DTZ Group - Case Study
DTZ is one of the ‘big four’ global real estate advisors operating across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific and the Americas, working with client organisations to advise on the purchase, sale, leasing and acquisition of all types of commercial and residential real estate. Its professional advisory services include the management of real estate portfolios, building consultancy and valuation. DTZ’s clients include multi-national companies, major financial institutions, property companies, banks, governments and other public sector organisations. DTZ has over 150 offices in 46 countries around the world; currently there are 25 offices in the UK alone including the Group HQ. DTZ currently has around 12,500 employees worldwide, of which around 2,500 are in the UK.
In early 2008, DTZ commissioned Quantum Plus to carry out a review of its ICT Sourcing Strategy. A significant factor underlying this was that DTZ planned to rationalise its London office locations in Autumn 2008, consolidating five current offices across the City and West End of London into three locations including a new global HQ building in the City of London. One of the existing locations housed a data centre and others contained server rooms, primarily providing local file and print facilities. As a part of this relocation, DTZ no longer wanted to have an in-house data centre. In addition, DTZ had a legacy agreement with a third party organisation for the provision of an IT Service Desk for its UK business, which was due to expire in July 2008.
This sourcing strategy review identified a number of conflicting constraints – the existing contractual commitments, the requirement to consider the strategic direction to meet global demands, budgetary pressures, the need to ‘layer on’ services in line with IT maturity and business objectives, and the very tight timescales of the pending office moves. This resulted in a decision to identify a strategic partner that was capable of performing a swift mobilisation to take on responsibility for the provision of Service Desk and Data Centre services in the UK within the required timescales, but that was also able to demonstrate its ability to expand at a future date the scope of services provided to DTZ in both breadth of function and geography.
Quantum Plus proposed an RFP based selection process that enabled services to be prioritised and added as required. The RFP had as its top priority the outsourcing of the existing DTZ UK data centre and the transfer of the UK service desk service from the current external provider by 1 September 2008. The RFP then requested commercial proposals for the subsequent outsourcing of support for the rest of DTZ’s ICT infrastructure. Finally, the RFP asked recipients to describe their capabilities to later extend the scope to include support for the ICT infrastructure in other countries where DTZ operates and to provide support for its global application portfolio.
Following the evaluation of responses to the RFP, bidder presentations and reference visits, a preferred supplier was selected. Owing to the relatively tight timescales associated with the completion of the transfer of the DTZ data centre prior to their central London office relocation, it was necessary to commence some transition activities (e.g. the ordering of network links) prior to contract signature. To facilitate this, a ‘letter of intent’ was agreed and issued by DTZ to the supplier. In line with this, the current service desk agreement was extended by three months to allow the data centre outsourcing to be accomplished as top priority and assure the continuity of the service desk service over the intervening period prior to it being transferred to the new supplier.
“This has been a very challenging programme of work both for the internal DTZ teams and for all our partners, including Quantum Plus. Frankly, we would not have achieved that which we were required to achieve without Quantum Plus’ expertise and guidance”.
Chief Information Officer
