The Opportunity

A large central government department and some of its subsidiary organisations were undertaking a major transformation programme and had historically procured a managed shared services provider for all their operational IT services with the aim of delivering a high performing IT environment and platform to enhance user care and experience.

However, the contract in place wasn’t meeting the collective requirements of these agencies and they wanted to build a new managed shared services organisation within the department that can deliver IT managed shared services back to its sister organisations in addition to themselves.

To provide this, they wanted to transition to a retained Service Integration and Application Management (SIAM) model allowing the department to manage numerous suppliers and co-ordinate the SIAM function itself to provide several benefits:

1. Full ownership and control over their ICT services
2. Reduce reliance on one service provider
3. Ability to introduce best fit experts for each aspect of the service
4. Improve efficiency and quality by encouraging collaboration between suppliers
5. Provide a seamless insourced end-to-end service for the department that can in turn deliver best-in-class IT services back to its sister agencies.

RedRock had already successfully introduced a retained SIAM model for another central government agency and because of this, we were directly approached by our client to discuss the opportunity of implementing this retained model with them.

After presenting an options paper and outlining the business case to our client’s boards, we were delighted to be awarded the contract. This is a fantastic project for us to take on, with over 14,000 end users across 4 organisations that in turn support 1.4 million employees – making this one of the largest contract we have worked on.

Our Approach

At RedRock, we underpin all our Managed Professional Service engagements with the same core values:

• Client enablement
• Teams of excellence
• Impartiality

Each engagement is directly overseen by one of our Portfolio/Technical Directors to ensure this. From the outset, our Portfolio Director collaborated with the Agency to ensure we fully understood the project’s desired outcomes. This also included monitoring progress and performance, providing updates and support where necessary.

As our client had been working with their legacy service provider, it was vital that we started by working with them. The aim was to ensure any existing IT services were transitioned over to the new shared services organisation to provide a seamless move and guarantee services wouldn’t be interrupted.

With this in mind, and from our discussions with our client, we were able to provide the following:

• Service design
• Portfolio design
• Project accounting
• Consultants who are experts in their fields with a history of delivering successful projects
• Team co-located with in-house team within two weeks from the initial request.

Our Solution

Our team engaged with our client and all other stakeholders, holding a series of meetings and workshops to ensure everyone involved had a chance to discuss the current issues. And, that they fully understood the aims of the portfolio and the process to implement the retained SIAM model.

The key aims of the programme were to:

• Align to the needs of customers and users
• Improve service reliability, value, speed and responsiveness
• Be flexible and agile, in reacting to and enabling change
• Be open, safe, data-driven and compliant
• Be transparent in governance and decision making
• Be innovative in methods of service delivery and choice of technology
• Develop in-house teams for the new managed shared services organisation to become the ICT partner of choice across government.

Our approach to ensuring a successful delivery was to complete a discovery report comprised of:

• Findings
• As-is state
• To-be state
• Solutions options
• Recommendations

This fully costed report was presented to our client to ensure they could review the issues, recommendations and timelines to achieve these, giving them a full understanding of the process.

From our discussions we agreed to develop a portfolio of programmes that would build the new managed shared services organisation. Including ensuring the development of a new best fit technical environment in the cloud and enabling the transition away from the legacy managed services provider. Within the portfolio we defined three programmes that form the core delivery structure of the programme, these are:

Transform – build out of:

• New cloud-based environment within Microsoft Azure
• New digital workplace environment with the Office 365 suite
• Remediation plan to transition the as-is state to the to-be state environment.

Organisation – design, build and implement:

• A new managed shared services organisation to deliver end-to-end service provision to partner organisations.
• A managed shared services model and defined service catalogue.

Transition – a programme to cater for:

• Exit and commercial management away from the incumbent IT services provider
• Service transition to the new service design, service catalogue and IT service management tooling

The Outcome

This project is modernising and reshaping our client, empowering their people by developing internal skills and building capacity.

We have now successfully completed the discovery and design phase for this portfolio and are excited to hold a senior delivery management role for the delivery phase, continuing our effective support for the programme.

Our partnership with our client has gone from strength to strength and we are both committed to a culture of openness and trust.