2024 · Montpellier, France · Hybrid
Sustainable IT consultant — investment
CGI — Global investment group
An engagement brought in by CGI Canada, on the market opened after the Canadian sustainable-IT offering was built jointly with the French teams. The client had put out a tender following its environmental policy: a maturity assessment of the organisation and a survey, to establish where all its people stood on sustainable IT — sustainability, translated literally — and to understand their position, their maturity, their appetite and the constraints they saw on projects, with a view to a strategy suited to the organisation.
A three-to-four-month engagement, from the summer to November 2024, run by a functional team: a lead and a functional consultant on the Canadian side, a responsible-IT functional expert and a consultant working as a pair on the French side. The workshops surfaced an unsuspected technical dimension — links with the client's FinOps policy, management of the application and hardware inventory in the CMDB, means of measurement. A few weeks before the deadline, two deliverables were still to be produced: the technical assessment of the corporate website and the detail of the roadmap's actions. Reinforcement on those two workstreams, two to three weeks in November.
Work across two time zones: production on the French side in the afternoon, workshops at the end of the French day and early in the Canadian morning, Canadian review and direction overnight. In the writing phase, four or five people on the same readout deck, with a colour code for each page's state and the time of last change noted on each so that the handover happened without collisions. The engagement was conducted in French.
Achievements
- 15 action sheets written
Five-year roadmap broken down and documented
Breaking down the prioritised roadmap, arbitrated in parallel with the Canadian lead, then writing the actions in detail after reviewing all the workshop minutes — architecture, FinOps policy, asset management and CMDB — and the corporate documentation supplied by the client. Around fifteen sheets produced: putting a GreenOps policy in place, enabling greenhouse gas emissions dashboards on the cloud platforms, measuring the asset inventory through Aguaro connected to ServiceNow.
Technical assessment of the corporate website
A rapid assessment, without workshops, of the site's main pages: readings of EcoIndex, accessibility indicators, page weight and request count via Lighthouse, GreenIT-Analysis and WAVE. Two to three pages of the deck, with the three or four recommendations to implement first.
Recommendations on measurement and optimisation tooling
A rapid benchmark of life cycle assessment tools with recommendations. Presentation of tools that centralise cloud and private data centre consumption for usage measurement and architecture optimisation, including EasyVirt. Proposal of a tool developed at CGI to optimise Kubernetes orchestration and reduce the need for virtual machines.
A sustainable-IT generalisation plan formalised
Recommending an approach to generalising eco-design across the organisation, formalised on one action page of the plan. The first writing of this arrangement, taken up and detailed a few months later internally at CGI.
- 40 recommendations in the action plan
Roadmap budgeted, approved and started
The readout was held and very well received. The roadmap, budgeted and prioritised, was approved by senior executives and some of its actions started, beginning with a life cycle assessment measurement engagement. Around forty recommendations in the final action plan.
Skills applied
- Corrective action planning after audit
- Digital accessibility
- Eco-design assessment
- Eco-design measurement tooling
- EcoIndex
- FinOps
- GreenIT-Analysis
- GreenOps
- Label Lucie
- Life cycle assessment (LCA)
- Lighthouse
- PowerPoint
- Transformation roadmap
- WAVE
- Working in a distributed international team