Interim IT Management

Background:

We engaged with a firm that was struggling in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and was experiencing severe financial problems.  IT Management turnover had been high, with a series of IT Managers coming and going over the previous few years.  The business was dependent on a call centre and severe technical issues were impacting the efficiency of the operations.

Problem:

Substantial investment was required to bring systems up to scratch, but the resources were simply not available. Further, constant minor technical issues were causing IT staff to be diverted to fire fighting activities, leaving the fundamental, underlying issues unresolved.

We quickly identified the underlying problems as being:

• Lack of IT management processes, resulting in significant downtime
• Lack of management information, resulting in frustration and lack of understanding of the causes of problems and the need to fix them
• Severe technical shortcomings in aging hardware that had not been addressed

Finally, poor management of the IT staff had resulted in their being demoralised and unresponsive.

Solution:

We introduced a process to manage changes to the environment, to make sure the implications of changes were understood and agreed with all stakeholders

A framework of reporting was put in place to explain downtime and recommend steps to prevent repetition.

Simple technical and process changes were made to substantially reduce downtime, buying time for the firm to restructure, without incurring heavy IT capital expenditure in the short term.

The outcome from the intervention:

There was a substantial and measurable fall in downtime, and staff morale and their regard in the wider business improved.  An unexpected outcome of our intervention was to encourage some great ideas from developers. The automation of a key process vastly improved customer service and saved over £8000 a month in postage costs alone.

The future:

Our intervention bought the business time whilst it restructured, and put in place a series of initiatives that stabilised the organisation, buying time until a full time permanent CTO was appointed.

Conclusion:

As an experienced IT hand, we were able to offer practical technical and managerial experience to improve the running of the IT function with immediate benefits and cost savings.

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