Migration of BPO operations from Sofotel, which was WNS’ oldest and primary site in Pune to Weikfield, along with the core IT infrastructure set-up, was a massive IT/ BPO program management exercise. This required detailed analysis for identifying all program deliverables and detailed planning across various functions such as IT (PMO and infrastructure), operations, facilities, procurement and finance. It also required identification of risks, having strategies in place to mitigate these risks and of course, flawless execution.

Any error in analysis, planning or execution would have lead to direct monetary loss of Rs 67 lakh to be paid to a builder. Far more importantly, any error in the project execution would have resulted in potential adverse impact on more than 350 processes pertaining to over 60 global clients, which would in turn have significantly affected the credibility of WNS. Further, this would have led to loss of revenue and market share for WNS.

What makes this project credible is the fact that the entire task was completed within a span of just three months with zero unplanned downtime and zero client impact. The scale and complexity of the migration can be seen from the fact that more than 2,000 plus seats were re-aligned and migrated. In addition, the migration of a variety of applications, pertaining to 350 plus horizontal processes (covering F&A, R&A, legal and contact center), as well as industry-specific processes pertaining to 60 plus clients, ranging from varied industry segments, such as travel, insurance, healthcare, logistics, utilities and BFS, were carried out.

Apart from this, shared processes sharing infrastructure from a common pool were a challenge. There are more than 100 plus processes, which were in the shared infrastructure. Ensuring that these processes were migrated meant that their backend infrastructure was up and running. This included authentication, user shared drives, printer access, group policies and security. For this, the company did a parallel set-up at the destination site using the server virtualization methodology.  This ensured that when the processes were shifted, no problems were encountered. There was also a risk related to clients raising objections or their IT team causing delays, which had to be accounted for and mitigated.

The core IT infrastructure that was migrated includes networks (service provider links, Juniper Routers, core switches, and firewalls), telecom (Nortel Passport, CM set up, Avaya Gateways) and servers (NAS Server, process servers and back-up library). The migration activities of the shared processes were kept to less than five hours.

Some of the complexities involved in planning this project were seat shifting and re-alignment complexities. For example, shifting of 1,700 seats from the earlier location to the new location and re-alignment of 300 plus seats within the new location to enable consolidation of similar process modules was a highly complex task.

During the migration exercise, the training rooms were made ready in the destination in tandem to the movement of the processes. Detailed scheduling was carried out to ensure that the correct processes with training schedules were moved to the destination and their training rooms were available for use upon movement. The entire migration exercise was executed flawlessly by the project management team within three months with zero downtime, zero client impact and the optimum utilization of resources.

Note: WNS Global Services is a Silver EDGE winner. The complete list of EDGE winners is published in the October 2011 Print issue of InformationWeek India