Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS)
Delivering Best Practice ICT Shared Services at Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS)
Scope of Work
NICS needed to deliver ICT shared services to support eight major civil service departments over a staged period. The first step was to share ICT services between two major departments, the Department of Finance and Personnel (DFP) and the Department of Regional Development (DRD), with other civil service departments coming on-stream over two years.
The initial Shared Service Centre (SSC) would support some 10,000 users rising to 18,000. NICS wanted to implement service management based on ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) which provides a cohesive set of best practice drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme and is the British Standards Institution’s standard for IT Service Management (BS15000).
In order to achieve this, Atkins work covered:
- The review of an Outline Business Case (OBC) and tightening down of costs
- A culture assessment of staff from DFP and DRD who would become part of SSC
- An ITIL maturity assessment and development and integration of five new ITIL processes
- Provision of a new Service Management tool (SMT) procured using OJEU
- Full training of staff on processes and management of the testing of the SMT
The Solution
Atkins revisited the OBC looking closely at;
- The principles for an ITIL based implementation approach
- An organisation/role model and resource plan for shared services
- Accommodation requirements to agree a strategy to optimise costs/benefits
- The high level transition plan
The next step in the programme was to address concerns about how the people aspects bear on the successful outcome of the ICT Shared Service Centre. Atkins undertook an assessment of the respective cultures of the merging departments by using internet-based questionnaires with follow-up, semi-structured interviews and focus groups to assess the respective cultures. From this NICS were able to understand each department’s culture, identify likely tensions and adopt a range of people-focused actions to plan into the programme to maximise the success of the merger.
Atkins then assessed the maturity of the existing ITIL process using ITIL Gap Analysis. The results showed that:
- ITIL concepts were understood by most ICT support staff
- Some elements of ITIL processes were practiced already
- Little formal documented ITIL processes
NICS was evaluated as PMF level 1 (initial) and it was agreed that this level of maturity would not support a new shared service centre. NICS needed to move to a PMF rating of 3 (defined) in time for the opening of the SSC.
Atkins managed the functional, system and user acceptance testing of the new service management tool implemented by the tool supplier and developed training on the process for the Service Desk, ICT support staff and ICT support managers.
The SSC opened smoothly with the five ITIL processes and the new service management tool live.
Key Benefits to Client
- Atkins consultants working on the project were ITIL red badge (Managers Certificate) qualified with strong experience of process development.
- NCIS built Configuration Management with Atkins input.
- The Incident, Problem and Change Management process developed in three months and new Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) completed in a further 6 weeks.
- Project completed on time and within agreed consulting budget.
