Case Studies

IT Insourcing for Family Action

By Published On: 21 June 2023

Client Overview

Family Action transforms lives by providing practical, emotional, and financial support to those who are experiencing poverty, disadvantage, and social isolation across the country.

They have been building stronger families since 1869 – today working with over 60,000 families a year in their community-based services, as well as supporting thousands more through national programmes and grants programmes.

Business Challenge

For 8 years Family Action have outsourced their IT and at the end of 2020 started to evaluate the business case to insource IT Support.

The key drivers for considering insourcing were as follows:

  1. Increasing costs year on year

  2. Any out-of-scope work resulted in additional project costs, often not meeting the budget constraints.

  3. A perceived reduction in the quality of service

Harrison Solution

Due to our track record and subsequent credibility in the not-for-profit sector, Family Action engaged Harrison to work with them on the following:

1. Validate Family Actions decision or present alternative options

2. Support the delivery of the selected option

Working with the Head of Digital Services our consultant performed a current state assessment to ensure we fully understood the business challenges.
Based on the service and budgetary needs of the organisation we designed and implemented a new TOM (Target Operating Model) that specified the organisational, capability and governance needed to establish and transition this into service.

This was achieved with compliance with the following critical success factors:

  1. No reduction in service quality to the end users.

  2. Transition delivered on-time and on-budget.

  3. Capacity to deliver more IT change within the capped cost budget

Outcomes

50% increase in capacity to deliver internal business-initiated projects whilst achieving a 3% decrease on the annual spend.

Support Services extended availability for critical services and execution of urgent and critical changes outside of core hours.
Closer relationship between the business and IT. IT has a deeper appreciation for what the business needs, how it needs it and why it needs it.
Agile project delivery aligned to business need. If the business priorities change, IT’s can now change too when needed as they are not constrained by Statements of Work.

Significant Improvement in customer satisfaction and feedback. Along with additional routes to log Incidents via new Self-Service portals. Making the accessibility of IT support much easier.

Improvement in IT resource productivity with the introduction of ITIL aligned workflows and processes to ensure the right people are working on the right things at the right time, in the right way.

No reduction in service levels during the transition, in fact a Day 1 onwards increase in service performance.

Recruited, trained, and introduced the new IT Service Team.

Developed a capability improvement plan that will drive the ongoing maturity of the team by coaching and mentoring the team to perform.

Harrison have played an important role in supporting our major insourcing IT project – the project went live on 1 July and to date has been very successful. During the process Harrison provided us with an excellent level of customer service and advised us with solutions to any issues we have faced, and participated fully, through our Principal Consultant, in an away day with our new team. We are now moving to the next phase of implementation of an organisation IT strategy and key projects (and their prioritisation) with Harrison ongoing support.

Ricardo Gomes Da Silva – Director of Systems

Follow us

A quick overview of the topics covered in this article.

Latest articles

Share this article

Leave A Comment