Case Study

The Challenge

During a high-stakes data centre migration for a global Consumer Markets , an unexpected legal and commercial roadblock emerged. The parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on behalf of a US-based subsidiary, which held licensing rights for critical applications and infrastructure hosted in its US data centre. This legal action immediately froze all migration activities involving those assets, threatening to delay the programme by up to three months.

The financial stakes were equally severe. Continuing operations in the legacy data centre was costing the client around £850,000 per month, while the migration programme itself incurred a £1 million monthly run rate. Even a short delay risked undermining the business case, straining commercial relationships, and jeopardising regulatory compliance tied to the data centre exit.

Our Approach

Our Change Squad took a proactive and agile response to the emerging risk. While the Chapter 11 development introduced unforeseen external disruption, we immediately engaged with all relevant stakeholders to reassess the plan and identify actionable paths forward. Our approach included:

• Rapid Impact Assessment & Replanning: Without knowing when it would end, this was a live issue that we were monitoring every day. We identified which workloads and environments were affected and prioritised unaffected components, such as pre-prod and test workloads, for immediate migration.
• Licence Repurchase & Rental: Where possible, licences were repurchased at low cost or temporarily rented to maintain migration momentum. Where this was not viable, applications were decoupled from the main migration plan and rescheduled with a two-to-three-week buffer to accommodate potential overruns.
• Prioritising Workable Environments: Development environments that either did not require licences or used lower-cost alternatives were prioritised to keep work progressing during the licence freeze.
• Cross-functional Orchestration: We facilitated tight collaboration between legal, procurement, and technical teams, acting as translators between the licensing experts and infrastructure engineers to maintain alignment and velocity.
• Strategic Use of Buffer Time: Fortunately, a quiet delivery period was pre-planned for December. This was strategically repurposed to absorb re-scheduled migrations, avoiding downstream slippage.
• Procurement & Licensing Leadership: We worked closely with third-party vendors and licensing specialists, identifying lower-cost or temporary alternatives where possible, and implemented twice-weekly stand-ups to maintain progress and quickly deal with any blockers.