RBC Saves 40% on Cost of Desktop Migration Project

Challenge: Serving over 16 million clients through its network of 1200+ retail banking branches, global bank, RBC wanted to upgrade 20,000 PCs in retail branches and corporate centers throughout the US and Europe without any negative impact to users.

The bank required a centralized data source from which all teams could work from, however teams of disconnected project managers were using individual spreadsheets to manage these multi-million-dollar initiatives. This created program delays, making it difficult to meet target deliverable dates. With a large team of consultants in place, and unmovable deadlines approaching, delays increased the bank’s exposure while significantly adding to program costs. The company wanted to eliminate manual work and standardize delivery, incorporating lessons learned into subsequent workflows.

“Managing a data center migration and upgrading 20,000 PCs with spreadsheets and manual processes was inefficient, error prone, and costly. We needed a system that would allow us to deliver these programs on time and on budget.”

Solution: The firm initially looked at a popular ITSM platform and considered building an in-house solution. The cost and effort of modifying the ITSM platform far outweighed the cost of using a purpose-built platform. Consequently ReadyWorks was selected for this project as well as the successful migration of one of RBC’s largest data centers in the US.

RBC benefited from:

• Savings of 40% on labor costs traditionally associated with a Windows upgrade.
• A centralized real-time view of project data and task completion.
• Accelerated IT program delivery.
• Achieving compliance within the deadline.

ReadyWorks enabled this through:

• System Integration: ReadyWorks was piloted, validated by the security team, and then configured, connecting to the customer’s systems, and acting as a central command and control center.
• Data Intelligence: Remote migration teams utilized a ReadyWorks playbook on their mobile devices to track each task and report back to a central project manager in real time. This allowed the PM team to proactively identify bottlenecks as well as opportunities for acceleration. PMs utilized dashboards to allow stakeholders to see information that was important to them.
• Orchestration & Automation: Technicians were able to see machines assigned to them from their mobile device. Machines were not considered migrated until all tasks were marked completed. The desktop upgrade was managed using dynamic waves and wave groups.

“ ReadyWorks allowed us to hit the ground running and rack up early wins rationalizing the application inventory. We were able to identify bottlenecks, accelerate task completion with automated workflows, and deliver the project at nearly 60% of the cost and with 1/10 the staff of the Windows 7