The overnight removal of the company sign from the office forecourt in Birch Street was just a small part of the separation of Tarmac’s construction and materials businesses – a massive operation that required intricate planning. Connor’s part of it was to prise the construction arm’s computer networks from those of the building materials side. He then had to ensure that there were no traces of the old Tarmac left.
Like most Tarmac employees, Connor first heard of the demerger plans in February. A series of meetings with his counterparts in the building materials business followed in which the transition to the new service was sorted out. The decision on who got the hardware was easily established, as each division kept its own kit. But what would happen to e-mail addresses, the web site, databases and all the servers that were accessible by both sets of employees?
Planning the switch was complex enough; putting it into effect required a “miracle”. Connor had to create the new Carillion network in less than 48 hours.
So, how was it done? Much of the groundwork was carried out between February and July. Connor began by working out exactly what was needed to wipe out all trace of Tarmac. He split the task into projects and drew up a budget plan for each. These covered renegotiating the licensing deals with thousands of software firms and transferring data from Tarmac’s human resources database to Carillion’s.
This last job was the most sensitive. It involved the personnel details of 14 000 employees. The old database was kept at the office of Tarmac Heavy Building Materials in Ettingshall, also in Wolverhampton. The easy part was setting up an empty database on the new computer in Birch Street. The hard part was transferring all the data from one machine to the other. “Given the nature of the information, we had to ensure the integrity of the data was maintained.”
To make sure everything went smoothly, Connor organised a dress rehearsal. “We transferred information to the new machine but didn’t use it.” Connor admits that once the real transfer was completed, the information was kept for a while on Tarmac’s database as a back-up. “They deleted it after a month, and then we went over to check it had really gone.”
The 48-hour white-knuckle ride
The transfer of the human resources database could be managed over several months, but there were vital systems that had to be converted overnight on Thursday 29 July. For instance, all the employees’ e-mail addresses had to be changed from tarmac.co.uk to carillionplc.com, and the routers, switchers and servers that run the network had to be reconfigured to give the new company its own discrete IT system.
Although the move was planned out well in advance, Connor and his colleagues had between 5pm Thursday 29 July and 8am Friday 30 July to make Carillion work. “The timescale was just not negotiable,” he says. And all along, the IT department had to carry out its usual duties.
Preparations began on Wednesday 28 July for the cut off at 5pm Thursday, when Connor disconnected the construction business from the tarmac.co.uk Internet site and external e-mail addresses. By Friday morning, everyone had to have a Carillion e-mail address. An army of technicians across the country worked into the night to configure the 53 servers that would form the core of the new system. In the meantime, three technicians from the network group were changing the 100 routers and switchers that organised the flow of information to and from the servers.
The Carillion site also hosted the old Tarmac web site, which had to be updated and transferred to the new Tarmac server. A new site had to be put together on the Carillion server to represent the very different image of the new company – this, too, was scheduled to be available at 8am on Friday 30 July.
As part of the identity change, Connor had to ensure that PC users could send letters and faxes headed with the Carillion name that Friday morning. This meant having document templates for individuals’ PCs ready to send out. Connor hit on the idea of e-mailing the templates with an automatic installer device attached. So, when staff arrived that Friday, they found that they could open their e-mail and click on an icon that brought up a checklist of operations to install the new template, tailored to the part of the business they worked for.
All systems go
Connor arrived at work at 6.50am on the Friday, having left late the previous evening. The help desk was on standby. He was feeling confident.
At 7.10am he successfully installed his own template. Gradually, more and more IT staff arrived to see the inauguration of the new firm. At 8am, Connor watched his e-mail convert to Carillion. “The best moment,” he smiles, “was at one minute past eight when I was able to get the new web site.”
The rest of the day proved the whole job to be a success. By mid-morning Connor could count who had installed the document template, and the number was reassuringly in the hundreds, despite the helpdesk being kept busy with calls. By Friday afternoon, it was clear that the changeover was a success. The IT department celebrated with a few cream cakes.
Some aspects of the elimination of Tarmac took a little longer. The template for bid documents was sent out a few days later, but any estimator who needed the new logo on day one could apply to the firm’s graphics department for headed paper.
Connor owes the success of the highly complicated operation to some excellent partnering between the two divisions of the old company, which worked hard to co-operate with each other. Now, every morning when Connor passes the Carillion company sculpture outside the Birch Street offices, it is a reminder of a few tense months in the life of an IT department.
