Unifying data delivery through effective programme management

Our customer, a multinational defence engineering firm is undertaking major changes in the way data is collated, managed and deployed as an asset under a vision to “Scale and Accelerate how they govern and ensure coherence of assured data and analytics”.

Alongside the Data Transformation activities, a number of projects were kicked off, aimed at delivering enterprise-wide Data and Analytics tools and capabilities within the organisation.

Projects of this nature are typically run out of Shared Services, who were going through their own transformation. As such, the OCIO team picked up the projects with an expectation to transition these back to Shared Services once the team is up and running and have suitable Programme Management capacity.

Our customer has a vast amount of data across the business residing in an array of data repositories ranging from enterprise applications, different databases to spreadsheets. The business has minimal information of where the data resides leading to ineffective and inefficient data analysis.

Their objective is to offer a curated catalogue of internal and external data to diverse users to allow them to more efficiently realise business value from their data and analytics investments.

A Data Catalogue is an informative and searchable inventory of data assets, combined with data management and search tools that helps users find the data that they need.

The Catalogue can support:

• Governance of lineage, terminology and access
• Speed of data discovery
• Visibility of data location and sensitivity for security control
• Collaboration and sharing of data and analytics
• Data reliability, ownership and control.

The FTSE 100 defence company had launched several disparate Data Catalogue related activities since 2021, being executed by several internal and external organisations. There was no joint management of these activities with each group working to their own independent timelines with very little governance and cross dependency control.

The OCIO was tasked with bringing these together in a single programme of work to ensure a cohesive delivery of a companywide Data Catalogue solution and associated delivery framework/capability.

Project One assigned a Programme Manager to launch the new Enterprise Data Catalogue programme. Project One established three core delivery workstreams:

Capability Delivery & Adoption

This focused on the design and implementation of a repeatable delivery framework to drive the capability (referred to as the Data Catalogue Factory) to configure new connections, on-board new data sources and associated user community. This workstream was also responsible for driving Data Catalogue adoption across the business.

Technology Delivery

This focused on the design and implementation of the productionised enterprise Data Catalogue application/toolset to provide the Data Catalogue system to support the capability.

Shared Service Readiness

This workstream focused on readiness of the shared service team for the transition of the future delivery and service provision.

The programme was successful in bringing together the disparate activities into a single managed programme delivering phased benefits towards establishing a Data Catalogue service.

Programme controls and a supporting governance model was established, including a monthly steering committee attended by the sponsors and key stakeholders ensuring strong collaboration between the Data and Analytics OCIO team, business sectors and the service suppliers.

The capability delivery and adoption workstream delivered an end-to-end service design that is able to manage the demand pipeline and service delivery for Data Catalogue services.

The technology workstream established a secure platform and associated systems to install and configure a Data Catalogue tool.

The resource model was accepted and Shared Services teams have started the process to recruit and fulfil the roles to complete the delivery of the programme and the resultant Data Catalogue service.

Project One value Add:

• Project One was key to this delivery due to our ability to start quickly, see clarity where others could not, and identify and overcome delivery blockers to ensure the data and analytics objectives were met
• We were also able to bring together various disparate organisations and stakeholders which were not always aligned on the same objectives
• Project One was also flexible working beyond immediate project and programme management activities and covering communications and other key delivery activities.