I was part of a consultancy team to deploy a new ITAM function and I was specifically responsible for discovery and integrations to the CMDB, a project worth $3m over 3 years.

The particular challenges faced were that all of their IT functionalities were outsourced to different partners and vendors and some of these partners insisted on work orders to help us with data gathering. This was a complex challenge which required some level of obtaining buy-in and negotiating with the client to get work orders processed as quickly as possible to meet our tight deadline.

I held multiple workshops with the client and partners – and we deployed a “waterfall” data pipeline for populating the CMDB.

After deployment was completed, an issue arose with the accuracy of the CMDB and the wording of the contract which was “95%” accuracy, with no caveats. The first milestone payment was held back whilst the team resolved this critical issue.

I was not directly involved with the client by this time, but as part of resolution I suggested to the account management team that they needed to ensure the contract wording was updated in future to specific automated data only. I also assisted with identifying the sources of data, and types of data – such as that which would be manually entered and would ultimately be down to the client to ensure it met “95%” quality.

The final approach with the client was to review all CIs and fields within the CMDB to be populated and adopt a MoSCoW approach, determining which data were neccesary and which data they agreed, for example, would be impossible to obtain. This massively improved the baseline results and showed that CMDB population was already very close to “95%”. After some additional work on the data pipeline the customer agreed to release the first payment milestone.

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I was brought into save a project for a leading UK logistics company where the Discovery solution had been chosen and deployed but the initial project team had failed to deliver. The challenge was that half of the budget had already been consumed and the client took a hardline sticking to their budget. This meant I had to deliver the full requirements in half the time.

I did not have time for workshops, so I had to identify the key stakeholders and go over their list of requirements from scratch, which they gracefully accomodated. I then manged to split the requirements between must-haves and nice-to-haves using MoSCoW. This allowed me to effectively prioritise what I should tackle first.

For this customer, I modelled the applications hosted on their WebSphere platform using a combination of out of the box discovery and some additional coding. I also managed to put together a Runbook and deliver on their nice-to-have reports. They were impressed and fully satsified with the work effort. The result was that they kept the solution and came back for more future work from us.

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