case study
IT Operation Improvements at a large energy player
Philip Van Puyvelde
This case focuses on 2 initiatives that were part of an operational improvement program within the IT department of our client, a leading Belgian energy company. Together, these 2 initiatives formed the kick-off of the improvement program:
24/7 Application Guard
IT Infrastructure Change Communication
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Challenge
24/7 Application Guard
The energy sector and needs in Belgium are rapidly evolving, leading to an increasingly complex and real-time application landscape at our client. This complexity was leading to an high increase in incidents and combined with the critical nature of the energy market, this meant an unacceptable risk. While an IT 24/7 Duty was already in place, this was staffed by the infrastructure teams who were not fit to help on incidents related to the application functioning, data issues or business process fail-safes.
IT Infrastructure Change Communication
Several large business incidents related to uncommunicated IT infrastructure changes had occurred in the past period. As the infrastructure teams are continuously implementing changes, proper communication procedures needed to be put in place to ensure transparency and awareness towards all stakeholders.
We needed to think out of the box and created a new team whose primary focus is the protection of the most critical applications of the company
Approach
For both these initiatives, we applied our hands-on practical methodology:
Interview the stakeholders involved, to gain an in-depth understanding of the different points of view and distill the relevant discussion statements.
Discuss each statement during a workshop. This allows to align on the needs, assumptions and potential improvements in a commonly understood way with all stakeholders.
From these statements, determine the direction that is most fit-for-purpose and craft a proposed detailed solution, through individual work sessions. This is again discussed in a common workshop to align on the practical implementation.
Finally, the implementation or transition is set into motion and effective functioning is monitored and adjusted where needed.
Impact
24/7 Application Guard
While placing the application team members themselves in a guard rotation might seem like an obvious solution, these roles have only a very specific domain of expertise. Only a few roles (Product Owner, BA, Architect) have an all-round view of an application, and they are usually only knowledgeable about a limited number of systems. This means that obtaining critical mass for a 24/7 guard schedule for each of the scoped applications would be an organizational challenge and result in a very serious impact on their workload.
Hence, we needed to think out of the box and created a new team whose primary focus is the protection of the most critical applications of the company.
This approach was taken because it provides the best guarantee of application protection -both reactive and preventive. Additionally, the solution is more cost effective compared to the best alternatives, as it limits the impact for the existing teams and avoids multiple remunerated guard personnel in parallel. Lastly no contract changes would be required for the existing workforce.
Additionally, in close collaboration with business stakeholders, we reevaluated the top critical applications and their availability criteria, to ensure an application guard team that is functioning and is set up fit for purpose.
IT Infrastructure Change Communication
Our conclusion was that a clear and unform three-way communication was needed between business, application teams and infrastructure, i.e. a companywide planning methodology for important changes and critical windows. To support this, a single source of truth was essential.
This resulted in several improvement actions:
The set up of a change module in their service management system, with a centralized planning functionality for all critical change windows of the different infrastructure environments.
A “Change Advisory Board” was implemented in which the major infrastructure changes are explained, as well as the business and application critical timings are communicated (tri-directional).
A process owner was assigned as the responsible for running & updating this process according to evolving needs.
Summary
The energy company faced rising IT incidents due to a complex application landscape and unclear infrastructure change communication.
To address this, they launched a 24/7 Application Guard and implemented a structured IT change communication process.
BrightWolves guided the process through stakeholder workshops, solution design, and hands-on implementation support.
This led to fewer incidents, better team coordination, and more efficient, cost-effective IT operations.