General Data Protection Regulation - EU-DSGVO

With the EU GDPR project, an internationally active service provider pursued the adaptation to the European General Data Protection Regulation, which came into force in May 2018.

The law aims to standardise European data protection guidelines. The numerous changes to data protection pose a major challenge for many companies. The stricter guidelines and significantly higher fines for violations make action essential.

The first step was to carry out an analysis of the current situation and gap in the company with the aim of defining the necessary fields of action. This involved analysing the conditions and processes at headquarters as well as in the approximately 70 European companies. Based on the results of the gap analysis and the comparison of the new requirements, a comprehensive catalogue of measures was developed.

In the second step, a data protection organisation was set up for the Group. A person responsible for implementation was appointed for each company or Group division. Following intensive training of those responsible, the central project team managed and supported the implementation. Support was provided in the form of advice and the provision of the tools required for implementation. The progress of the project and the management of the implementation were regularly monitored by consolidating and evaluating the feedback. The implementation of the measures was monitored in close cooperation with those responsible.

In addition to the project objective of “compliance with the EU GDPR”, the project also laid the foundation for future requirements in the areas of data protection, data security and information security. The cloud security project is currently being evaluated via these structures and will be implemented at a later date.

by esc

Planning and rollout of a "private cloud"

Following the merger of two service providers, the IT landscape had to be revised and adapted to the new circumstances.

Three different approaches were developed, from which our customer decided in favour of a “private cloud environment”. As part of this extensive project, the new cloud platform was designed, the necessary governance and security regulations were taken into account and then made available to over 1000 branches.

esc’s experienced migration and rollout management team will take on this task. The complex specifications of the strategy, the extensive data security requirements and the full range of BaFin regulations were incorporated into the elaborate rollout plan. The individual branches were converted in series. “We planned the changeover over 25 weekends per year. Which we were able to optimise over the course of the project,” says the esc series coordinator.

Our team of five solved the known and additional challenges of the project within the specified time and thus ensured the project’s success!

Over 250 people were involved in the private cloud project, which ran from mid-2016 to the end of 2019, totalling 15,500 person-days.

by esc

Improved collaboration with Skype4Business

The existing 7000-port telecommunications infrastructure of an insurance and financial services group was replaced by a modern unified communication platform.

The new system can also be accessed by all employees in the field, meaning that around 12,000 participants are now active. To achieve this goal, esc held workshops with the stakeholders to determine the requirements for the future communication infrastructure. These requirements served as the basis for the neutral product selection – Skype for Business from Microsoft. As the project progressed, the architecture of the new solution was designed and esc was responsible for the technical introduction, the accompanying training measures and the entire rollout. Following the successful rollout, it was time to coordinate the dismantling of the old telecommunications system.

The planning was planned and successfully implemented in close consultation with works council committees, training departments, technical units and managers. The changeover involved almost 700 organisational units, 6500 office staff, 4500 field staff and 800 technical connections.

by esc

Service Desk: Transition and operation

The existing service desk, which handles a total of around 240,000 calls per year, was to be modernised.

The focus was on these three requirements:

  • Reduce costs per ticket
  • Increase availability
  • Increase user satisfaction

The esc Service Desk concept impressed the customer across the board. In addition to the focus requirements, we also took into account relevant topics such as

  • Planning the service transition
  • Development of a knowledge database
  • Innovations such as AI or service automation

The discussions revealed that the service transition from in-house operation was one of the biggest challenges. Service quality had to be maintained throughout the entire transition and be invisible to users. It was only after the transition of the actual services that issues such as improved availability times and service innovations were added. This approach enabled us to achieve the esc double benefit: Increasing user satisfaction and reducing ticket costs.

by esc

RZ-Transition

The aim of the project is to transfer responsibility for the services for the applications used by a vehicle and mechanical engineering group from the existing supplier to the new service partner.

In the course of the project, the applications were moved to the new data centre locations and a dedicated service centre was implemented for the customer in Berlin and Prague. Careful analysis during the transition project made it possible to achieve noticeable and sustainable improvements to the IT infrastructure. With the standardised cut-over management, the operational transition was carried out effectively and in line with the wave planning in the planned time and quality. The overall project is divided into 6 sub-projects, the project start was in June 2016, the project end was in June 2018, over 150 people were involved in the project and it had a total volume of 60,000 person days.

by esc

Datacenter Transition

The data centre infrastructure of a financial institution no longer met the requirements.

The applications therefore had to be moved to the new location. esc supported this project in the roles of project management, transition and migration management as well as test management.

The migration included the complete relocation of the central application operation with almost all applications used in the bank as well as some infrastructure components (e.g. data centre firewall, VPNs). The affected applications and components were divided into several migration waves in accordance with the esc Transition Framework as part of extensive coordination with the relevant stakeholders (IT & business application owners, central release management, IT infrastructure, etc.), which are carried out sequentially.

