Context

Salamanca Trust & Fiduciary has offices in Jersey, Geneva and Mauritius. Part of their IT strategy in 2015 was to move to a cloud-based infrastructure service, a significant change in direction from managing all of their IT infrastructure in-house, including hosting hardware in a computer room within their Geneva office. The project timelines were aggressive as there was a dependence on an office move which was already locked in to a pre-existing date. The new hosted platform was in Zurich, with a new service provider.

CBO’s Approach

Salamanca Trust & Fiduciary required CBO to act as their Project Manager on the Data Centre Migration. The client required CBO to successfully manage the project from initiation to closure, working closely with the Head of Technology within Salamanca Trust & Fiduciary. The objectives of the project were:

• to ensure that the technical design of the new hosted IT platform met the outlined business requirements;
• to update the Project Initiation Document (PID) following technical design and approach meetings with the Senior Supplier;
• to implement the required project governance;
• to highlight the need and identify the resource for independent technical assurance on the IT platform design;
• to manage and coordinate the technical and user migration from the old IT platform to the new data centre solution in Zurich; and
• to operationalise the process and procedural changes following the data centre move.

CBO’s Impact

CBO successfully managed the delivery of the project through:

Project Governance 

• Set-up fit-for-purpose project governance, including an updated PID and the required Project Register and Exception Reporting process;
• Creation of the Detailed Project Plan, incorporating the detailed technical design steps into the plan;
• Creation of the Detailed Budget.

Technical Design Validation

• Management and coordination of the review and validation of the new hosted IT platform;
• Management and coordination of the review and validation of the technical migration approach;
• Management and coordination of the business approval of the design and migration approach.

Data Centre Build 

• Manage and coordinate the build of the new data centre in Zurich;
• Manage and coordinate the implementation of the new network comms links;
• Manage and coordinate the System Acceptance Testing for the new Zurich data centre with the chosen supplier.

Data Centre Migration 

• Managing and coordinating the technical migration of all live IT services to the new Zurich data centre;
• Managing and coordinating the technical migration of all Disaster Recovery (DR) IT services onto new infrastructure at the client’s DR site;
• Managing, coordinating and communicating all User Acceptance Testing across Jersey and Geneva;
• Ensuring operational documentation is updated in line with technical changes following the Data Centre Migration.

Project Closure

• Demonstrating successful User Acceptance Testing to all senior stakeholders within the business;
• Producing a detailed project closure report to enable the Project Board to formally close the project.

The outcome of this project was the successful migration of the Live IT infrastructure and applications to a hosted data centre solution in Zurich.

All required IT services were successfully migrated within the required timeframe, which allowed the business to progress its complete office move on time.