Singlewave

Background

A leading national FTSE 100 retailer embarked on a 5-year business change programme to transform legacy infrastructure, systems and processes with newer and more efficient solutions.

Their strategy was to move towards the Oracle Retail product suite. This required the establishment of new teams to build and support integrated solutions, primarily to provide data flow between (but not limited to) ‘old-world’ and ‘new-world’ systems.

Issue

The business change programme required the development, configuration, testing and deployment of Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) interfaces to enable the integration of ‘old-world’ legacy systems to the ‘new-world’ Oracle Retail platform.

There was no team or experience within the Retailer to enable the expansion of OFM technology to support either project delivery or production service.

Progress

Mobilisation of technical resources was initiated to begin provision of the required project delivery and production support. The resources were a combination of permanent and contract colleagues.

The workload and resource requirements continued to be a challenge as the usage of Oracle Fusion Middleware increased with every major initiative.

Building up a forward view of demand was a requirement that was not forthcoming.

Requirement

Senior IT management recognised the need for support from an experienced IT Project Manager to help plan, resource, budget and coordinate delivery of Oracle Fusion Middleware interfaces across multiple programmes and projects. Each of these initiatives required the building and supporting of multiple environments across various project lifecycle phases of testing before they could be implemented into the production systems.

Role Objective

The Role Objective was to be the ‘Go To’ person for anyone wanting to engage on a project with any of the Oracle Fusion Middleware teams to provide protection for the department and formal governance of project issues, changes, budgets and resources.

Having discussed the personality traits required for the role with the client, Singlewave provided someone who had the Retailer’s business strategies and priorities at the core of all decisions, be innovative, providing leadership and excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

The role includes reviewing the project pipeline to enable forecast resource demand, performing initial technical impact analysis for project delivery and production support and managing issues relating to projects with conflicting priorities, timelines, resources and budgets.

Solution

Singlewave provided their Service Delivery Manager to fulfil this role and alleviate pressure on the Retailer’s own management.

Service Delivery Manager Role Profile

From a project management perspective, the Singlewave Service Delivery Manager:

• Represents the assigned area in project meetings and advise team of impacts/actions;
• Is the workstream lead for specific project phases, e.g. OAT, Cutover;
• Manages project issue resolution requiring coordination across multiple teams;
• Advises projects how to engage with the teams and their R&Rs;
• Manages relationships with projects and service providers/business partners;
• Coordinates tasks and activities required for project deliverables;
• Provides effective communication to project teams on progress and issues;
• Participates and contributes to lessons learned reviews.

As the resourcing manager for the Oracle Fusion Middleware teams, the Singlewave Service Delivery Manager is responsible for:

• Resource demand planning;
• Input to portfolio process to ensure visibility of upcoming projects and impact upon resources;
• Recruitment process and planning, i.e. CV reviewing and interviewing;
• Managing the on-boarding process for successful candidates;
• Coordination and communication of support rotas;
• Working with team leads and their managers to resource work and ensure sufficient resource in place to staff it;
• Manage day-to-day delivery of supplier resource augmentation service;
• Act as Service Delivery Manager for escalation, issue resolution and status reviews.

Conclusion

• Singlewave provide a range of top quality technical and management resources to help deliver solutions with added value and collaboration with the client at the forefront of the service offerings.
• This is a real example of “Delivering Excellence”.