Case Study: Heritage IT Infrastructure Programme

The Situation

My client acquired ten sites and had no shared infrastructure between any of them. Everything needed building from the ground up: WAN, LAN, wireless, cloud telephony, EPOS tills, data migration and decommissioning of what was being left behind.

The constraint was access. We had limited access to the sites until two months before the expected opening date, and the minimum viable product we were being asked for normally takes six months to deliver.

I was brought in as the IT Programme Manager to lead delivery across the full scope.

What Elisabeth Did

The scale was significant. Nine WAN connections, 57 wireless access points, 37 switches, 20 tills across six sites, and 2.7TB of data migration, delivered across a team of around 30 IT subject matter experts.

The sites themselves added complexity. These were heritage environments with public facing operations that could not be disrupted, and the practical obstacles were not the ones you plan for in an office fit out. Pest removal was on the critical path at one point.

Sequencing mattered enormously with that little access. Stakeholder communication mattered just as much. Monthly Highlight Reports and fortnightly Status Updates ran on time throughout, so nobody was ever guessing where the programme stood.

The Results

• Go live reached across the first wave of sites two weeks ahead of the expected schedule
• Ten sites taken from no shared infrastructure to working networks, telephony and tills
• 2.7TB of data migrated across the estate
• Every Highlight Report and Status Update issued on time for the duration of the programme
• Risk Register improved substantially over the course of delivery
• Delivered inside 5.5 months against a minimum viable product that normally takes six

Related service: multi site EPOS and infrastructure rollout programme management