Case Study: Europe’s largest tyre retailer

Unlocking the power of Azure DevOps for Europe’s largest tyre retailer.

Requirements

The customer recognised that its application development process was unsustainable, leading to issues in developing and deploying its applications to production and blocking cloud adoption. Expert Thinking was engaged to review the environment and:

Identify significant opportunities for improvement across application development, covering both tooling and ways of working.
Provide a prioritised roadmap to increase the velocity of change and maximise efficiencies
Reduce risks relating to code management and quality through necessary adoption of DevOps tooling and practices.

Critical success factors:

Identify Key Issues

Understand the as-is state of their environment and provide objective view of key demands and challenges. Focus on inconsistencies in approach across the oganisation.

Realise an achievable future

Reducing waste and risk, focus on eliminating single points of failure. Highlight key blockers to moving to cloud relating to internal ways of working.

Configure Process

Define tooling and ways of working that would meet the key requirements, highlight areas of automation.

Our solution

Expert Thinking engaged with key stakeholders to provide a benchmark of maturity in the context of DevOps adoption and presented a prioritised set of actionable improvements broken down into discrete phases. Key recommendations included:

The need to secure critical assets, ensuring redundancy of the code repository with suitable validation of backup and restore.
Focus on standardising the version of Visual Studio and tooling (code repository, release manager, build manager, etc.) across the organisation.
Change ways of working to break down silos, forming multi-function teams and creating a working group to establish common ways of working, knowledge sharing between teams, etc.
Define and implement ways of working blueprints, adopting process improvements to planning work, control and governance, especially focusing on the adoption of quality over process gates
Review their Azure implementation and future plans to ensure fitness for purpose, reducing risk and ensuring it’s security, compliance, scalability and extensibility.

The benefits

The project yielded several positive outcomes, including a decrease in risks associated with code management. This contributed to a heightened confidence in the tools employed for application development.

Additionally, strategic recommendations were presented to facilitate an accelerated pace of change, thereby augmenting the overall efficiency of development resources.

A future-focused operating model for application development was successfully delivered, accompanied by a roadmap outlining incremental improvements needed to attain the desired target state.