A multi-site organisation in the health industry

A classic tale of a ‘Jack of All Trades’ gone wrong.

At the start of our engagement, this company operated in four sites, and was in the process of adding a fifth. While the processes around their core business were well defined and actively facilitated the growth that they were actively working towards, their IT systems lacked basic robustness and were acting to hinder growth. Their IT systems were managed by a fairly generic “IT guy” whose involvement started as a pure support service provider, providing specialist Help-desk/software management services for one particular (mission critical) application . As the organisation grew, so did the services he provided, including commissioning the multi-site wireless network, VoIP phone system, mail servers, file servers and the like. While all of these services functioned adequately at the early stages, as the business grew, they were experiencing significant issues with stability and reliability. Prior to our involvement, the following symptoms were presenting: – The phone systems were crashing every morning, frustrating both the patients trying to make bookings and the reception staff who had to deal with both non-functioning systems and potential customers frustrated by their inability to make appointments. – The network failed intermittently, with some workstations proving less stable than others. This meant that staff were unable to use mission-critical applications to do their respective jobs. – Printers randomly stop working, preventing printing of invoices. With the following results: – Patients and staff were increasingly frustrated. Some senior staff were verbalising their intention to move on to a ‘more professional’ organisation, and a number of patients have simply given up and moved on. – Company directors are spending far more time than they should need to attempting to manage IT issues, retarding company expansion plans. Pragmetric became involved, and, roughly in order, carried out the following actions: – Contracted the services of a company that specialises in the installation of radio based networks, stabilising the underlying network infrastructure. The same company also rationalised the site-based LAN configurations, making good use of existing hardware where possible, and adding new hardware where required. – Contracted the services of a specialist VoIP phone system company to review the phone configuration, fixing the few remaining issues that weren’t resolved by fixing the network. – Rationalised the inbound data links (additional links were installed in an attempt to resolve phone and network issues). – Installed network interrogation software, analysing the servers and workstations on the network, discovering a woeful lack of software version control, patch (upgrade) management, and multiple workstations sharing the same software license (breaches of software license conditions). This information was provided to a newly contracted support organisation who are currently – Contracted the services of a more professional support organisation to provide both specialist application and more general network/user support. Net result Client is now moving forward with their planned expansion plans with a sixth site in the process of coming on-line, staff have long term intentions to stay, and help the business grow. Patient numbers are back up, and continuing to grow. The business now has the support systems in place to ensure that the business systems stay stable