HR Services Partnership (HRSP) are specialists in providing bespoke HR support to organisations in the voluntary and community sector. Operating since 2003, they have a wealth of expertise and experience working with small and medium-sized organisations.
Prior to moving to ramsac, HRSP had an incumbent IT company they had outsourced to for several years. They had an office based server and used tape backups but they were concerned this was not the way forward for their organisation and were interested in moving to a cloud based model as Jerry Taylor, Director from HR services explains “My frustration was that the backups would just keep on failing and wasn’t considered a priority by our provider at the time. It was a huge concern of mine and the main reason why we started to look around for another provider.”
HRSP went out to tender and met with ramsac, where we discussed solutions to help them start their cloud transition. Jerry commented “ramsac were very professional and when they came over to see us. Despite being a small company, ramsac were attentive to our needs, responsive and made us feel valued as a prospective client. We were taken seriously and ramsac clearly had the range of service and professionalism that we were looking for.”
ramsac initially undertook an IT audit to take stock of the entire IT estate, to see where the priorities lay, and to start the process of developing an ‘IT roadmap’ agreeing a plan for the direction of travel. As Jerry discusses “One of the things that has really been a massive benefit for us with ramsac, has been how they have kept us up to date with technology and have taken time to talk to us about what we can do and how we can do it. They have been effective at painting a picture of what the future could look like and then supporting us moving through change.”
ramsac has managed a migration to the Microsoft 365 platform, firstly migrating emails to Exchange Online and then more recently, migrating file storage to Microsoft SharePoint, and implementing Microsoft Teams to enable better collaboration. This happened just weeks prior to the Coronavirus pandemic. Jerry explains how important that has been for HR Services during these unprecedented times “We were moving on to SharePoint, which we thought would be a far more disruptive project than it actually ended up being. Our ramsac technical consultant completed a detailed planning process and we migrated at the start of March 2020. We had a staff away day on the 6th of March where ramsac came in to run training on how to get the most out of Microsoft Teams and everyone was really excited. The timing was perfect just as well because a week later we were in lockdown and we were using it with a vengeance. If we had not made the move we would have been a very different position as a business. It wouldn’t have stopped us from working, but it would have been far more difficult in terms of remote working and keeping in touch with the team. Teams has been really good in supporting cohesive working, we have work and social channels to help the teams stay connected.”
ramsac has provided HRSP both end user support through an IT helpdesk, through to high level thought leadership and strategic input. As Jerry comments, “I think the key point for us is keeping up to date and ensuring that our IT is secure and reliable, we didn’t have that reliability before. ramsac provide support on many different levels. We are very fortunate with our relationship manager who is great and keeps in touch with us, making sure that we’re up to date with new IT. Account management meetings help us explore what we need and what’s out there in the market and making our IT more secure and fit for purpose. Also, the helpdesk is great on a day-to-day basis, I think we’re using the help desk far less than we were, but that’s a good thing as that shows that we now have a much more reliable and stable system. When we do call the help desk, they are very professional and take ownership of issues.”
Discussing the move to ramsac and a more structured approach to IT support and management, Jerry concluded, “It’s about the relationships and it’s about the confidence in our systems. We don’t want to skimp on something as critical to our business as IT. I would definitely recommend ramsac to other professional organisations.”
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