During the migration cycles, esc coordinates the application owners and the service provider technically responsible for the moves in order to ensure a smooth transition and stable operation in the new data centre. In addition, esc’s responsibility for test management ensures audit-compliant acceptance of the completed migrations and thus effective quality management.

In order to meet the regulatory requirements, a detailed test strategy was also drawn up in preparation for the migrations, which sets out the scope of testing to ensure the error-free operation of the migrated applications and infrastructure components after the move to the new data centre. The execution and audit-compliant implementation of the tests are ensured by close tracking and intensive training of the testers concerned.

The project was realised to the complete satisfaction of the customer.

by esc

Data Center Relocation

The data centre relocation project ensured a smooth change of provider/location of the data centre for the support of partner brands of a telecommunications company.

esc took over the project management of the 4 sub-projects:

  • Infrastructure set-up
  • Data centre migration
  • Transition-to-production and test management
  • Programme management with a direct report to the management board.

The project was carried out in accordance with PMI standards.

The tasks included taking into account the existing commercial use of the professional services, including the contractually agreed SLA with the contractual partners, as well as setting up the complete infrastructure in the new data centre. The focus here was on IT capacity management and analysing the required infrastructure at the new location.

The cut-over planning, taking frozen zones into account, ensured a smooth and loss-free DB transfer as well as a carefully quantified hypercare phase to stabilise operations after the go-live. When defining the new service concept based on ITIL V3, we took over the migration planning of the existing partner interfaces to the new data centre.

by esc

BackUp data centre

In the BackUp data centre project, esc was responsible for providing a second data centre to ensure the availability of IT services.

Specifically, the project consisted of the following subtasks:

  • Provision and equipping of the data centre space
  • Expansion and coupling of the network infrastructure
  • Relocation of the systems and dismantling of the old data centre

The project was planned for the period from May 2017 to December 2018 and was successfully implemented during this time. In total, around 30 people were involved with around 7,000 calculated PTs.

by esc

Rollout of a modern Windows 10 infrastructure

Until Windows 7 was discontinued, all 12,000 users, spread across two main sites, needed a new and therefore more modern Windows 10 workstation environment. At the same time, 3,500 old endpoints had to be replaced with the latest desktops and notebooks.

The project was therefore launched in November 2017 to migrate the operating systems to Microsoft Server 2016 in addition to the workstation environment.

The focus was on the following benefits for the customer, which were successfully realised

  • Implementation of the new workplace philosophy
  • Standardisation of operating systems and applications
  • Lean and agile update cycles
  • Reduction of Windows 7 support costs

When the esc team took over the rollout management approximately 1.5 years after the start of the project, the first task was to convince the departments and people involved as well as the users of the successful and joint implementation of the project. We were already the fifth project manager for this project. For this reason, communication and support for the individual process steps was particularly important. With a transparent, understanding and results-orientated approach, we gained the trust of everyone involved and the approval and positive feedback from the customer and users.

In May 2019, a team of four esc experts took over the coordination of the delivery of the hardware, including the clearing process, database setup and communication. After a successful pilot phase, the official rollout started on schedule in June 2019. In close collaboration with the various teams, the objectives were achieved to the satisfaction of the users and the customer. The positive feedback confirms the correctness and importance of our approach. In close coordination with internal and external project managers, the generational change of hardware was also organised transparently.

by esc

Microsoft SharePoint Introduction

The advantages of networked collaboration have been obvious since before March 2020. With SharePoint, Microsoft has an innovative collaboration solution that also offers our customer a wide range of benefits.

The main objectives were the structuring and centralised storage of all data used in the company (content management), the significant improvement in collaboration (e.g. between field and office staff) and the improvement in transparency.

Along with the large number of existing systems and interfaces, the complexity of the project also increases during the implementation phase. With our experienced PMO, which reports directly to the product owner, we ensured a rapid introduction.

Before an organisation-wide rollout, which affects two main locations and a total of 14,000 employees, two things are crucial in addition to the process adjustments:

Governance
Training end users and site managers

Our PMO provides support with the definition and application of governance, the roles and rights concept and the comprehensive training concept. For example, a consensus had to be reached between the Management Board, data protection officer and staff council on how to handle data that is particularly worthy of protection and this had to be documented in the form of work instructions for the various user groups.

The training concept, which was based on face-to-face training and knowledge ambassadors, was completely reorganised in a short space of time to meet the new requirements imposed by the contact restrictions. Video training courses are offered and tracked via the internal University platform, while a SharePoint help desk is set up in parallel. Only then will the originally planned training concept be implemented in a reduced form.

Once again: complex IT projects solved innovatively and smartly

by esc