Local authorities increasingly rely on technology to deliver effective and efficient services to their citizens and businesses. At the same time many are using technology to transform themselves, adopting new ways of working and engaging with the public. By bringing its IT service desk back in-house with Sunrise ITSM, Tendring Council is successfully delivering services to its 750 staff and councillors, ensuring the organisation makes best use of its available resources.

Successfully brings technical services in-house and supports IT transformation with Sunrise ITSM!

Tendring selected Sunrise ITSM for three main reasons – a close fit with the council’s requirements, the fact that the solution delivered value for money, and that it provided a cost-effective way to expand as needs grew. .

“We’ve been using Sunrise for nearly three years, without any failures, giving us reassurance and allowing us to focus on supporting the work of the council, its staff and councillors. We particularly like the ease of use, and the intuitive interface that we’ve been able to customise to meet our needs in every area”.

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Successfully bringing IT support in-house.
Local authorities increasingly rely on technology to deliver effective  and efficient services to their citizens and businesses. At the same time many are using technology to transform themselves, adopting new ways of working and engaging with the public. By bringing its IT service desk back in-house with Sunrise ITSM, Tendring Council is successfully delivering services to its 750 staff and councillors, ensuring the organisation makes best use of its available resources.

Formed in 1974, Tendring Council provides a full range of services to 145,000 residents in the north east of Essex. Covering rural districts, the holiday resorts of Clacton, Frinton and Walton, along with the port of Harwich, its population grows significantly in the summer due to tourism. The Council’s IT service team provides support to over 750 users, including 60 councillors, located across 20 sites.

The ‘Shop Window’ moves In-House
After outsourcing its IT operational services in 1993, the council decided to return to an in-house delivery model in April 2016. Judy Barker, Information Governance & IT Services Manager, explains why, “We see the service desk as IT’s shop window, as it can often be the only direct contact that end-users have with our team. We therefore wanted to provide an efficient, effective and proactive service when we moved back to an in-house model.” As part of the move, Tendring knew it needed to implement its own IT service management (ITSM) solution. It began researching the market in July 2015 and following a full tender process, awarded the contract to Sunrise Software in October 2015. It chose Sunrise ITSM for three main reasons – there was a close fit with the council’s requirements, the solution delivered value for money, and it provided a cost-effective way to expand as needs grew. Additionally, Tendring had worked with Sunrise previously, when running IT services in-house and during the first ten years of its outsourcing contracts. “Our previous experience with Sunrise had been
extremely positive, and while its software had been developed substantially since 2003, this gave us real confidence in our selection,” adds Judy. “As a company Sunrise engaged well with us, and the whole team was supportive of the project throughout the implementation process.”

A Rapid Roll-out
Roll-out of Sunrise was rapid. After awarding the contract in October 2015, the solution went live following the Christmas 2015 break, with Tendring signing the official completion certificate in January 2016. The council now benefits from a full IT service management platform to support its councillors and staff. As well as handling service desk queries, the 2-level support team provides staff with the ability to raise security concerns and incidents. It receives around 35 incoming calls per day, logged by telephone, email and face-to-face channels. The team is trained to carry out around 20 types of first line fixes, as well as being able to assign more complex queries to two different teams for resolution. Overall, the service desk team, councillors
and staff are extremely happy with the solution. “Sunrise makes our job easier as it provides us with a stable, highly functional system to support our users,” says Judy. “We’ve been using Sunrise for nearly three years, without any failures, giving us reassurance and allowing us to focus on supporting the work of the council, its staff and councillors. We particularly like the
ease of use, and the intuitive interface that we’ve been  able to customise to meet our needs in every area.” Additionally, while the council is not currently a heavy user of the ITIL methodology, it is something that the team believes will become more important in the future. Consequently, Tendring has four fully trained ITIL foundation officers. They have already been using the methodology, and the ITIL support within Sunrise, to benchmark functionality over the past three years.

A Platform for the Future
Most importantly, Sunrise provides Tendring Council with a platform for the future. The past three years have been extremely busy for the council, with enormous change, including an organisation-wide Transformation Programme. Key elements of this have been office
rationalisation, customer service channel shift and greater investment in IT, including the implementation of new unified messaging services via Skype for Business and supporting greater mobile and remote working. An effective IT service desk is key to underpinning this
transformation. The IT service management team is now looking at further extending how it uses Sunrise, particularly around setting up change management and deploying self-service. This will allow the team to extend the support it offers in terms of service desk hours, with
minimal impact on resourcing. “Sunrise provides us with all of the functionality we need –
now and in the future. The team there are always friendly, approachable, willing to engage and keen to ensure that we remain successful in what we do. Sunrise enables us to successfully deliver a good quality of service to our customers, helping the council to achieve its objectives
and in turn deliver the best possible service to Tendring’s citizens and visitors,” concludes Judy.