The Client

Our client is a leading retail business with over 2,000 retail shops across the UK operating two major businesses under the same brand. To enable one of the businesses  to be  sold,  the IT services and infrastructure needed to be separated. To complicate the  project a previous cost-savings initiative had merged shared-service functions such as  HR, Operations and IT. Beyond were engaged to help design and deliver a IT system divestment for 18,000 users.

Scenario

The project had been in-flight for some time but the team needed assistance as the infrastructure project plan was difficult to track and there was nervousness from the technical staff whether the amount of technical change would be achievable given the amount of remaining time left on the project. The pressure of trying to deliver within the stated timescales was leading to uncertainty and talented staff were finding employment elsewhere.

Our Approach

Working with a strong programme manager, we collaborated with the technical staff to detail  the effort required, resulting in a single project becoming a  programme of over twenty separate but interrelated work streams. With an approved plan in place, crucially with engineer  buy-in, we set off to deliver a new separate IT environment for the 4,000 users.  The  main challenges were providing shared -services to both "new" businesses, enabling co-exis­tence during the transition and keeping the lights on whilst making major change.

Project Detail

• Project recovery and re-planning
• Joint -team delivery
• Increase confidence of the engineers
• Increase confidence in the project plan
• Delivery of new Active Directory and migration of 4,000 users
• Discover desktops and users usings bespoke techniques
• Working with developers and service SMEs to orchestrate service changes

Business Benefits

• Total Data Centre separation
• Project brief met - enable sale of a business
• Retention of staff
• Reduced costs by not utilising expensive 3rd party software

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