Suddenly IT was no longer a reason as to why people could not hit their targets nor complete their work.
Consolidating the data centres allowed for cost and complexity to be reduced across the IT estate. Simply there were less things to go wrong and less complexity.
Reducing the number of servers, applications and databases (‘sunsetting’) again reduced the amount of things that IT had to support. This frees up IT staff time to be able to work on making things better and more stable.
Creating the centre of excellence meant that anything in our “core” was fully understood, supported, documented, backed up and fully resilient. Servers within this area were all built to a standard “image” and under full change control. This meant that things did not break and when changes or security patches were rolled out, we had full testing and rollback capability in the event of a problem.
We then gained Cyber Essentials Plus certification and were also certified to ISO27001.
Finally; the money saved on moving to the cloud (with lower support costs and less need of hardware), the closure of the data centres and the much reduced software and hardware estate meant that the whole project was cost neutral.
I then presented the new IT Strategy to potential new buyers of the company during due diligence, and the company was purchased with the IT infrastructure cited and one of the reasons for the acquisition.
