Helping a Big-6 energy supplier stabilise their customer-facing website
A ‘Big Six’ Energy supplier was facing challenges with a new customer facing website and core platform, as part of their multi-year digital transformation strategy. Oaklin was engaged to lead a large-scale remediation programme to remedy various performance, stability, and usability issues with the new system, and to partner with the client on their digital journey.
“Since its launch, the platform had experienced performance, stability, and usability issues, resulting in frequent platform outages and ‘red alert’ events.”
Case Study
Prior to Oaklin being engaged by a ‘Big Six’ energy supplier had gone live with a new £35 million content management system (CMS). The new system, underpinned by a complex technology stack, was built to underpin the company’s customer facing website, and be a critical platform for large parts of the organisation. The system’s implementation was also seen as a ‘trail blazer’ for future digital programmes and was key to the client’s overarching digital transformation strategy.
Since its launch, the platform had experienced performance, stability, and usability issues, resulting in frequent platform outages and ‘red alert’ events. Several reviews (both internally & externally led) had been conducted of the underlying technology and processes surrounding platform, resulting in a ‘shopping list’ of recommendations and changes that, if implemented, were expected to resolve the underlying issues.
The client was looking firstly for a ‘safe pair of hands’ to help formulate a structured response to these recommendations in order to confidently state, “here are the issues, this is what we need to do, and this is how long it will take”. Secondly, they wanted a trusted partner to successfully deliver the remediation programme.
Oaklin was engaged to lead the remediation programme and restore stability and performance to the platform. This initially included shaping and leading numerous cross functional projects to establish a proritised backlog of activity to support the remediations. Subsequently, Oaklin led the delivery off the required technology, process and people changes in a systematic, controlled, but agile method.
The Oaklin team partnered closely with subject matter experts to clarify how the new system needed to be configured, captured and articulated the architectural view of how the system was supported, and ran workshops to baseline the businesses understanding of the platform.
At all times the team managed rigorous programme governance frameworks and ensured timely, informative and reliable reporting to key stakeholders, and ensured business and IT alignment at all times. Among other successes this led to:
- A 92% reduction in platform outages in the year following programme completion;
- A 6% year on year increase in customer visits; and
- A more stable and reliable platform for the future.
Oaklin continues to partner with this client on a number of key digital programmes.
