Meet the client

Pendlebury’s Family Bakery sounds like two people and a proving oven. That is rather the point of the name.

The reality is eleven retail branches, a central production bakery, a delivery fleet, thirty-two wholesale accounts and around 215 staff. It is a proper business that has spent thirty years growing faster than anyone found time to document.

This is the first part of a series that takes them from here to a rebuilt platform. Everything is invented, but nothing here is exaggerated. I have walked into versions of this more than once.

The call

The Operations Director rang because the tills in Clitheroe had stopped talking to head office again, and someone had mentioned that the server in the cupboard was “getting on a bit”.

That is usually how these start. The stated problem is never the actual problem, but it is a door, and you take the door you are given.

What came out over forty minutes:

• The server is a physical Small Business Server. It runs Active Directory, Exchange and the file shares.
• It is out of vendor support and has no redundancy.
• Nobody wants to reboot it, because the last time somebody did, it took nineteen minutes to come back and the office manager did not breathe for any of them.
• The payroll system is bolted onto the same box. It is discontinued.
• There is no IT team. There is an office manager who is good with computers and a contractor who comes when something breaks.

None of that is the thing I wrote down first.

Start with the org chart, not the server room

The temptation on a first call is to go straight at the infrastructure. Resist it. At Pendlebury’s the interesting fact is not that the domain controller is a 2011 physical box. It is this:

Eighty-three of the 215 staff are part-time or casual retail workers. They share a till login per shop. The payroll suite is the only system that reliably knows when one of them leaves.

That single fact decides the identity design, the licensing model and the entire joiner-mover-leaver process. It is worth more than a week of port scans.

Think about what it implies. There is no reliable leaver process, because leaving is something payroll finds out about and Active Directory does not. There is no per-person accountability in a shop, because the till login is shared. And any licensing model that assumes one paid identity per employee is going to produce a number that makes the Managing Director end the meeting.

What the numbers do to the design

Group	Headcount	Needs a named identity?
Retail, part-time and casual	83	Probably not, today
Central bakery production	45	Mostly not
Retail, permanent	42	Yes
Logistics and distribution	18	Some
Head office functions	27	Yes

Two hundred and fifteen people. Somewhere around ninety who genuinely need a mailbox and a named login right now.

That gap is the whole commercial argument for the project, and it only appears if you ask about people before you ask about servers.

The growth plan changes the answer

The last thing the Operations Director mentioned, almost as an aside, was the expansion. Cumbria, Greater Manchester and Yorkshire. Thirty-plus branches. Possibly five hundred staff. Three to five years.

If you design for 215 people at twelve sites, you will be back inside two years. If you design for 500 at thirty-five sites, you will price yourself out of the room today.

Holding both of those at once is the actual job. Everything in the parts that follow is an attempt to do that honestly.

What happens next

Part two is the technical discovery: walking the estate properly, and the four things that were not mentioned on this call and change the design anyway.