Established in 1890, Cirencester Friendly is a mutual society which provides income protection.  Initially formed to benefit agricultural workers in Gloucestershire, today it provides members from all walks of life across the UK with a regular income should they become unable to work because of illness or injury.

The Challenge

Following the resignation of the Head of IT at Cirencester Friendly and faced with an imminent office relocation, the Board decided to take the opportunity to make changes within IT.  They engaged Leading Resolutions to review the IT organisation to identify what was needed for future success.

Leading Resolutions identified several immediate and critical issues to be addressed:

A strategy was required for the IT server estate to ensure that the office move was successful and that the newly relocated team could operate seamlessly from day one
There was an urgent need to document the system configuration and set up, to address support issues and provide the team with sufficient knowledge to transfer the IT equipment
The business saw IT as a barrier rather than partner, with concerns raised about their ability to deliver appropriate solutions to meet their needs
Current disaster recovery and business continuity measures were not as robust as they could have been, and the business would be negatively impacted should a recovery situation arise

Leading Resolutions led the change programme on behalf of Cirencester Friendly, placing an experienced Interim Head of IT, supported by its wider consulting capability, to drive change across the IT organisation. The engagement significantly raised the standard of IT service, creating and implementing an appropriate strategy for the hosting of the IT server estate, supporting the office relocation and addressing critical issues with Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity.

The Solution

After an initial download from the departing incumbent, Leading Resolutions quickly established control of the IT function and the technical landscape – building a picture of the team and developing an understanding of the processes and technologies in place. During the first few weeks, activities included documentation of critical systems to improve support, picking up the technical components of the office relocation and working closely with the business team to get processes in place around requirements management and stakeholder management

Strategy options were developed for the hosting of the IT server equipment with a hosted data centre strategy subsequently adopted for the core business systems, which addressed the business continuity and disaster recovery challenges. Time-critical and complex migrations to the data centre were then successfully completed on time and within budget, including the migration of all Microsoft functionality to Office 365. This ensured that all systems were available in advance of the office move. All system configurations were documented as part of the office and data centre moves and the migration prerequisite, get the servers and O365 ready, was completed on schedule

 

The technical components of the office relocation were executed to ensure enough functionality was in place in time for the agreed move dates, with limited user impact

Running through a new and robust governance process, incremental changes were made to other systems in parallel to the office relocation, delivering value to the business and enabling the launch of a new product. This included identifying the root cause of stability issues with one of the business-critical systems which was failing on average twice a week, and migrating the database from MS Access which improved stability

Support was provided for the recruitment of a new Head of IT through production of the job description and the selection and interview process, and full handover was completed to minimise any impact in the change of leadership

The Results

Improvements to system support and security, significantly reducing the number of incident tickets raised and improving the end-user experience; this included service level reporting and configuration documentation for core systems

Reduction in the number of open tickets by 50% within 12 months, with tickets open for more than 14 days reduced to single figures

Introduced Online Application system enhancements that contributed to the percentage of applications being made online increasing from 60% to 95%

Stabilised the Application Process Tracking system to get system availability close to 100%

Embedded robust disaster recovery and business continuity processes to support all users and reduce fail back from one week to under 2 hours

Seamless move to the new office location with users commenting “how easy the IT Department had made everything for them”

Migration to a new hosted data centre

New Head of IT in place and operating within an agreed framework to ensure that momentum was maintained

The enhancements and changes driven by Leading Resolutions left Cirencester Friendly Society in a stable position to meet future growth needs. Key successes included:

Improvements to system support and security, significantly reducing the number of incident tickets raised and improving the end-user experience; this included service level reporting and configuration documentation for core systems

Reduction in the number of open tickets by 50% within 12 months, with tickets open for more than 14 days reduced to single figures

Introduced Online Application system enhancements that contributed to the percentage of applications being made online increasing from 60% to 95%

Stabilised the Application Process Tracking system to get system availability close to 100%

Embedded robust disaster recovery and business continuity processes to support all users and reduce fail back from one week to under 2 hours

Seamless move to the new office location with users commenting “how easy the IT Department had made everything for them”

Migration to a new hosted data centre

New Head of IT in place and operating within an agreed framework to ensure that momentum was maintained

Leading Resolutions made a massive contribution to Cirencester Friendly, taking the lead in reshaping our IT department and making it more forward-thinking and business focussed as well as playing a key role in the site relocation. The Interim Head of IT was consistently ready to go the extra mile and lead others to do the same; he leaves IT in a significantly better state, and we are grateful for the improvements to our systems, people and ways of working.
John Quinn
Chairman