Carers Trust

Improving support for carers by aligning UK wide partner services

Carers Trust was facing a significant challenge. It needed to work more closely with its national partner network to ensure carers were receiving accurately targeted, effective services. As an established Microsoft customer, the Trust was aware that its Dynamics 365 and Office 365 technology could help them work as one organisation.

The issue was whether it had the ICT resource to support this transformation. The ICT department provided day-to-day support to 80 staff at Carers Trust. With new projects in plan and extra pressures from GDPR, ICT had less and less time to support partners, and the effects were widely felt.

“We were using a basic e-market solution to communicate with our partners. They were getting many irrelevant emails, often sent to the wrong people, and our partners were fed up with it. It was just as frustrating for Carers Trust. We knew what the problems were, but we didn’t have the resource to fix them.”

Says Head of ICT, Tim Cornish

The Trust recognised that a new strategy was required to drive better collaboration across the network, optimising the Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365 estate. As a charity, Carers Trust was operating within-firm financial limits.

The strategy could only be implemented by carefully managing its ICT investment and resources. CPS had been helping Carers Trust for 18 months to implement their Microsoft solutions. Convinced that CPS had the depth of Microsoft expertise required and a good understanding of the Trust’s financial and resource constraints, Carers Trust appointed CPS as its strategic partner.

The first requirement for CPS was to release ICT resources from the burden of day-to-day support to focus on the new strategy. CPS Managed Support Services enabled that with onboarding and help desk provision, system monitoring and technical support across the Microsoft solutions estate.

The results from this ‘stabilisation and optimisation’ phase were impressive. The CPS team removed much of the administrative burden from the in-house department and significantly improved systems performance. Some 99% of service desk tickets were responded to within an hour, and CPS’s active monitoring service regularly identified and resolved network issues before they impacted users.

The second phase was to create an IT vision and strategy for the future, underpinned by a carefully costed technical specification and migration plan. The main driver of the strategy was a strong commitment to improved collaboration with and between partners.

That meant relevant information could be shared and intelligence gathered to ensure carer support is well-targeted and finetuned across the country. Leveraging its Microsoft skills, CPS helped Carers Trust develop a knowledge hub where partners can share documents, toolkits, policies and branding guidance. An extranet portal gives partners access to the Trust’s SharePoint environment.

The portal has subsections so that different types of partner users can get relevant information and news stories. There are also plans to develop pop up workspaces for the Trust and partners to collaborate on specific projects, using the flexibility of Microsoft Teams.

Once the Vision and Strategy phase is completed, CPS will work closely with Carers Trust on the implementation and migration phase. This evolving comprehensive and dynamic digital workspace allows the Trust and its partners to deliver a consistent and effective ‘single organisation’ interface with carers. It will ensure that the business, compliance, security, and technical outcomes are delivered seamlessly, on time, on budget and in full.

The Trust says it is confident that CPS’s consultancy and Microsoft technology expertise will deliver a cost-effective IT infrastructure to meet its needs, now and into the foreseeable future.