Computer One helps a Major SEQ Charity
19-01-2016. Recently, a fast-paced IT project came from an unlikely source. A respected and long standing charitable organisation that offers literally dozens of services to the Brisbane and wider South East Queensland community.
With over 500 staff, the company is also a service hub for related centres located around Southeast QLD, providing an Infrastructure-as-a-Service product that provides cost benefits for the participants.
Some expected but dramatic IT personnel changes left the charity feeling they required assistance very quickly, so they reached out to Computer One.
The charity’s management felt they needed establish some additional controls around the infrastructure and IT services, and bolster their capacity should there be any problems.
The Computer One Managed IT Services team enacted what we call “Rapid On-boarding”. In layman’s terms we:
- Captured and documented the operating environment as built
- Ensured it was secure and that the data recovery systems were working
- Provided an interim help desk solution
- Performed a risk assessment
- Quickly established where the knowledge gaps were, and
- Created a roadmap for remediation activities
After the first 48 hours we set about capturing system information from the heads of the IT support staff and the organisation’s application owners. This information was used to map the application dependencies within the infrastructure, control change so that system stability was kept high and ensure that everyone who touched the environment knew exactly how it worked.
As always, the documents became the property of the client. They will help to mitigate future risks of disruption and support delay, even if Computer One is no longer on the scene.
When the intensity of the first week had passed, we began delivering a flexible Managed IT Services package. The company was not ready to outsource all levels of support, so the goal was to offer a help desk for as long as needed while we assisted them to recruit a new IT Manager.
Update: In 2021, Computer one still supports this client. We helped recruit a new, very skilled IT Manager with whom we have developed a very efficient working relationship, characterised by a mutual respect for each party’s skills. We continually deploy and rotate staff on-site to ensure there’s always first-hand knowledge of the organisation’s systems among our Service Delivery team and to take the pressure of delivery off the client’s internal team so they can focus on items of strategic importance.
The system has been stable for more than 5 years. In all, it was a model Disaster Aversion project, designed to give the organisation the necessary information and ability to make educated decisions about the future of IT Services, and an experience we are proud to say we had.
