Case Study _ Taming a Giant: How one nimble team solved an enterprise-wide performance issue at its core

1. Globally applying best practices:
Collaborative tackled a SharePoint project in one of the client’s companies, which
not only improved local performance, but set the foundation for best practices in
performance design, monitoring and management that can be applied across the
entire enterprise.
Proactively approaching performance:
As the client prepared to migrate its contract management application to a
new platform, Collaborative identified improvements in platform construction,
performance testing, and continuous monitoring, which ensured that the
application met performance goals before it was put into production.
The client now builds upon these successes as it aspires to continually strive for higher standards
of performance.
For six months, the client had attempted to resolve performance
issues with a third party software by adding new servers at every
bottleneck, tripling the budget.
Collaborative re-framed the challenge, discovering that of the
300 processes at stake, only thirteen were critical — and all
thirteen shared one common cause, a conflict at the security
layer. Resolving the problem at the source not only rescued the
implementation, but put performance goals ahead of targets,
a strategic approach with enterprise-wide ramifications.
An integrated performance culture that delivers ongoing
improvements
The client partnered with Collaborative to incorporate performance engineering excellence into
every part of the software development lifecycle. Three performance features were prioritized:
To meet these priorities, Collaborative crafted a Global Performance Model with the following
components:
Link performance testing to
established goals
Challenge
PROCESSES
300 CRITICAL
13 CAUSE
1
Fostering a performance culture in the entire software
development lifecycle
Using the Global Performance Model, the client has successfully implemented a number of performance
projects, which serve as models that can be scaled throughout the enterprise. These projects
exemplified two key advantages:
Solution
Results
Relevance: Scalability:
Investments of time,
money, and talent into
performance must deliver
real, measurable value
Performance guidelines,
processes, and methods
must deliver improvements
at any scale
All of the units would work
toward one common set of
performance expectations
using proven performance
methods
Integration:
Taming a Giant:
How one nimble team solved
an enterprise-wide performance
issue at its core
With diverse management models and software development practices, the client, a world's leading
life sciences and medical device manufacturer, needed to bring all of its units under one standard of
excellence to meet its application and system performance goals.
To improve business operations, the client needed a performance model that could ensure strong
user experiences, define performance expectations clearly, and provide executives with deep
insight into application performance and end-user experiences.
To achieve all of this, the client needed to transform its performance management model and
smartly direct investments for improvements that would yield measurable benefits.
1 2 3
“Our goal is not to chase
every possible performance
metric, but to help the client
achieve relevant performance
targets for a world-class
user experience.”
– Walter Kuketz, Chief Technology Officer,
Collaborative Consulting
Shift performance
engineering to the early
stages in the software
development lifecycle
Unite stakeholders behind
user-experience standards
Deploy dashboards for
real-time application
performance management
Plan for the right
performance system,
at the right price