In March 2020, news of the UK entering a national lockdown began to break, which meant that Abri and many other organisations had to think fast to make sure they could continue the delivery of their goods and services to customers across the nation.
We’re over a year in from the start of the global pandemic and restrictions are beginning to ease - now is a good time to reflect on our efforts to keep our workforce well and safe whilst adapting to agile working.
It all began when IT received a request to lead a ‘work from home test day’ last March. At that point, the enormity of the task ahead really began to hit home. Our wider team began to investigate the capabilities of working from home and tried to better understand any limitations colleagues might face transitioning from an office workspace to a remote environment. The test day was insightful, it helped us trial and error the process of mobilising colleagues to work outside the office.
Challenge accepted
Even though this was a reactive operation, as a team, we spent a lot of time planning how we were going to licence, provision, train and support our colleagues to work from home for a prolonged period in a very short space of time.
There were several challenges that we had to overcome. In the grand scheme of things, we had to deliver an IT secure solution, scaled to support home working across the organisation, while configuring department specific requests to allow key business activities to run without disruption. Sizable, as you can imagine. Once colleagues had initially been mobilised, you’d think it would return to business as usual, but it was only really the start for us in IT. As colleagues settled into working from home, Teams became the focal point of communication and “you’re on mute” the most repeated phrase.
It wasn’t a piece of cake, the main difficulties came in the form of procurement, for instance we needed to secure additional licences and hardware while the rest of the country scrambled to do the same. We knew that an operation of this size was possible, but it would require a lot of detailed attention and extensive research. We ended up needing to create new telephony profiles, as the original profiles were office based. By installing special software on laptops and reconfigure call recording licencing, the telephony profiles allowed the technology to work remotely. All this was challenging, but the toughest part about it all was our race against time. Time became our principal driver; but we were determined to mobilise IT quickly to safeguard our colleagues and their ability to deliver services to customers.
Citrix saved the day (no, really!)
Overcoming these challenges wasn’t without issues, but with some late nights and a little head scratching we were able to provide workable solutions for colleagues. It gets a bit of a bad rep, but without Citrix this would have all been far more difficult. We were confident we could support the necessary volumes. Even then, we undertook hourly performance checks so we could see any trends or track any potential issues to decrease disruption.
It was the joint work carried out across all IT functions that became the catalyst to making it all happen. The efforts were huge and although we knew some early elements weren’t pretty, and improvements would be needed, we still achieved success.
Adjusting to the new world order
IT have continued in the background to adapt technology where needed for home working, we realigned processes and adjusted our day-to-day support model to achieve this. We haven’t always got everything right; some legacy solutions have had limitations that have been difficult to overcome. As we sit here now, more than a year after we first went into lockdown, we reflect on what has been achieved but are fully focused on the future. New technologies for a truly agile workforce.