Working closely with CFO on data centre relocation was 'extremely positive' experience says Imperial College ICT chief

Defining and refining business case for a better project, says head of ICT operations

Working closely with the CFO resulted in a data centre relocation project that not only proved value for money, but also affirmed best practice and positive business impacts at an early stage, Imperial College's head of ICT operations told delegates at Computing's Data Centre and Infrastructure Summit 2015 today.

As Paul Jennings told Computing in our interview a few weeks back, Imperial College migrated many of its data centre operations to a colocation contract with data centre provider Infinity, switching on the Swindon-based stacks just last week.

The project was spearheaded by Jennings, as head of ICT, along with the CIO and the CFO.

"This helped us to define the business case up front," Jennings told delegates today.

"To get it in the right format is challenging. Very early on we got to a point which defined the recommended solution."

Jennings also highlighted the advantage of defining the specific positive business impact early on.

"I've worked in places where it's not clear what positive impact you're delivering from the business case, but it was loud and clear here," he said.

"We signed off the business case and went into validating requirements - we'd already spent a year looking at options. Then we validated applications, and looked at signing off. It sounds simple, but that took the first three to four months of the 10-month project period.

But such an in-depth first phase, involving financial stakeholders, really paid off, Jennings explained.

"It was a very positive relationship," he said.

"The CFO works in a different part of our office, but would quite often drop by and see how it's going, and overall the initial response to the business case was extremely positive."

Jennings described how there was added pressure to define very early on what the specific reasoning was to go colo.

"We made it clear to the CFO very early what the challenges were, thinking it absolutely paramount to be open and honest about those challenges," he said.

"In previous roles I've seen that as a very different challenge, with probably several different versions of a business case, but this was very different. We had a complete buy-in very early."