Case Study
Modern Workplace & Hybrid Working at Mind
Situation
Mind, the National Charity, were running an on-premise server estate, associated IT Infrastructure and end user hardware that was reaching the end of its life. They were also undertaking a large office move to a modern workplace, located within the Cancer Research UK Head Office in Stratford.
They asked Smartdesc to seize this opportunity to migrate the charity to a new technology solution that would underpin Mind’s transition to agile working, within a strict timeline due to the nature of the property negotiations.
“The Smartdesc modern workplace project has been a great success, supporting culture change and leading to greater efficiency. We continue to work with Smartdesc to support our staff to achieve even more with the technology solution.”
Phil Walsh, Chief Financial Officer - Mind
Solution
The Smartdesc team provided the overarching solution design and delivered the turn-key change project to deliver Mind’s new agile technology solution; retiring the on-premise hardware, migrating the legacy systems to Azure, implementing a fully integrated Microsoft 365 solution, delivering centrally managed and secured laptops, and completing the office move. All on time and to budget.
This work included:
- Collaborating with heads of departments to evaluate a number of solution options.
- Designing a technology solution that underpinned Mind’s organisational change programme to hybrid ways of working
- Redesigning and optimising the Microsoft 365 estate, leveraging maximum nonprofit grants.
- Planning and migrating legacy systems not suited to full Software as a Service, to the Microsoft Azure cloud.
- Moving the user interface from aging virtual desktops to local laptop desktops
- Co-designing hybrid meeting rooms and coordinating Minds’ 3rd Party vendors to implement best-in-class Video Conferencing, based on Microsoft Teams.
- Selecting and overseeing the internet connectivity installs and mobile signal boosting technology, and implementing enterprise grade WiFi across the agile space.
- Taking all users, stakeholders and volunteers on a change journey, including early engagement via an inclusive solution design process.
- Driving positive change through IT training and user adoption, supporting the implementation of Mind’s new hybrid working initiative, through “Office Ready” training and IT induction days for all 500+ members of staff.
Results
As a result of the changes, we’ve seen a continual improvement in IT Service and user satisfaction at WaterAid. Other benefits include:
- Strengthened the IT Infrastructure
- Increased stakeholder value and delivered substantial operational savings.
- Service delivery model has been very successful and has been replicated across other resource delivery departments.
- Over 5 years to date of successfully meeting SLA’s and ensuring a secure, stable IT Infrastructure.
- A highly regarded hybrid IT Department in place to cover every aspect of IT Support.
- Good and Excellent satisfaction ratings on feedback from support tickets. Please see a selection of comments shown on the following page;