Abbey National has taken just five months to move its
legacy branch network onto an IP virtual private network operated
by BT Transform.
The project, which involved 7,000 site visits, saw the replacement
of leased lines, ISDN and ASDL with an IP VPN to support data and
voice network traffic.
When the first phase of Abbey's new network is fully operational at
the end of October, its 750 branches will handle 750,000 internal
calls and 1.2 million calls from the public every month.
Bill Gibbons, director of technology services and support at Abbey
National, said three main factors contributed to the success of the
project.
First, the bank and BT Transform set up a proof-of-concept project
that looked at the challenges of upgrading both the branches and
the main offices.
"We learned a number of lessons from the project," said Gibbons.
Upgrading branches involved multiple site visits by BT and Abbey
staff working outside office hours.
A degree of advanced planning was also needed to liaise with local
authorities to get permission to dig up roads to lay cabling.
The main branches posed a different challenge. "We realised we
would need to upgrade hundreds of people overnight to the new
network," said Gibbons. "Any delay would have meant a key bank
location would be unable to conduct business."
The pilot project also convinced Gibbons of the need of a helpdesk
for branch staff to guide them through teething problems with the
new network.
Gibbons put the second factor in the project's success down to a
decision to locate Abbey's project team next to the BT Transact
office in Milton Keynes.
"This allowed Abbey's project team of technical, human resources,
legal and operational risk staff to collaborate more closely with
BT on the project plan," he said.
The third key was "Setting reasonable planning horizons," Gibbons
said. This involved ensuring the project team could accommodate
business requirements.
One such factor was the upgrade from Category 3 cables to Category
5 within Abbey bran-ches. "BT sub-contractors had to complete the
cabling before we could transfer to the BT Transform network,"
Gibbons said.