A multinational manufacturing and service company suffered from technical debt in the form of a large IT estate of aged and unsupported applications, operating systems and hardware.
The company was the merger of two large players, themselves formed of acquisitions over an extended period of time and this had led to legacy IT and fractured support organisations.
Typical of many of Wavestone’s clients, the Company needed support in producing an approach to identify and quantify the problem, devise an approach to remediate, produce a prioritised plan and then execute on the plan.
What Wavestone did
Over the last 5 years Wavestone has provided support in multiple projects in various forms. Initially, in 2016, Wavestone provided project management support in the rollout of Microsoft Active Directory and Office365, a workplace rollout, and an IT Service Management rollout.
Wavestone used its proven techniques to perform a Tech Debt Discovery exercise across the global IT estate to identify and enumerate all servers. Our client soon recognised this asset’s value in identifying technical debt, single points of failure, lack of technical knowledge and exposure to obsolescent risk – something that previously they had a lack of visibility of. This was used to produce management information to support business cases for remediation projects.
We were able to provide advice for several projects on how to remediate following the Repurchase, Rehost, Re-platform, Refactor/Replace, Retire, Retain process using a factory model approach leading to predictable results. Our client was also embarking on a move to the cloud and Wavestone drew on its extensive cloud experience to provide technical assurance, governance and management to these cloud migrations. Wavestone worked with our client to industrialise the migration factory approach by sustainably leveraging internal resources to execute simple transformations and allowing Wavestone to focus on complex transformations to accelerate the journey.
Our client also had an aging PKI deployment that they lacked the detailed technical knowledge to maintain. Wavestone provided technical expertise to examine the existing deployment, identify critical remediation activities and then propose the future framework for an up to date and maintainable replacement.
"Wavestone soon became a critical transformation partner for our client, providing advisory services, technical assurance, and management support to multiple different parallel projects. "
Results and key success factors
Wavestone’s ability to provide agile support across multiple disciplines such as defining the prioritised workstreams, supplementing expertise where they had gaps, working with 3rd party providers, and leading the project execution fostered a collaborative approach leading to the successful remediation of many applications.
Our client has benefitted from the increased stability and sustainability of a number of its key applications and services, future-proofing them and ensuring their supportability.
Wavestone drew on its adaptable approach to customers’ needs when a cyber incident highlighted a specific area of urgent remediation. Wavestone adapted the plans and projects to reflect this urgent change in priorities.
