Carers Trust

About Carers Trust

Carers Trust is a major UK charity. It supports anyone caring unpaid for a family member or friend who is ill, frail, disabled, or has mental health or addiction problems. Carers Trust works through a UK wide network of 110 locally based, quality assured independent partners to provide a range of services at home and in the community.

Over stretched resources

Carers Trust was facing a major 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 regulation, ICT had less and less time to support partners, and the effects were being widely felt.

We were using a basic e-market solution to communicate with our partners. They were getting lots of 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 strategy partner.

Three phase approach

The first requirement for CPS was to release ICT resource from the burden of day-to-day support in order 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 inhouse department, and significantly improved systems performance. Some 99% of service desk tickets were now 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.

This evolving comprehensive and dynamic digital workspace gives the Trust and its partners the opportunity to deliver a consistent and effective ‘single organisation’ interface with carers. Once the Vision and Strategy phase is completed, CPS will work closely with Carers Trust on the implementation and migration phase. 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.

Business benefits

• UK wide separate organisations are collaborating to provide carers with the best and most suitable support
• New functions can be added over time without increasing investment in infrastructure because the strategy is cloud based
• Outsourced support enables in house ICT expertise to be leveraged for strategy and future projects and delivers improved performance
• Strategy is based on proven Microsoft solutions with expert CPS support

Results

Improved collaboration with delivery partners so all work as one organisation. Better intelligence about clients enables more effectively targeted support. Underpinned by an optimally aligned and carefully costed strategy. 

A word from the team…

With CPS Managed Support Services, we have a team of specialists that give all our staff great confidence, and CPS’s work on our vision and strategy has been superb. They are really nice people to work with, down to earth, and understand business processes and the charity sector. Many of our people aren’t technical, and it’s great that CPS seems to be so sensitive to that.

Tim Cornish, Head of ICT