CASE STUDY
O
is a leading mobile network
operator and the principal
commercial brand of Telefónica UK
Limited. It has around 6,700 employees in
the UK across three main offices and 450
stores. Some of the frequent challenges O 2
faced included having a fragmented and
abundant number of test environments;
limited visibility of test environments had
a potential impact on O 2 ’s customers and
the business; and the duplication of time
spent collaborating with diverse information
sources for non-production environments.
2
The benefits of implementing the
Plutora Test Environment and Release
Management solution therefore included:
centralised management of disparate
test environments; live visibility of test
environments including live dashboards and
reports; new process to manage conflicts
and alert key stakeholders to any IT issues
or changes in test environment status; and
proactive management of non-production
environments improved agility and resiliency.
The results of the implementation included:
60+ critical test environments now being
managed; 50% reduced unplanned outage
of non-prod environments; saving admin
time through automated scheduling
and coordination; reduced delays on
test schedules due to misconfigured
environments; improved environment agility.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
O 2 centralised its IT test
environment management
Processes
Processes were manual and lacked
coordination and collaboration from the
different IT teams. It was taking several
days to track and rectify unplanned test-
environment outages. Conflicts (double-
bookings) were common through not
having visibility of other bookings on the
same environments.
Challenges in software delivery
Telecommunications is a fast-moving
industry. As a leading brand at the forefront
of the industry, O 2 has continually innovated
new mobile products and has championed
customer experience. In order to maintain
and extend its leadership position, O 2
maintains the highest standards in its IT
application delivery in order to support its
massive customer base which comprises
over 33 million connections. However, its
IT infrastructure experienced a number
of challenges which could slow down the
planned improvements.
The UK IT test environment management
group supports a large number of internal
teams. They were faced with over 30,000
emails and remedy requests relating to
non-production environments. In addition,
scheduling environments were not centrally
managed, allowing each team to manually
add their bookings into spreadsheets with
little or no collaboration or arbitration on
conflicts. Management of communication
and schedules was an unsustainable
situation without more effective tools or a
lot more people. In the case of unplanned
outages (i.e. failures in non-production
systems or applications), it could take
several days to work through the various
architectures to understand where the root
cause of a test system outage originated.
Furthermore, it drew heavily upon many
different support teams which had to be
coordinated using manual lists. Ultimately,
IT testers were often unable to carry out
their testing projects while issues with the
test environments were being investigated.
Mark Lewis, UAT Test Environment Manager
at O 2 , commented: “One solution we sought
was visibility of all of our test environments
to avoid double-bookings and uncontrolled
changes and make sure sufficient
management is in place to be effective.”
The UK IT test team – in conjunction with its
quality test partner, NTT DATA – decided to
undertake a review of IT test environment
management tools to provide a solution to
address these issues.
“We are rolling out a dynamic, company-
wide IT test environment view in the UK
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