Omniarc - A Recruitment and IT Solutions Company

Carlsberg UK

The Task
Further to some project assurance and consultancy work carried out by Omniarc for Carlsberg UK at their site in Leeds, Carlsberg UK approached Omniarc to manage a project that would move a couple of their business critical applications from IBM Lotus Notes platform to Microsoft’s .NET platform.

In addition to this development work the project needed to ensure that after the delivery of the applications, Carlsberg UK would have the capability of not only supporting the new platform but be able to develop future applications and have clear visibility of the business and system processes surrounding each application.

The Issues
Carlsberg UK had no experience with .NET, the majority of their developers developed in Lotus Notes or SAP. The move to .NET was a group strategic move.

Carlsberg UK’s infrastructure was being outsourced with new operational, support and management processes being introduced.

Carlsberg UK business processes around the two business applications where not available in a single source.

The Approach
The approach was to build a team of .NET professionals with a mix of Carlsberg UK staff from IT Development and Business, with close working relationship to the outsourcing company that was now going to manage the infrastructure.

To ease the burden on resource and cost a single management team was put together and it was decided that the developments would run in parallel. The management team consisted of senior stakeholders and business sponsors from Carlsberg UK and an Omniarc Project Manager.

The development process that was followed was iterative. This ensured that the resource and cost could be flexibly managed across the two developments. It also allowed the Carlsberg staff to be appropriately mentored in .NET initially, taken on more responsibility for the development and testing as the project continued.

Both development teams were lead by experienced Omniarc .NET developers, business analysts and testers – these roles were mirrored by appropriate Carlsberg UK staff. All the Carlsberg UK staff had initial induction training in .NET, UML and component based testing - this was supplemented by mentoring throughout the project by the Omniarc personnel.

The Result
Carlsberg UK where left with two new business applications built out of common components on the .NET platform with a team of developers, testers and operational staff who could not only support the new applications and the .NET platform but could also managed future developments.

Carlsberg UK now also had a n iterative development methodology that could be used in all their new development projects of this type.