Case Study

Gloucestershire Hospitals

NHS Foundation Trust

Large-scale transformation project utilised ManagementStudio to provide much-needed boost to Windows 10 transformation project

Healthcare Trust seeks remedy
for transformation challenges

Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (GHT) employs 8,000 staff supporting a population of 635,000. It provides a wide range of acute services, including a regional cancer centre, from its two large general hospitals – Gloucestershire Royal and Cheltenham General – as well as maternity services at Stroud Maternity Unit. Its mission is to, “achieve the best for our patients, their families, our staff and our communities” and to deliver, “(the) best care for everyone.”

The Trust’s long-term digital strategy is to reach stage 7 on the HIMSS EMRAM maturity model. Its aim is to become one of the most digitally advanced trusts in the country, providing the kind of high-quality care that patients deserve and staff aspire to deliver.

The Trust needed to migrate 6,500 legacy devices to Windows 10 to optimise productivity, tighten security and reduce support costs. They turned to ManagementStudio for its ability to provide a clear understanding of the current estate, optimised planning for the migration, unified communications and fully automated deployments.

ManagementStudio has
changed everything

– Lead Migration Analyst, Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Project Objectives

GHT was required to transform its digital environment to a modern operating platform to enable increased productivity, minimise security issues, and reduce support costs. Part of this transformation involved upgrading the end-user device from Windows 7 to Windows 10.

Challenges

This large-scale migration project had many challenges, two of which were key to success:

  • Understanding the current estate make-up in terms of devices, users, locations and application requirements
  • Building a rollout plan that wouldn’t impact the delivery of patient care and would accommodate the multi-location mobile workers with laptops

Platform Requirements

The Trust required a platform to assist with the successful, ongoing delivery of operating system upgrades and application management. The following were set out as requirements:

  • Provide discovery data to show single pane-of-glass view of current estate combining multiple data sources to provide a single point of truth
  • Show granular usage metrics of devices and applications with breakdown by location and department
  • Enable automated communications for the end-users to keep them informed of key updates, migration dates etc
  • Deliver stakeholders with key milestone information through dashboards and reports
  • Validate user data (location, device info, application requirements etc) through user surveys
  • Schedule users for migration via a self-service portal

Devices Migrated

6,500

Applications Packaged

400

Total Savings

£726,000

Outcome

The initial Windows 10 upgrades were managed manually and this process was extremely time-consuming. In an organisation with over 400 applications in use, it was very difficult to get a view on which applications should be prioritised for packaging in order to give the Trust the best value for money.

ManagementStudio was subsequently chosen to provide estate discovery, process control and automation.

The solution was implemented and discovery data from multiple data sources (Active Directory, SCCM, HR system) aggregated and made available in less than one day.

This single pane-of-glass view enabled the Trust to rapidly implement a bespoke migration process with two-way SCCM integration, providing fully automated migrations with user-selected migration timeslots where appropriate.

Understanding application-usage and device inventory was key to being able to plan the migration strategy effectively. ManagementStudio’s data connectors ran daily, providing the project team with near real-time visibility of the usage patterns across this estate.

This facilitated dynamic application rationalisation which in turn produced readiness reports, allowing the project team to deliver an early pilot migration with great success. Subsequent migrations were rapid and trouble-free thanks the SCCM integration.

The Trust also realised a tangible time savings of 3 months through effort optimisation, process control and automation in ManagementStudio.

Testimonial

“I have received many positive comments about how organised the upgrade programme is”

Lead Migration Analyst, Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Get In Touch