Transitioning a life-saving outsourced IT contract to a new service provider
Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH comprises of Addenbrooke’s Hospital and the Rosie Hospital in Cambridge. The Trust provides accessible, high-quality healthcare for the local people of Cambridge, together with specialist services, dealing with rare or complex conditions, for a regional, national and international population.
CUH lacked a detailed understanding of their existing fully outsourced IT contract. As a result, they were finding it extremely difficult to negotiate commercial terms to exit the contract.
CUH had taken the decision to move to a new IT service provider. They were understandable cost-conscious, but simply didn’t have sufficient resource available to manage such a complex, multifaceted project.
We appointed a full team to manage the process from start to finish, including exit negotiations and the transition to the new supplier.
The IT delivered life saving services, so system failure, or outage simply wasn’t an option. Methodical planning, with back out strategies and lots of out-of-hours migrations, were going to be key to the project being a success.
We identified 3 key challenges which needed to be addressed as part of the project:
Complex contract negotiations
The current contract was lacking in detail, due to a management change, which had resulted in non-enforcement of service delivery SLAs and KPIs
Critical service provision
The outsourced IT services to be transitioned provided lifesaving services to patients so system failure was not an option
Lack of resource
CUH had very little resource with the experience, or capability to manage such a negotiation, or transition to a new service provider
As well as helping CUH to negotiate its exit strategy, eXceeding was able to provide a flexible, onsite resource solution to manage the entire process to transition to the new service provider.
The project was delivered over three key stages:
CUH now has a much more flexible and agile IT outsourced contract, that meets the current and future needs of the Trust and its patients.
The new contract has sufficient and appropriate processes, procedures, SLAs, key performance indicators (KPIs) and management toolsets to ensure the new service provider delivers against the contractual obligations. CUH has already engaged eXceeding on other projects due to the quality of services delivered.
The eXceeding team were initially recommended to us to assist us with a contract exit negotiation strategy from our long-term outsourcer. It soon became apparent that the Trust required an experienced transition team. We asked eXceeding to fulfil that gap. They provided a team of experienced professionals which ramped up and down as the project ebbed and flowed, providing us with a highly flexible resource model. The project was a huge success and was delivered on time and within budget.
Capco asked eXceeding to fully assess their current IT service catalogue and recommend the right future solution for their outsourced IT managed service support.
Through engaging eXceeding, they were able to benefit from significant cost savings across their IT and WAN outsourcing providers.
ICAEW has been working with eXceeding for over 9 years, during which time we have worked across IT, telecoms, facilities management, outsourcing and learning and development.
