Seven locations, 350 people, two delivery centres, two years
The hardest consolidation problems are not technical. Support work for a whole European region moved into two centres, and every part of it was about people.
An international IT services provider
Support delivery for a European, Middle Eastern and African region ran out of seven separate locations. Over two years it was consolidated into two global delivery centres, moving 350 roles. The programme ran through several project managers and had to land inside its time and its budget, because a service that people depend on daily cannot pause while it reorganises.
The challenge
Consolidating support into shared delivery centres is described as a cost exercise. That description is why so many of them go badly.
Seven locations means seven ways of working, built up locally over years, most of them undocumented and none of them wrong from the inside. The knowledge that makes support actually work is not in the runbooks. It sits with people who are being asked to hand it over as part of a change that may not include them.
And the service cannot stop. There is no window in which a region's users agree to go without support while the organisation rearranges itself. Every transition has to happen underneath a service that stays up, which means sequencing matters more than speed and a missed dependency is felt by users the same week.
A programme this size is also too large for one person to run directly. It runs through project managers, which makes the real task defining what done looks like clearly enough that several people can drive toward it without converging by accident.
What we did
Own the programme end to end
Oversight of the full consolidation across the region, working through multiple project managers each accountable for their part landing inside the agreed time and budget.
Move the work, not just the headcount
Transitioning support delivery from seven locations into two global delivery centres, which is a knowledge transfer problem wearing an organisational change costume.
Keep the service running through it
Sequencing transitions so the service stayed available throughout. Users experience a consolidation as either invisible or broken; there is no third outcome.
Hold time and budget as real constraints
A two-year window with a fixed budget, treated as boundaries the design had to fit rather than targets to be revised when the design proved inconvenient.
How it works
Run through project managers
Several project managers each owning a workstream, with the programme defining the outcome precisely enough that parallel work still converged.
Seven origins, two destinations
Every origin location had its own practices. Consolidation means choosing which of them becomes the standard, and being able to say why.
Two years, fixed
Time and budget set the shape of the plan. Constraints stated up front are more useful than ambitions revised halfway.
The knowledge is in the people
Support capability lives in experience rather than documentation. Transferring it is the actual work, and it cannot be rushed by adding resources.
Continuity is the acceptance test
A consolidation is judged by whether users noticed. Sequencing and dependency management decide that, not the target operating model on paper.
Measured against service levels
Delivery managed on agreed service levels and key indicators throughout, so quality was observable during the change and not only after it.
Technologies
The result
Support delivery for the region was consolidated from seven locations into two global delivery centres over two years, moving 350 roles, inside the agreed time and budget.
This is the oldest work published on this site and it is here on purpose. Platform thinking is usually presented as a technology idea, and it is not. Standardising how work is done, placing ownership deliberately, and moving capability without dropping the service are the same problems whether the thing being consolidated is a support organisation or a cloud estate.
The figures below are the scope of the programme, taken from the public professional record. Nothing describing the provider's customers, commercial terms or internal performance is published.
The organisation is described by business area rather than named. This was an employed role rather than a client engagement of Hernandez Ortiz B.V. The figures published are programme scope already stated in the public professional record. No customer names, commercial terms, service level data, site details or colleague names are published.
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