Case Studies

Cloud Adoption: Scalable Ways of Working

Change SquadsRegulatory Compliance NavigationTechnical Transformation and Modernisation

The Challenge

The customer wanted to move their technical services and applications from legacy servers hosted in four data centres around the UK and Europe to a fully hosted public Cloud system.

This would reduce annual costs, improve business agility, and enable them to respond to customer demand better.

The Perform Way

Starting with a team of four, Perform Partners scaled and flexed based on the client’s needs and delivery stage. At our peak, Perform Partners had fifteen people leading and working with a team of over 200 resources from the client business, spanning all departments.

Our success was built and driven by quantifiable data. Perform Partners initiated a detailed evaluation in parallel with an adaptive analysis approach, allowing us to realise customer benefits as early as possible. This helped validate the customers’ assumptions around their architecture, the complexity of the existing estate and overall migration readiness. The data showed us that the customers’ preferred migration option wasn’t viable to achieve their – expected data centre cost reduction benefit in time for a fixed contractual deadline. Perform Partners designed and proposed an alternative route directly into VMC, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a proportion of their estate while concurrently progressing AWS native migrations of systems/applications that were not dependent on the exit timeline.

“Having worked with the team at Perform Partners for several years, they continue to deliver outstanding service from their reliable consultancy solution. The Perform Partners team have been fundamental in the success of delivering one of the largest cloud migrations in Europe. We have established and maintained a strong relationship built on trust, candid conversations and getting the job done. Their approach and engagement model has provided me with a solid consultancy service that works.”

Sarah Lucas, William Hill

The Outcome

Migrating this client to AWS has delivered them instant results. They had event-driven ‘Spikes’ of system activity, which were challenging to predict and increasingly expensive to support. Perform Partners’ approach provided our clients with confidence in the technical stability and scalability of their applications on-demand to optimise operational spending. This enables the teams to spend less time managing their service and more time developing it. Using data to understand what products to develop that will improve customer experience and return investment quicker has become central to our client’s ongoing strategy, which was made possible by successfully moving to the Cloud.

By applying the correct technologies and collaborating at the right levels, Perform Partners helped the customer achieve ongoing sustainable business transformation. This goes beyond making a technology choice and goes to the roots of the people involved to inform ways of working and operational best practices. Due to the delivery scale, the company culture has progressed from siloed inward-facing departments to collaborative business teams meeting common goals and sharing benefits.

01.

Improved Ways of Working

The team improved, working towards a stable and predictable cadence of delivery by the end of the 3 months and took the learnings in that period and applied them to further improvements in the following quarter.

02.

Coordinating Demand

As a result of the work done around coordinating cross-team demands, we improved the experience with prioritisation set at the business outcome level and all dependencies being delivered in the second 3-month period, including some late entrants.

03.

Cloud First Strategy

Cloud first strategy adopted across all business functions.

04.

Cloud Capability Gap

Identified a broader business Cloud capability gap, initiated a rolling training programme with hands-on skills, and established a community of practice to share ideas, questions and experience.

05.

Cross-Functional Team (CFT)

Established a Cross-Functional Team (CFT) providing our specialist Cloud Engineers, alongside the client’s staff, to help increase their capability and confidence.