Projects that we've worked on
Are you interested in discussing potential work?
Back Office Transition
This project entailed transitioning over 200 Back Office (Support Services) staff (including all the IT function) from London to Glasgow, as part of a £4m cost efficiency project.
My role, as one of the key members of the senior operational project team was to ensure the facilities transition was seamless, as well as the transition of over 60 staff and 300 years of SThree IT knowledge to a completely new team in a new region.
All knowledge and associated services were transformed in less than 12 months which was an incredible feat considering only one role decided to migrate.
Although the technical challenge was significant to ensure minimal expertise lost or downtime to key business services the people transformation component was the most challenging to ensure key staff were retained and churn was limited; during the transition we lost less than 5% of the IT staff and the majority of key staff were retained until all the main targets were met.
Implementing Salesforce / Office 365
On the back end of upgrading over 3000 desktops globally (over 30 locations in 17 countries) from XP to Windows 10 I managed a major project to replace our legacy CRM with Salesforce and to exploit our Office 365 licensing agreement.
The challenge associated with upgrading the legacy Oracle CRM and Microsoft Suite platforms was significant in itself, but the biggest hurdle to overcome was taking the business and it's 3000 staff on the journey to adoption; especially a FTSE250 recruitment business focused purely on delivering results in what is a hugely competitive sector.
This major digital project entailed exploiting the mobile capabilities of both cloud solutions to ensure their work force could be more agile in their approach and to fully start exploiting workforce collaboration. This was a challenge in itself due to the cultural challenges and history of exploiting these types of solutions.
With some key integrations in to existing on-premise technical solutions and Amazon Web Services this project started to deliver key cutting edge solutions to the SThree work force to ensure competitor advantage in our sector.
Web & Social Engagement
Two of my smaller clients were trying to generate improved interaction with their web sites and generate some social engagement. Although very diverse businesses with different goals I was engaged to deliver more regular visitors to their sites and ensure they both had a social presence.
The Art of Glass, based in Lancashire are specialists in stained glass restorations and new designs; when I was engaged the web site hosted by Yell was very dated and had little visitors; added to this even basic interactions like the Contact Us page did not function and they had no social presence.
Our engagement with them and Yell ensured that they have a fit for purpose site (www.theartofglass.co.uk) linked to newly delivered social platforms on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram delivering new customer engagement and revenue streams.
Thorns Flowers, based in Kent, are specialists in producing flowers for special occasions; when I was engaged they had no web presence or social media sites.
Our engagement with them involved designing and delivering a web site (www.thornsflowers), as well as social platforms on Twitter and Facebook delivering new opportunities to engage with their following and generate new business.
Cyber Security Assessment
A client, who plays a key role in the Cyber Security arena was looking to get their business Cyber certified. Initially, we were asked to do a health check on their environment and suggest ways in which we could improve their security posture.
Once completed we then took the business through the end-to-end method of attaining their certification . This was achieved on the first attempt by ensuring that we took full management of their 3rd party engagement and process.
Overall the assessment process took just under 6 weeks to complete; using our standard agile approach that we uphold at Lengthorn Consultancy. Particularly, focusing on key elements of the assessment and driving these through in order to mitigate ongoing business risks.
Cloud vs On-Premise
We were approached by a client who were about to scale out their business significantly. They were after our unbiased knowledge in plotting out the future direction of their technology infrastructure.
Utilising our 30+ years experience in IT service delivery, we were able to delve into the requirements of their business. More specifically, understanding their current technology landscape and aligning the technical roadmap to fit their business strategy.
Although Cloud services were an obvious initial solution, we needed to fully comprehend the commercial considerations of this decision. To do this, we had to ensure that we would still maximise any investment in the existing technologies whilst also ensuring that we minimize the risk of implementing such a significant business change.
The resulting solution being that the business, when faced with the recent COVID-19 pandemic, were still able to react promptly and initiate full mobile working with minimal risk.