Our client is one of the world’s leading management consulting and advisory companies. The firm provides international financial reporting, assurance and advisory, tax auditing, corporate governance, risk consulting, and management and board advisory services.
Business Challenge
The initial request from our client focused on validating if its migration to the cloud was being conducted properly. In the early stages of the collaboration, SoftServe applied a DevOps assessment methodology to perform current state analysis and to understand the areas that needed immediate attention. The assessment also revealed underlying complexities our client faced.
Our client’s IT organization could not meet the full spectrum of requests from functional business departments. As a result, these functional departments began to develop their own IT services, including infrastructure, which caused unmanaged diversity, environment sprawl, and incorrect internal compute assets. Not being able to provide the business functions with leading IT solutions put them at risk of losing a competitive edge on the market.
Our client needed to achieve the following goals:
- The IT organization has to become a DevOps-enabled organization capable of serving other functions with high-quality DevOps offerings
- Enable self-service capabilities for the development / engineering organization
- Increase basic IT performance KPIs
- IT organization to take responsibility over the production support
Project Description
SoftServe presented an assessment report to the client’s stakeholders with SoftServe’s recommendations on how to transform the IT organization through a detailed roadmap. An essential part of the implementation plan was re-establishing trust between IT and business functions by empowering IT to provide cutting-edge solutions.
Once the first pilot transformation program had begun, within the first three months the initial tangible results of cooperation were realized. One of the business functions had a periodical demand in rapid use of compute services and was performing all-at-once application deployments because of the specifics of the annual business cycle. It was previously a constant struggle to provision sufficient computing capacities in a timely manner with no issues. Through the collaboration with SoftServe to streamline delivery of computational services, the function had no problems with meeting peak demand. For example, critical application deployment shortened from five weeks to two days, including testing. The application management process was completely overhauled; time to production was reduced from months to less than two weeks, an agile-like collaboration between Dev and Ops was established, and a new approach to constant quality control was applied.
SoftServe brought its think – iterate – deliver approach where the initial stage was the assessment of current state and design of the future organization state (think).
SoftServe uses a High-Performance Enterprise IT Organization model when there’s a need to perform a rapid transformation of an enterprise-scale IT department.
Key stages of the transformation program included:
- Assessed current DevOps state against DevOps Maturity Model
- Initiated the creation of DevOps CoE, centralizing DevOps expertise and authority, taking the workload off of function’s shoulders, freeing up their time and resources
- Assessed the current state of critical business applications for the selected pilot business function
- Recommended a roadmap outlining short and long-term initiatives important for successful operations and support
Value Delivered
Besides streamlining an IT process, SoftServe optimized the computation load itself. After optimization was performed on one of the applications, its resource consumption was reduced by more than 12X; and performance measures as report generation time improved more than 5X.
After three months of the implementation period, our client reported the first indications of visible improvement. The selected pilot business function entered a new business cycle without delays caused by IT for the first time in the last decade. As a result, our client’s IT organization started to regain trust again and is now on track to become a high-performance enterprise IT organization.
The roadmap is moving ahead with the implementation and currently, two portfolios are about to be migrated and transformed, including 50+ applications in total.