PROJECTS
PROJECT 1
Developed a proposal to deliver an IT infrastructure strategy, presented that proposal and was successful in landing it. Assembled a team of 8 consultants / engineers to deliver the project. Worked directly for the CIO. Client had a number of plants across the UK and more widely and a complex IT infrastructure landscape - including outsourced / 3rd party datacentres as well as on-premise datacentres / IT rooms. Within these there was a complex mix including legacy systems & platforms. I led the team to interview over 50 people across client and suppliers (TCS/IBM), gather over 140 data items (cost, contracts, technical, service delivery, architecture, organisation). Analysed the current landscape and created a summary storyboard to explain findings to IT leadership – legacy risks, process & governance issues, cost & vendor issues. Created a high-level strategy and a high-level transformation programme plan and a detailed business case. The plan in summary removed a significant amount of legacy / applications, consolidated & refreshed platforms, changed the IT organisation (more internal skills, less outsource), and showed how it could reduce run rate costs by 40% post transformation, and be cost neutral over 3 years. Post strategy we were engaged to oversee vendor delivery of the build of the client private cloud platform by HPE, along with more detailed analysis and planning for migration onto the platform. Work continues by internal staff. Consulting Revenue £2.5m
PROJECT 2
Request from client was to help run an RFP to go to market for IT outsource provider, as the existing outsource was approaching renewal point. We moved the discussion back a step into IT strategy. Created proposal for 12 weeks strategy engagement, assembled team of 8 consultants – including RFP/vendor contract capability, financial analysts, technical analysts and enterprise architects. Met numerous stakeholders both in IT and the different client businesses, including CTO, CIO and COO. Created a clear baseline of current landscape, contract costs and capability. Created a set of scenarios / options for how the building blocks of IT could be delivered and could be optimised. Created a future state based on an agreed scenario (where it was clearly defined what client wanted to own vs outsource, across each region / country and across each technology tower). Created and agreed a high-level cost model with Global insurance company finance / CFO, showing single vendor transition. Moved on from strategy with proposal to run the programme for RFP to vendor selection. Created the RFP (requirements engineering, cost / charging models), ran the RFP process with 12 vendors initially, downselected to 4 and then finally to vendor selection. Assisted with contract. Migration to this vendor is now nearing completion. Run rate costs reduced by ~40%. Consulting Revenue £2.0m
PROJECT 3
Request from then CEO to assist with “IT Diagnostic” following significant IT outages across their business. Assembled a team of 6 architects / engineers. Deep dive into current landscape, and issues that they had been suffering. Landscape messy, legacy, under-invested. Vendor / partner landscape also complex – client had created this “innovative” Alliance with a number of vendors. This structure assigned vendors to towers. Issue existed in the contracts and responsibility often ended up with the client, with issues falling between vendors. At the time of us starting client did not have a CIO, and we recommended and placed an interim for 6 months. Our analysis showed issues throughout the IT landscape. We continued from the initial analysis to start fixing some of the issues – right down to network switch reconfiguration, VOIP software updates, Win10 project improvements, network re-architecture from MPLS to SDWAN, internet breakout at all sites, Mainframe software upgrades and migration to IBM zCloud. Application portfolio analysis and recommendations on Application Rationalisation programme. My team was onsite for 15 months – one of the team acted as interim-CTO for 6 months whilst hiring a replacement. Stability & service was significantly improved, technology and organisation strategy in place. Consulting Revenue £3.5m
PROJECT 4
Engaged on various strategies from 2011 through to 2018. 2018 – Cost management strategy – client had a target to reduce IT infrastructure spend and asked us to look at the current costs/vendors and advise. I brought in a small team of 3 to look at strategy / cost / vendors – to triangulate technology usage against contract / commercial cost. We created various hypotheses – from reducing hours of run service on non-production Azure, resizing all instances on Azure as well as their on-prem hosted private cloud, removing overlapping vendor entitlements (where they were paying for same capability in more than one place), reducing SLA levels of systems where either not required or the architecture of the system provided resilience, reducing email archive retention systems and retention period, re-negotiating vendor agreements / support agreements. As well as “technical” cost reduction, advised on improved vendor / contract management – to link technical landscape to vendor contract landscape – mostly through maximising the use of ServiceNow capabilities that had been purchased but not used. Presented the hypotheses and ran programme to reduce costs. Met internal friction where other teams also wanted to claim cost savings or claimed were already doing it. Achieved ~£3.5m run rate reduction within the 6-month engagement. Immediate pipeline of activities would have brought this to ~£5m reduction. Potentially was to reduce run rate by up to £35m pa, but the programme stalled due to lack of sponsorship. Consulting Revenue £3m.