Supporting an automotive manufacturer with end-of-support migration

The aim of the project was to migrate an IT landscape that had grown over decades with different applications to new application and operating system versions in good time before the end of support. The biggest challenge was to review each existing application in terms of its functionality, criticality and interactions and to make the necessary adjustments to ensure a smooth migration.

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The tasks of the BITS employees covered all important facets of IT project management and IT consulting: from professional project communication and project planning to various workshops for knowledge transfer and discussion of requirements and possible risks to service provider management. BITS was also responsible for coordinating and communicating with the company’s internal data center.

150 Application server

Migration of 150 application servers

100 databases

Various databases were affected

100% In-Time

Timely implementation

About 1000 users

Large number of users

10 months project duration

The project duration was 10 months

22 Project staff

5 BITS employees and 17 application owners were involved

Challenge

One challenge was to identify the requirements and dependencies for each individual system. As this was an evolved heterogeneous IT infrastructure, it was also necessary to dissolve all existing knowledge islands. For this purpose, the BITS project managers created an application map with contact persons, responsibilities and know-how carriers of all systems. An in-depth risk identification as well as cost calculation and determination of the adaptation requirements were also part of the project planning. The second major challenge, as in very many projects, was time, as the migration had to be completed in time for the end of support. The following is an overview of the project success factors that the BITS project team successfully mastered:

Find contacts and experts for each system in a timely manner
Identify requirements and impacts for each system, e.g. expired service contracts, incompatible software, etc.
Carry out adjustments in compliance with Group guidelines

Adhere to schedule, as end-of-life of the operating system
Migration support through our own project structure, best practice and knowledge transfer to the respective application owners

Realization

A detailed migration plan was drawn up in order to carry out the migration successfully. This defined the process and the data and interfaces to be migrated. Communication took the form of regular updates on project status as well as various info sessions and workshops. BITS provided IT consultants, IT project managers and IT specialists to implement this project. The BITS team was responsible for the following tasks: Definition of the status quo and project scope, scheduling, project setup, definition of a project structure, migration support and coordination and management of service providers.

Project roles at a glance

The BITS experts took on the following roles in this project:

IT project management
IT-Consulting / Consulting
IT architecture

IT quality assurance
Database specialist
Exchange/Office specialist

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Tools & Technologies

CONTACT

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