A global financial transformation was about to start for a leading logistics organisation. The program was led by the business stream who were seeking to standardise and transform a new Oracle platform across seven business units, globally.

IT represented near 80% of the program scope. Their initial mobilisation team was in place, but lacked the maturity needed to support the transition and decommissioning of critical legacy systems across the full group of companies.

Additionally, they identified a need to secure specialist services to not only provide a governance layer over the vendor, but the incumbent consultancy firm as well.

IT acknowledged that traditional sourcing would burden the department with hefty ramp up times and not guarantee the specialist skills required. This could elevate delivery risk and in turn, add program risk which they could not afford.

At the same time they did not want to pay high end consulting rates, preferring an effective and fast solution with an organisation that they could easily engage.

IT subsequently approached Inner Circle to rapidly mobilise a Managed Team with proven experience to drive the program objectives. They were looking for key specialist capabilities including large scale, global transformation experience, coupled with subject matter expertise in the needed technology and solutions.

Inner Circle was able to provide the right specialist capability of hand picked Transformation specialists, provide effective mobilisation through effective teaming and briefing to ensure standardised delivery across the program, and establish the appropriate governance and assurance of team members through critical path visibility to ensure the team to effectively and efficiently manage delivery.

This level of customisation is typical of Managed Team Services where teams are rapidly tailored to the client requirements, ensuring they have the attributes to deliver a successful program outcome with less risk.

Inner Circle has over 10 years’ experience in managing technology platform transformation involving SAP and Oracle and understands their professional services and other platform methodologies, and has developed internal project management frameworks used to identify the data needed to drive these programs.

“We have a deep understanding of the logistics sector, matched by our experience in managing vendors and management consulting organisations on behalf of both IT and the business,” explained Adam Stafford, Managing Director of Inner Circle.

“Our value to the client was initially the speed to mobilise the team to augment the existing IT capability and extended through the ongoing governance, support and transparency we instilled.

“Not being an Oracle or Accenture partner may have proved even more valuable. It meant we could maintain our vendor agnostic approach and always work to the client’s agenda, not someone else’s.”

The client needed a team with global transformation, Oracle and Accenture experience that could work for IT, but report into the business. They sought a team was not going to be burden – one that would have a level of self-sufficiency, yet have the capability to roll up the sleeves and augment the existing teams during the mobilisation.

The Inner Circle Managed Team Services were the ideal solution. The team was mobilised within the week and well versed in the project before commencing. This early on-boarding meant the team was able to hit the ground running from day one. Within the first week they identified key dependencies for delivery – such as other dependent programs, lack of standardisation, detailed requirements scope and definition, test environment requirements definition – were lacking and needed to be correctly aligned, mobilised and planned.

The Managed Team delivered key program milestones including release and planning, prioritisation for workload and delivery stream strategy based on function, business unit and priorities for the business.

Equally as valuable, the team was instrumental in providing the client with the guidance across disparate functions on the program, providing key insights across different functions including business function, technical integration and decommissioning and remediation that independently had not been seen previously.