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Moving to Agile Cloud-Native Delivery

Case Study

We supported one organisation in its cloud transformation.

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UBDS supported one organisation in its cloud transformation Every organisation develops its inertia, its culture, “the way we do things around here.” Anyone trying to change that may begin to feel like Sisyphus having to repeatedly roll a huge stone up a hill only to have it roll down again. One organisation faced this challenge as they moved away from a culture of PRINCE2 project management and ITIL practices to agile, fast-paced delivery and cloud-native application development. Back in their day, these approaches had provided robust governance, minimised delivery failure and protected live services. They were also very transferrable.

However, the organisation wanted to upgrade to its ‘Cloud First’ strategy and transition towards consuming Software as a Service. Doing so would enable it to break free from maintaining large datacentres with swathes of staff needed to provide networking, infrastructure, operations, governance and due diligence, none of which contributed to the end customer or organisational goals.

UBDS has a wide range of process flows, strategies (technical, security, HR, operations), financial models and organisational models. These are all designed to help effectively build a cloud-native team that can enjoy the benefits of more reliable, cost-efficient, elastic, resilient and secure hosted applications.

What We Helped Them Achieve

Fully Optimised Process

Migration away from traditional waterfall delivery to agile squads operating in fortnightly sprints

Optimised end to-end process from front-door request to fulfilment Improved ability to recruit and retain the best and brightest

Major Efficiencies Gained

200% increase in input/output Time to release moved from 12 months to 2 minutes Development of over 30 shared services which standardised their services Reducing time to release and costs – faster, better, more cost-efficient

Cloud Transformation

Applications built to be cloud-native, auto-scaling, self-healing, deployable using Infrastructure as Code commands and packaged into containers, to avoid future vendor lock-in

Hybrid Cloud Capable – combining cloud hosting with on-premise, including Software-Defined Wide Area Networking to connect everything securely

Multi-Cloud Capable – teams can operate efficiently using one hyperscale cloud provider or multiple, e.g. Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and others

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For further reading on migrating to the cloud or broader digital transformation, please download a copy of the UBDS Insight Digital Transformation for Cloud or contact us at: engage-us@ubds.com

Some key lessons learned Significant cultural change takes time and energy and lots of communication to gain

the necessary traction

Tackle the change at all levels of the organisation from the Executive Team to the engineer on the ground

Be clear on your vision – what are the outcomes you want to achieve, what is the organisation model you want to build, what is the tooling you will use – UBDS can advise on a variety of solutions for all of these

Let the teams lead the change; you will be surprised how much they want to engage

Be prepared that some people will leave, but some new people will also join refreshing the mindset and culture

CRAIG WARMINGTON UBDS LEAD FOR CLOUD MIGRATIONS