The Problem
Water Plus was created from the merger of the water divisions of two major utilities businesses, Severn Trent and United Utilities - as a result of the deregulation of the commercial water supply market.
The new business needed to merge core business critical systems to demanding timescales to enable it to support 700,000 customers from inception. This included the migration and cleansing of data from disparate systems onto a new core ERP (MS Dynamics) and subsequent reporting on this system.
The Solution
I was asked to supply a team of contractors with a mix of data analysis, migration, data warehousing, and reporting skills on the Microsoft BI platform. A team of contractors was stood up rapidly, enabling the business to meet its objectives, while working closely with management to respond to any issues and scale further as required.
Once the initial situation had stabilised I was asked to supplement and back-fill the contractors with permanent staff to enable the business to continue to deliver on its objectives as it transitioned into BAU.
The Impact
Tim Marsden, Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse Manager, commented: “Mark responded very quickly and got to know our requirements really well. We worked closely together to identify the skillsets and personalities needed, and built a strong team of data professionals that helped us reach our objectives as a business”
The programme had been running for two years and had made headway in certain areas but needed to accelerate the global delivery to meet the business objectives sooner. It had been identified by management that a certain skill set would be needed to take the programme forward. The Solution Initially, I was asked to find a data warehouse consultant with a super-niche skillset to work in Swindon, UK. Having sourced this consultant (from Melbourne!) I was asked to build a small team to review the ‘as is’ of the programme and make suggestions on how to take the programme to the next stage.
On successful delivery of this report I was asked to start building various teams to deliver against this plan. These teams ranged from source system analysts to business analysts, from solutions architects to data warehouse developers, and from trainers to reports developers as well as various niche skill sets, as required.
Working very closely with the business and Talent Administration, I built a pipeline of first-rate contractors, so was able to respond as soon as new requirement was identified. These were not ‘next cab off the rank’ contractors, but were carefully vetted once sourced to ensure technical as well as cultural fit to be able to deliver in a fast moving environment. The Impact Martin Houghton, Programme Delivery Director of BIGS commented: “Mark pulled together a large number of contractors against a very specific and demanding brief. The quality of the individuals supplied was and partly as a result of this, the BIGS initiative was one of the most rewarding programmes I have had the pleasure to be involved in.”