Case Study June 25, 2019
Reviving a Stalled Data Center Consolidation Project
Trexin helped a large financial services company improve performance and lower cost with a new infrastructure.
Business Driver
Our Client, a large multinational financial services company specializing in insurance and asset management, launched a global data center consolidation initiative to use the latest technology to increase reliability and performance yet reduce operational costs by eliminating legacy physical servers and non-standard, non-scalable solution frameworks. One of the larger and more challenging consolidations was for their North American-based life insurance company, involving the creation of two new (primary and secondary) data centers and their next generation infrastructure of security, networking, and server/processing frameworks. But this critical project was already a year behind schedule with less than 10% completed, so the EVP of the IT shared services business unit responsible for the migration asked Trexin to lead a recovery effort to determine root cause of the delays, establish trust among all parties, and drive a methodology (inclusive of new project management tools and oversight structures) to regain momentum and complete the project in 12 months.
Approach
Led by a small team with deep analytical and technical expertise, Trexin immediately initiated multiple discovery efforts via document inspections, individual interviews, and group whiteboarding sessions to determine gaps in methodology, processes, and communications. Once these gaps and their root causes were identified and fully analyzed, Trexin effected changes to remediate short-term process and milestone impacts while mitigating future impacts that could slow or stop forward momentum. These changes included the introduction of a new program management office (PMO) for server and system builds to coordinate the more difficult tasks among the two involved business unit teams and numerous 3rd party vendors, including the large outsourcer contracted for system and network builds, configuration, and monitoring services. While establishing the PMO, Trexin also authored and introduced a new methodology for workflow procedures, acceptance processes, and deliverables tracking, including an extensive change management aspect to educate all key stakeholders and contributors to ensure all parties understood the importance and agreed upon the changes. The creation of a master build tracker that was communally accepted as the single source of truth by all parties proved to be a critical element. Trexin then diligently participated daily in all meetings, captured the decisions and owners of tasks and actions collaboratively with the other teams’ project managers, and drove adherence to the new program framework until the project was brought to completion.
Results
Trexin successfully led the team to complete the project in 12 months as requested, resulting in two new operational data centers with 773 servers built and migrated, including related networks, data analytics engines, and storage area networks supporting over 800 applications.