CASE STUDY
where key stakeholders will be able to
self-serve with customised dashboards and
reports and see environment utilisation
centrally for the first time. Plus they
can be alerted to any potential system
conflicts, enabling them to have a direct
conversation with the stakeholders affected
and take immediate action,” said Rob
Hutchinson, Senior Test Manager, IT Billing
and Charging, O 2 . support their customers during their test
lifecycles. This spans simulation of buying a
new mobile phone to services that support
their provisioning such as operations and
billing upgrades.
“One of the main problems was that we
just didn’t have visibility of all of our test
environments and that frequently resulted in
double-bookings and uncontrolled changes
because there wasn’t sufficient management
in place to be effective,”said Lewis. In phase one, O 2 and its QA test partner, NTT
DATA ran a pilot and was satisfied that the
tool contained all mission-critical processes
to ensure that when any service exits the
test phase, it can be fully integrated into
production with minimal risk.
Partnering with Plutora After four months, phase two of the
implementation extended a rollout to 60
test environments including support of the
company’s compliance with the European
After a two-month external review of IT
test environment tools, O 2 and NTT DATA
selected Plutora as it is an independent,
dedicated, test environment management
platform that could be rolled out across the
business. Plutora was brought in to deliver
the following outcomes:
• 100% visibility of the test
environment planning
• Enable unified scheduling for the
first time
• Centralised environment booking
and change requests for testing and
change management
• Automation of manual improvement
processes to increase productivity and cut
resource duplication
• Integrate seamlessly with Plutora’s
standard APIs so other systems and tools
used in the O 2 ecosystem can benefit and
further reduce effort and manual updates
• New self-service capability for the
senior leadership team via Plutora’s
reporting feature
• Up-to-date dashboards, alerts,
notifications and analysis to
engage stakeholders and reduce
unplanned outages
“Plutora was the only tool dedicated to IT
test environment management, rather than
it just being an add-on, and the team was
really flexible and supportive,” said Lewis.
The focus of the O 2 IT test team is to support
the IT environments, including physical
hardware and application upgrades that
www.intelligentcio.com
The implementation of Plutora was carried
out in two phases to ensure a smooth
transition from the existing two tools which
only included IT testing as an add-on.
the past have disappeared due to the hard
work of O 2 ’s IT Environment Management
team with quality test partner, NTT DATA
and Plutora. Standardising the handling
of IT test environments with Plutora has
meant a considerable reduction in testing
effort and a much easier, more efficient
way of managing IT schedule conflicts.
Now, key stakeholders can be alerted
automatically to any issues or changes in IT
environment status.
Release and environment teams are no
longer relying on spreadsheets. Manual
improvement processes have been
automated and standardised.
Consequently, a single, dynamic view of
IT test environments has been created
from which vital intelligence is garnered to
prevent any detrimental impact on internal
project delivery.
IMPLEMENTING PLUTORA
HAS CONTRIBUTED TO O 2 ’S IT
MODERNISATION AND DRASTICALLY
REDUCED UNPLANNED NON-
PRODUCTION DOWNTIME BY 50%
IN A YEAR.
Union GDPR data compliance regulation
which came into force in 2018.
Benefits Implementing Plutora has contributed
to O 2 ’s IT modernisation and drastically
reduced unplanned non-production
downtime by 50% in a year. Before, these
outages were managed by identifying
incidents manually. Then they were
communicated to affected stakeholders
and project teams using a shared mailbox.
Now, the environment request module in
Plutora is used to capture environment
bookings and system changes. Also, reports
and workflows have been automated to
broadcast communication to projects and
support groups.
The telecommunications company has
made immediate gains following the
Plutora implementation. Many IT testing
problems that the company experienced in Furthermore, O 2 is using Plutora’s reporting
feature to automate monthly KPI reports,
thereby improving measurement and giving a
foundation for productivity improvement. n
“Our main priority for the next two years
is to ensure that test environment and
release management are given the focus
they need and we are as efficient as
possible,” said Lewis.
“Plutora gives us a solution that helped
reduce unplanned non-production outages
by 50% in a year,” said Hutchinson.
INTELLIGENTCIO
65