Gotelee teams up with Baskerville Drummond for its IT change problems

Andrew West, managing partner at Gotelee, says working with Baskerville Drummond was “nothing short of legendary. The project was an incredible achievement.”

The project began in December 2018. At that time, Gotelee took its hosted IT environment and its practice management system (PMS) from the same supplier. But the issues had been building up:
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• Outages were common
• ­User experience was poor
• ­Software versions were old
• ­Support was inadequate
• ­Challenges with remote working
• ­PMS had been made end-of-life
• ­IT was not supporting the business as it should
• ­Unclear contractual relationships.

After exhausting attempts to get the supplier relationship back on track, Gotelee decided to act. We were asked to devise a way forward, necessitating a carefully managed exit from the incumbent supplier and a renewal strategy to underpin the firm’s ambitions.

Our initial recommendations were to:

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• Separate out the supply of the hosted environment and the PMS, ensuring a better ‘system/needs’ fit in each case and a cleaner, clearer relationship/contractual set up.
• ­Tackle the process as a two-phase project, changing the hosted environment first and the PMS software later, thus ensuring a stable infrastructure and improved support ahead of the critical PMS switchover.

We were then retained to manage the remainder of the project, which started with a full invitation to tender process; saw a PMS implementation completed in nine months, rather than the typical 15-18 months; and achieved a flawless go-live despite the Covid-19 curveball.

Approach

The project kicked off with a tender process for a new IT/desktop hosting provider. This culminated in a recommendation that the firm switch supplier to Oosha and implement a cloud desktop solution that incorporated Office 365, cloud VoIP, Oosha’s private cloud and Microsoft Azure.

However, once notice was served on the hosting portion of its services, it rapidly became apparent that Gotelee would be best served by accelerating its move to a new PMS. So we undertook a fast-tracked selection process and, thanks to our knowledge of the firm’s requirements and optimum supplier fits, this was concluded swiftly with Linetime getting the nod.

The Baskerville Drummond team, Oosha and Gotelee then collaborated on a key phase that would see:
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• A number of substantial sub-projects undertaken in advance, including: a desktop hardware refresh, and the roll-out of a VoIP telephony solution.
• The final go-live weekend for both the new hosted environment and PMS, scheduled for the end of April.

Outcome

On 23 March 2020 the Covid-19 lockdown happened. But a rapid assessment of the state of play led to a decision to press on. This despite the fact that there was now just four weeks to go, and more importantly, resource was being urgently redeployed to support the mobilisation of staff.

But it was a well-reasoned decision. Contractual complexities were making delay a non-starter, besides which Gotelee was well set. The fact that so much heavy lifting had been done early was vital: it’s a standard part of our methodology to de-risk the project by bringing forward as many tasks as possible by way of preparation.

With the underlying hosting platform and Linetime’s performance on it already stress-tested, everyone could focus on the final data conversion and training tasks. Linetime stepped up to the plate admirably, putting together new mechanisms to deliver all of the end user training remotely to staff at home.

Everyone then came together for one last push. We had already determined that the outstanding tasks could be handled remotely, and everything went exactly to plan on that go-live weekend. Gotelee’s PMS data was migrated over to Linetime and all other data such as emails and documents were transferred to the new hosted Microsoft environment.

Managing partner Andrew West summed it all up perfectly: “Nothing short of legendary. It’s an incredible achievement. Two things are notorious in an IT project of this size: they never complete on time and they always cost at least 25% more than budgeted. This has been landed – and very successfully – on the very day we wrote in tablets of stone – and under budget.”