Situation

As the result of a significant merger, a leading financial services corporation with assets of approximately $345.2 billion engaged in a reconciliation of their  infrastructure. One of the key components of this was the integration of all backup and recovery activities under one single, centralized platform. The Enterprise Backup and Recovery (EBR) organization had a high stake in this initiative but was also facing critical recurring issues with their current infrastructure, placing their team in constant reactive “keeping the lights on” mode. They were also experiencing the challenges associated with merging two very different corporate team cultures. Very conscious of the risk level involved with both the day-to-day issues and the implementation of a brand new backup platform, especially as managed by teams unfamiliar with each other, the EBR management team decided to engage a neutral third party to assess their current operations and provide them with a plan to structure their organization to meet these challenges.

Solution

BusinessForward provided an IT Organizational Assessment Solution that included a holistic review of the Enterprise Backup and Recovery organization. Our focus was to enable the EBR team to manage their implementation without incurring critical failure or downtime, to avoid putting their reputation or clients at risk and to bridge significant organizational challenges between two drastically different cultures. A centralized infrastructure was a key element to allow people to work together as one team representing one company.

The project focused on several aspects of the organization to ensure a universal culture change, including:

1. Revision of the organizational structure to support all aspects: supports vs. projects vs. day-to-day maintenance vs. continuous improvement of existing processes and procedures
2. Visibility over the team’s workload and capacity through Monthly Management Operating Reports
3. Clarification of roles and responsibilities through documented processes and procedures

In addition we provided the team with a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that would be reviewed on a monthly basis with management and assess the overall health of the organization. The creation of a new role, “Process Control Officer”, allowed for optimal management of the EBR team’s monthly reports and overall knowledge base.

In the source of our engagement, close to 100 Standard Operating Procedures were created to reflect the way current and future platforms are operating.

Results

The EBR management team was so pleased with the outcome of this operational assessment that they decided to expand the changes BusinessForward implemented to the rest of the Infrastructure Organization.

Key factors in this were that BusinessForward:

• Provided the organization with clear visibility over their operational health allowing them to make critical decisions based on quantifiable data
• Helped the organization balance their workload without impacting their day-to-day operations and customers
• Provided the team with the visibility over processes and procedures needed to run the operations allowing for a smooth transition between resources and proactive management of issues