Founded in 2009, The Challenge is the UK’s leading charity for building a more integrated society. The Challenge designs and delivers programmes that bring people together to develop their confidence and skills in understanding and connecting with others. Approximately 34,000 people participated in its programmes in 2015.
Client issues:
Four years after launching, The Challenge approached Reflective IT to provide desktop and server support services. Up until this point they had shared IT resource with another company within the same office space but as the charity had grown so quickly they realised that they had a requirement for more visibility on what services they were using together with a need for a more tailored and efficient personal service to ensure faster response times and scalability to support their needs as the business continued to grow.
The MD of Reflective IT, recognised the issues to be addressed. “Through rapid organic growth The Challenge found itself with a mix of operating systems. Seeing that growth was likely to continue it needed to rapidly build the infrastructure to make its IT fit for purpose.”
Without changes to prepare for the future, it was going to prove hard to keep productivity high, enable flexible working and manage cost.
Our solution:
Reflective were engaged to provide full managed services with desktop and server support
and weekly proactive engineering to provide an onsite presence. Initially they worked on a pay as you go model to assist with the hand over process. After a full audit, all existing issues were highlighted to the senior management team. Software asset management reports and audits ensured licensing costs were negotiated. As the team rapidly grew to 900 people Reflective also took on responsibility for purchasing new hardware and any peripheral devices.
As the Challenge approaches over 1000 people across 9 sites, Reflective IT continue to provide support services for a fixed monthly fee. The CFO commented “The team at Reflective helped us through a period of enormous growth and enabled us to focus on the business. We are enormously appreciative of the hard work, enthusiasm and commitment of the Reflective team, and they have made a real contribution to the success of The Challenge.”
