Overview
The community programme at Charlton started in 1992 with Charlton Athletic Football Club (CAFC) establishing the charity Charlton Athletic Community Trust (CACT) in 2003. CACT works to empower communities and change lives by improving health, education, employment and helping to reduce crime.
CACT’s IT was managed by an internal IT team shared between them and CAFC but due to the growth of both organisations and a change in their organisational needs, external support was required and ITRM began providing IT support services in 2012.
Challenge
CACT employ 95 permanent staff and around 100 seasonal staff, working from either their head office or remotely whilst delivering services in the community. Reliable communication is key to their success, as is the ability for team members to maintain high productivity levels regardless of where they are working.
Operating an ageing on-premises solution proved challenging and a more streamlined, simple, solution was required to prevent downtime associated with the use of their Remote Desktop Service.
In addition, due to the seasonal nature of some of CACT’s work regular changes to their organisational needs often required the manual set up and closure of user accounts which, due to their volume, proved to be a time-consuming exercise.
The Solution
ITRM migrated CACT’s on-premises Exchange Server to Microsoft 365, addressing the issues experienced and allowing all staff members to easily access and work on their files from wherever they are – whether that be from the CACT call centre, head office or whilst out delivering a field-based project.
In addition to this, CACT’s on-premises telephone system was also migrated to a hosted alternative, providing a more scalable solution and bespoke call reporting facilities at their call centres.
Due to CACT’s charity status, ITRM were able to fully utilise discounted charity pricing for both Microsoft 365 and telephony licenses, which resulted in some significant cost savings for the organisation.
Although these changes were made shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic, CACT’s new hosted environment proved invaluable during this challenging time, allowing them to easily adjust and scale their operations to respond quickly to continue supporting the community.
The Outcome
• ITRM fully utilised charity pricing packages available from our technology partners, resulting in significant cost savings.
• Simplified, more reliable and more secure access for remote workers.
• Fully consumption-based services which are easily manageable and scalable.
• Fully supported services with direct access to ITRM service desk for all CACT staff.
