In Q4 2016 Highroads announced the closure of their Canadian offices, with the subsequent planned closure of the Canadian company.  IT Operations was to be fully handed over to various outsourced vendors, physical presence within the Ottawa office was to be immediately deprecated and the closure of the data centre supporting the “V1” application was to be planned.

Primary objective was to identify all internal IT Operations functions that we carried out purely from the Ottawa office and relocate those processes and functions to outsourced vendors.  Key focus was placed on risk mitigation from lack of presence and established staff.

Secondary objectives included the planned and controlled closure of Ottawa office services, infrastructure and systems post-layoffs as a “lights out” facility, with the planned deprecation of data centre presence after customer migration to the “V2” platform.

The primary challenge was a sweeping and overarching risk with the handover of all IT Operations to outsourced vendors.  Due to the relatively short tenure of staff, wholesale changes to the company structure and infrastructure systems from the asset sale of 2015/2016 and compounded by the focus on supporting development changes with an under-resourced team there was a significant lack of documentation and cohesive knowledgebase for corporate systems, CI/CD systems, and production systems.  The risk was easily mitigated by focusing exiting staff on documentation work during their working notice, with repeated blind-testing knowledgebase pages for efficacy with internal staff and on-boarded vendors.

Secondary challenges involved the management of vendor contracts and leasing agreements associated with the Ottawa office, and transitioning agreements with the Canadian company to the US company for ownership.  The loss of all Highroads administration staff prior to the closure required extensive work and diligence to capture all contracts, and put in place fail-safes for capturing outstanding issues post closure.

Tertiary challenges were to fully document and detail the planned closure and deprecation of all data centre based systems, and functionality for future closure.  The data centre was to be retained in operation, with remote management from a Boston, MA vendor until the last customer was migrated from V1 with an ETA of Q2 2017.  Plans and schedules were put in place to guide the remote vendor through hands-off deprecation to mitigate costs and limit hands-on work to a minimal requirement that could be completed by a local vendor at a reduced cost versus international travel.