About the client
A government owned company that operates, maintains and improves England’s motorways and trunk roads. The Road Investment Strategy (RIS 1) provides five years of stable funding and £15 billion to renew and enhance the road network.
The challenge
The client depends on technology on the roadside and within their offices to plan and deliver large infrastructure projects. They operate specialised roadside technology such as Advanced Traffic Management Systems as well as core back-office ERP, HR and Asset Management systems to name but a few.
Hundreds of projects can be running at any one time, of various sizes and levels of complexity. With many outdated technologies, assuring the design of next generation systems and Cloud Service is essential to achieve organisational transformation, deliver consistency and achieve simplicity across all areas of the business.
The solution
Triad was engaged by the client to lead design assurance of all core IT solution designs across all delivery projects. Triad worked closely with the Chief Technology Officer and Principal Enterprise Architect to provide them with a level of assurance over a new generation of systems delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions.
The first step was to audit their IT systems, to understand what they had, what technologies they were built on and how they were supported. Many systems were outdated, lacked documentation and there was a lack of consistency and no way of telling delivery projects what was expected of them.
In order to achieve a consistent level of quality across all products, Triad published guidance materials that technology projects could refer to. Existing and outdated documentation was updated and simplified to be clear and unambiguous. Initial design reviews of new solutions remained incomplete, so templates and example design documentation was created and published for use.
Triad also played an instrumental role in improving IT, quality and professionalism within the client’s organisation, enabling them to check and challenge supplier’s designs and implementation plans. Reviewing designs of all of the client’s suppliers, across all projects, from the small ones costing tens of thousands to the multi-million pound projects, assuring quality and maintaining consistency across the organisation.
The result
By building a solid foundation and level of consistency in working methods, creating guidance to improve processes and communicating more effectively, the client have developed a successful capability to re-establish core IT skills in-house to better manage their IT delivery partners.
Working more collaboratively, the organization are continuing to support the assurance of IT systems while they re-skill and design for the future.
