Case Study of Wiltshire Shared Service Consortium NHS Trust
Desktop and Infrastructure Deployment for Primary Care Trusts
Introduction
The Wiltshire Shared Services Consortium (WSSC) faced the challenge of satisfying the needs of four PCTS in their area of operation, who had received funding from the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), to provide and improve IT access to those NHS staff that had not previously had adequate facilities.
The timescale was short as the funds were allocated late in the financial year and had to be used by the end of the financial year.
The solution that they chose was to outsource the work, and they subsequently went out to tender.
A. The Challenge
The Shared Services needed to satisfy an immediate requirement to identify and confirm the areas of need in the four Primary Care Trusts (PCTs), and the current state of the technologies in those areas, before engaging upon a desktop deployment programme to utilise the available funding.
They carried out a first rough cut estimation and concluded that there were of the order of 200 sites to consider, and that 30% may need infrastructure upgrades before deployment could take place, and that the funding would be sufficient to provide approximately 600 desktops and 200 printers.
The aim was to have committed funding for this provision by the end of the financial year (March 31st) which meant that equipment would have to be purchased and delivered, and all infrastructure upgrades carried out, by this time.
B. Finding the Right Partner and Solution
The shared services issued a competitive tender for the outsourcing of this project, as they had insufficient resources to complete this work within the required timescale (approximately five months).
In order to be able to carry out the work in the required time with the necessary mix of skills, BDS Solutions proposed a ‘consortium’ of suppliers ‘approach’ to carry out specific and in many cases overlapping activities.
The suppliers selected already had knowledge of and experience of working with each other and the customer previously, so that a quick start up was possible.
BDS would provide the management, planning and coordination of the project, being responsible for liasing with the customer and the third-party suppliers on a day to day basis, throughout the duration of the project, and would provide the project support to the project.
C. Using the Right Solution to Solve the Problem?
The response to the tender was led by BDS, who worked with the other ‘consortium’ suppliers in proposing a solution that would meet the requirements in the required timescale.
Initially, it was proposed that the work would be carried out in four separate and consecutive projects, one for each PCT.
For funding and ‘political’ reasons this was not acceptable to the client, who required it to be carried as one project with equitable progress across all four PCTs during the duration of the project.
As a result the proposal was changed to facilitate this approach by interleaving the three main high level activities of Site Survey, Site Upgrade and Site Deployment, across the geographical areas of the four PCTs so that progress on the activities could be demonstrated across the PCTs.
D. Using the Right Technologies and Delivery Method
To make most effective use of supplier resources, and to reduce ‘travelling time’, sites across the PCTS were clustered geographically wherever possible.
A project coordination role was also introduced within the client environment to facilitate site selection and to reduce response time to any issues.
Clear targets were given to the suppliers to achieve each week, as the roll out took place.
The site surveys, site upgrades and site deployments were overlapped and interleaved as much as possible to achieve the very tight timescales.
E. Business Value and Benefits
The ability of BDS and the ‘consortium’ to achieve the very tight timescales has resulted in the Wiltshire PCTs being able to exploit the NPfIT funding opportunity that arose, to improve IT facilities at their sites.
Significant benefits have resulted from the results of the surveys of the sites, where information previously had been very poor. This has enabled better planning to take place and an update to the asset register.
The infrastructure of many of the sites has now been significantly improved and this will facilitate further facilities at these sites being more easily implemented in the future. BDS and the consortium are likely to be involved in future work at these sites when this occurs.
Key lessons learned in this engagement?
The paucity of information about the sites contributed to higher than expected requirement for infrastructure upgrades, which had an impact both on the timescale and the allocation of costs across the project.
The allocation of the budget across the activities remained flexible so that changes in costs could be accommodated. Because timescales were impacted by the greater need for infrastructure upgrades, the overall timescale for each site tended to became elongated.
This caused numerous changes to requirements as the volatility of changes at sites was high, and this created more management time in both scheduling, tracking and costing the work.
Some sites were also more ‘desperate’ to receive equipment than others, and had this been picked up at site survey time then they could have been prioritised.
In retrospect, a swifter individual project for each PCT would have reduced the impact considerably, as there would have been less time for changes to take place, although this would not have satisfied the ‘political’ requirements of showing equitable progress across the PCTs.
Customer Comment
David Barley Head of IT of the Wiltshire Shared Services Consortium summed up the project:
"The wide scope of this project involving 500 users across more than 160 sites, managed by four separate Primary Care Trusts would in itself have been enough to put off most suppliers.
"The consortium led by BDS Solutions was more than up to the task".