How we helped Royal HaskoningDHV
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Develop a validated approach to establish centralized platform services
Xebia followed a step-by-step validated approach to kickstart the internal platform services. We started by investigating the organizational context, conducting interviews, and running workshops with key stakeholders and platform users to discover their needs and expectations of the platform services. The next crucial step was to apply Xebia’s best practices to identify opportunities to optimize the envisioned platform services further. After establishing a sharp vision of the platform services, we developed a platform roadmap for Royal HaskoningDHV, a solid starting point for effectively establishing a centralized platform.
Pavel Goultiaev, consultant at Xebia: “The mission of the IT platform is that we provide DevOps & DataOps teams with the capabilities to deliver their software to end users, run it efficiently and have an overview of how the software is behaving in production.”
Xebia managed the platform as a product and led the IT Platform team responsible for delivering various services based on the platform's mission. This included reusable code blueprints, documentation guides, SonarCloud as a service, an Azure Landing Zone, Dependencytrack, API (Application Programming Interfaces) Management, and an Application Gateway for the Twinn brand. These services were aimed at facilitating the developer journey in a way that was efficient, compliant, and secure.
The IT Platform Team focused on empowering DevOps teams to become self-reliant in improving their software delivery, Azure cloud utilization, and Observability. To foster a culture of engineering excellence and collaboration, the IT Platform Team created a documentation central hub. Structured around the developer journey, this central hub was a comprehensive resource, providing the best engineering practices and guidelines for effectively utilizing the new tools. Moreover, the IT Platform Team took a proactive approach by closely collaborating with the DevOps teams, actively listening to their challenges and needs, and proposing innovative solutions in a persuasive manner rather than imposing authority.
02 - Establish a dedicated platform engineering team
To deliver the internal platform services, Xebia recommended Royal HaskoningDHV form a dedicated platform team consisting of a Product Owner, a Scrum Master, a Solution Architect, and Platform Engineers. This team will be responsible for managing the centralized platform services. Also, the platform team will actively onboard teams to facilitate the growth of their engineering maturity level and increase platform service adoption.
Results:
Royal HaskoningDHV successfully implemented platform engineering principles and accomplished the following key achievements:
- Significantly faster software delivery while maintaining high-quality standards
- Enhanced efficiency through the re-use of components
- Achieved cost optimization by hosting centralized services, and delivered best practices and insights on cloud spending.
- Improved compliance across 15 teams comprising 80 Engineers
- Better Cloud infrastructure orchestration by implementing IaaC best practices via Terraform
- Strengthened security baseline
It was fulfilling for Xebia to receive positive feedback from both platform users and the leadership team. The engineers in Royal HaskoningDHV claimed our IT platform as the go-to place for best practices and were eager to onboard our services.
This customer success story is part of the platform engineering consulting service.
