Customer Stories

Built a Central Platform Capability From 0 to 1 Within One Year

How Royal HaskoningDHV enhanced team compliance, fortified security, accelerated software delivery, and saved costs.


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Royal HaskoningDHV is a consulting firm that combines 140 years of civil engineering experience with digital technologies and software solutions.  

The mission statement of Royal HaskoningDHV is: Enhancing society together

By seamlessly integrating engineering and design knowledge, consulting expertise, software, and technology. Royal HaskoningDHV can support its clients in adopting innovative and sustainable solutions to address local and global issues in the built environment.

Deliver software with higher quality and speed, achieve efficiency through re-use, reduce cost and improve overall security base.

Why

A validated consulting approach of establishing a centralized platform service.

What

A scalable and cost-effective IT platform service.

How

Foster overall compliance and enhance the engineering maturity level

To equip their clients with the insights and agility needed in the ever-changing environment, Royal HaskoningDHV has fully embraced the era of digital transformation, leveraging powerful software products to develop future-proof solutions.  

In 2020, Royal HaskoningDHV combined its sector knowledge and digital capability, establishing a business line called 'Digital'. To further strengthen its digital capabilities, Royal HaskoningDHV has acquired several small companies and formed 15 different digital teams globally. To unlock the full potential of digital solutions, Royal HaskoningDHV is committed to elevating the engineering maturity level within the team and reinforcing IT compliance throughout the organization. On the one hand, Royal HaskoningDHV aims to shorten time-to-market, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. On the other hand, due to the geographic separation, the 15 teams built their software products independently without centralized standards, tool guidelines, or best practices. The absence of centralized standards and best practices may give rise to potential issues in the IT landscape.  

To foster overall compliance and enhance the engineering maturity level, Royal HaskoningDHV was considering centralized platform services. That is why they contacted Xebia to develop a plan on how that platform service would fit within their context.

“Delivering digital services requires professionalizing our software development by adoption of DevOps concepts. Leveraging knowledge and good practices in the IT organization, that is what the IT Platform team brings to the stage. Trust in Xebia to implement that effectively proofed right”

Ard Westerik

CTO Business Line Digital

How we helped Royal HaskoningDHV

Developing a validated approach to establish centralized platform services:

Xebia followed a step-by-step validated approach to kickstart the internal platform services. We began by examining the organizational context, conducting interviews, and holding workshops with key stakeholders and platform users to understand their needs and expectations for the platform services. The next crucial step was to apply Xebia's best practices to identify further opportunities for optimizing the envisioned platform services. After establishing a clear vision for the platform services, we developed a platform roadmap for Royal HaskoningDHV, providing a solid starting point for effectively establishing a centralized platform. 

Pavel Goultiaev, consultant at Xebia: The mission of the IT platform is to 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, which was responsible for delivering various services aligned with the platform's mission. These 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 designed to facilitate the developer journey in an efficient, compliant, and secure way. 

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 established a centralized documentation hub. Structured around the developer journey, this central hub was a comprehensive resource that provided 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. 

Establishing a dedicated platform engineering team: 

To deliver the internal platform services, Xebia recommended that 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. The platform team will also actively onboard teams to facilitate the growth of their engineering maturity level and increase platform service adoption.

The 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.   

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