Challenge
The Delphi Program is ITV's major cloud migration initiative, which involves migrating around 2,500 servers from their data centers into the cloud.
ITV had been looking at various ways to perform migration control — in other words, manage all their cloud migration projects efficiently. Historically they had used spreadsheets and tools like Trello to do this, but they all had problems.
Spreadsheets inevitably had too many users, and it was challenging to put guardrails around how users should enter and structure the data and maintain data accuracy.
Trello and other project management tools were better. Still, keeping the data in sync with their configuration management database (CMDB), which held essential information about the apps and services they were migrating, was hard.
Solution
When they started this initiative, Marc Walford, ITV's Head of Enterprise Platforms — knew Glide could help. The first step was to get the Configuration Management Database out of their provider and sync the data to a Google Sheet to build the app from.
“The CMDB stores information about our servers, what applications they are running, who owns it, what department etc... this is really useful base data, but it's incredibly dense and hard to access. We wanted to provide better visibility on this through the app. ”
On top of this read-only data, they overlayed project metadata to help them safely and successfully manage the migration. Adding this allowed staff to track each project's status and answer essential questions.
Any user across the company can drill into the data - without knowing how to use the CMDB, and they only get access to the relevant info for each project.
Results
Marc shared an MVP version of the app with the application managers and quickly received feedback on what additional info they needed that they didn't have in the CMDB and the new features they wanted in the app.
These requests could be integrated and added to the app iteratively as their requirements evolved, sometimes in minutes. This allowed Marc to respond rapidly to his team's needs and grew the valuable data the app provided.
As a result, the app provides a much-needed tool to facilitate data collection and collaboration and a rich set of reports to enable migration control and management. Any stakeholders using the app can browse the words they need and save them as favorites for quick access.
“All of this information is allowing us to pretty much live and breathe the migration program through this tool. There is now a single source of truth that we can trust. Just as importantly the app guides teams through the migration process, providing just the right amount of contextual info, enabling quality assurance through checklists, and supporting agile ways of working.”
Over eighty users across different teams and partners now use the app. The data is always up to date, and having the data in a simple, easy-to-navigate interface makes spotting issues much more accessible. Rather than attempting to navigate a large and complex dataset in a spreadsheet, the team is quickly discovering actionable opportunities and insights, enabling increased delivery efficiency.