Leonard Cheshire

IT Service Desk Supports Frontline Carers for Leonard Cheshire

e-Warehouse software helps charity create IT SLAs to improve delivery of frontline services to 21,000 disabled people throughout the UK

About Leonard Cheshire

Leonard Cheshire exists to change attitudes to disability and to serve disabled people around the world. The organisation's principal activity in the UK is the provision of services in support of disabled people in the widest context, including care homes, supported living, domiciliary support, day services, resource centres, rehabilitation, respite care, personal support and training and assistance for those looking for work.

Leonard Cheshire is headquartered in Millbank, London, and operates in more than 150 locations throughout the UK.

Background

As with any service provider of its size, IT plays an integral role in ensuring that clients' needs are met. Leonard Cheshire uses its systems to co-ordinate and manage the provision of care and support for more than 21,000 people throughout the UK, which makes the IT department's ability to respond to any issues promptly and effectively an absolute necessity.

Prior to its work with e-Warehouse, the charity had no internal IT helpdesk facility in place to deal with user requests and system issues, as Carole Thornton, Systems Analyst with Leonard Cheshire, explains:

“We'd handled the helpdesk function comparatively informally by using a shared mailbox for logging support requests. We had some processes for dealing with the issues as they came in, but it was incredibly difficult to track the history of an incident or prioritise jobs effectively. Not only did this put the IT department under considerable pressure, it also made it impossible to set deliverable expectations and communicate them effectively to the rest of the organisation.”

Realising that service desk software could play a major role in boosting the efficiency of the IT department, Leonard Cheshire decided to implement a formal facility to actively manage and improve the service to their internal users.

Introducing the service desk

Six solutions were subjected to evaluation before e-Warehouse's web-based Oxygen product was selected.

Oxygen has been supporting the Leonard Cheshire IT department since it went live in January 2006. The web-based software is installed on a single server, located in Millbank, and supports 2000 employees throughout the country. The helpdesk is manned by four staff who provide front-line support to users for support requests, such as password resets and installing printers. The 18-strong IT department offers specialist support to resolve more complicated issues. In addition, some problem management activities involving on-site engineer visits are outsourced.

One of the key benefits of the system is that it has enabled the IT department to implement, monitor and manage service level agreements (SLAs) with its internal clients for the first time. SLAs have been allocated according to the severity of the problem and fall under the heading of critical, high, medium or project, all of which will receive a response to their call or email within an hour of their first contact.

In practical terms this means the IT department is now better placed to ensure its services are aligned with the requirements of the organisation. For example, Leonard Cheshire is running the “LEO project”, a nationwide system to assist in the management of the provision and coordination of everyday, essential care for disabled people in their own homes. Staff involved in the LEO project may be assigned 'critical' ranking for their SLA, as Thornton explains:

“Our systems are used to coordinate the schedules of visiting support workers, so it's vital to ensure that any period of time that the systems are not running effectively for these workers is kept to an absolute minimum. The people managing these frontline workers meet the criteria for critical SLAs and using Oxygen means we can now prioritise, escalate and track calls to the service desk far more effectively than with our previous approach.”

Since the software went live, e-Warehouse has continued to work closely with Thornton to ensure the product supports Leonard Cheshire's requirements. A number of features published in the latest version of the Oxygen product, version 3.6, were developed directly as a result of feedback and input from Thornton and her team, such as integration with Active Directory to reduce the administration associated with updating user details.

Reporting and forecasting

Leonard Cheshire has used Oxygen's detailed reporting functionality to ensure that the work of the IT department is more accountable, particularly to senior management. In addition to generating business and operational reports to identify where there are resource issues and system problems, it has also enabled the organisation to measure staff performance.