Yorkshire Building Society
Background:
Our client is one of the largest building societies in the UK and is listed on the London Stock Exchange. In early 2022, they had selected an HR solution using Oracle Cloud, for onboarding employees. The migration from the legacy system was not going as smoothly as they had hoped so the Singlewave team were brought in with the original remit of rolling out the new system successfully. It is a common misconception that Cloud providers will have the experience to successfully conceive, plan, and deliver solutions.
However, the technical landscape and complexity of most businesses often requires a broader range of skills, technologies, and experience which tends to only be found in consultancy companies.
Challenge:
The initial challenge was to investigate the root causes of the project’s troubles by looking at existing processes and interviewing key stakeholders, from business owners to end users. The team also looked at the existing designs and found them incomplete, outdated, and, in some cases, non-existent. One of the biggest challenges was to ‘marry up’ the legacy systems with the new Cloud solution and ensure they could interact with each other. This type of environment is where specialist middleware consultants really come into their own.
Additionally, there was no clear RACI for the team, few business processes, and ultimately it was more than merely a technical implementation, because work was required with the internal stakeholder management too. It was clear that we should align the architecture with the project team and create some much-needed structure.
The permanent team had a good spread of skills but they were the result of a recent amalgamation of two technical teams, following a restructure, and were suffering from a lack of management or direction due to the post being vacant.
The Solution:
A team of 3 Singlewave consultants joined a 15-strong permanent middleware team in January 2022. We were there to support from a technical perspective and provide some stability from an operational perspective as well. The Singlewave team consisted of a Programme Director and two solutions architects who are also middleware experts. The first 3-4 months consisted of bringing the project under control and they delivered huge success in that time.
The team focused on the core service management principles—people, products, and processes. They helped the client understand its technology and approach it with structure and discipline. They also rewrote and reorganised most of the internal documentation, e.g., technical and architecture designs, and created new documentation to make sure everyone understood the new processes. They introduced automation to processes that had been manual and greatly reduced the number of outages that they had been struggling with.
The initial Oracle Cloud migration took 12 months, and due to its success, the team were asked to look at further projects that this client were struggling to deliver as below:
- Financial Crime application upgrades
- Intranet migration
- New compute migrations (database)
- Security improvement programme
- Fast Payment Solution
- A host of lifecycle management projects
- Decommissioning work
Conclusion:
The initial Cloud migration solution was a success and displayed true innovation. It was a collaboration of multiple teams and technologies, with a complex design and resulted in a new operating model. The business areas were human capital management, payroll, analytics, and financial reporting to HMRC. The solution behind it holds all of those details and the team had to integrate successfully with legacy systems without them breaking.
As mentioned, Singlewave has been consulting on various projects for this client in the last 2 years and are very much seen as trusted advisors and relied on for their expertise. Crucially, the team has ensured that permanent colleagues are always fully engaged, and successful handovers ensure they can take delivery forward by themselves which future-proofs the success. We understand that training, mentoring and empowering internal colleagues is absolutely essential to a good outcome in any project.