Integrated Electricity Management System Recovery Programme
UK Critical National Infrastructure
3 Data Centre Locations
£30m Budget
Brightive took over the lead of the IEMS Refresh Programme initiated by the a Multinational Electricity and Gas Utility Company’s senior IS leadership, which was experiencing delivery failures, time delays and cost concerns.
The Integrated Electricity Management System is the system that controls the Multinational Electricity and Gas Utility Company. It is part of the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) and is the client’s most critical operational application. The application is based on another product set with a network backbone provided by a telecomunications company. The solution is designed to be highly available, with multiple redundancy across the solution stack and 3 data centre locations.
The refresh scope encompassed full product upgrade and enhancement, full infrastructure (O/S, storage, backend server & workstations) replacement, full WAN/LAN network replace, full cyber–security solution upgrade, revised service/support environments and integration. The original budget was in the order of £30m but design changes and delay were risking potential overruns towards £50m.
Brightive was engaged with the immediate objective of ‘getting a grip’ and putting the programme on a firm footing to become capable for delivery. The team undertook restructuring – in particular establishing a ‘supplier’ construct for key support solution elements and agreeing a fully revised and incremental test strategy to move the client company away from a ‘everything ready first mind-set’, risking significant delay. Brightive made key resource hire and fire changes, empowered and motivated the revised team, established a delivery first culture and reset the business cases and time/cost delivery parameters to aggressive, but achievable levels. With these changes in place, the consultants then maintained continual drive, performance management and delivery focus across the programme team, business customer, suppliers and service organisation.
The IEMS Refresh solution was successfully cutover to live operations and under the reset budget and has experienced no material service issues in the Post Implementation Support period since. It has been widely seen as by far the most successful implementation of all of the client’s company’s recent programmes and many of the processes and cultural changes Brightive made are to be instantiated in the client’s delivery processes.
