“Having Consultancy provided by Rhys each week has enabled Deaf Aotearoa to get our heads up out of the Operational matters and be pro-active and more Strategic. Whilst it’s hard to find time in our busy days to step back and figure out what we could do smarter this investment has proved to be a great success! In practical terms I’ve been able to discuss with Rhys some of our headaches, like better understanding our Facilitators daily workloads and how that impacts our service to our Deaf clients. After some discussion we were able to develop a system to breakdown the volumes of services provided by individual Facilitators which in turn helped with staff performance and how we can better provide efficient services. The breakdown of information has highlighted valuable insights to our Management team and that has helped our Operational Management as we can identify areas that we need to have staff focused and identifying new Performance Indicators.
In general, I’d recommend the ITMaaS service to other organisations to give some valuable support and allow better time management of staff. A major success for this year has been that our systems were able to cope almost seamlessly when all staff were suddenly forced to work from home due to COVID-19. Deaf Aotearoa was deemed an essential service and we were able to support the Deaf community across NZ at a time when that support was absolutely critical to them.”
Best Practice Review and IT Consultancy
IT Strategy and Execution to Improve Efficiency and Add Value
Deaf Aotearoa is a national organisation representing the voice of Deaf people, and the national service provider for Deaf people in New Zealand. Deaf Aotearoa provides a range of services for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community from employment to providing assistance with equipment, youth support, interpreting services and advocacy.
Deaf Aotearoa also works closely with Deaf communities, government agencies and other organisations to increase awareness, promote New Zealand Sign Language and strengthen the rights of Deaf people.
Deaf Aotearoa have 80 staff located in 14 offices throughout New Zealand.
What Deaf Aotearoa needed
Deaf Aotearoa have internal IT resources for day-to day issues, and out-source support of more complex IT issues. However, the focus was on maintaining systems – fixing issues and keeping the lights on.
Deaf Aotearoa did not have an IT strategy and although they knew they could be working smarter, they didn’t have the time or expertise to progress work that added value to their staff; helping them be more efficient, more secure or generally making their lives easier.
Services Provided
Our Kambium Consultant Rhys, a strategic IT expert, has been providing “IT Manager as a Service (ITMaaS)” and annual Best Practice IT reviews to Deaf Aotearoa for 3 years to help add value to their staff through a digital transformation.
How Consultancy works for the client
Every year a Best Practice IT review is completed which helps identify the goals and priorities for the year. From this a simple IT strategy is developed. This is supplemented with standard IT Manager tasks to form an IT plan for the year.
Our “IT Manager as a Service” Consultant spends half a day a week at the Deaf Aotearoa offices working with management and staff to ensure that the work to achieve the goals is progressing.
The Consultant is embedded in the Deaf Aotearoa team which allows them to have an excellent understanding of the Deaf Aotearoa systems, people and culture.
Regular reporting on the status of the work ensures that management have visibility of progress, and additional comfort that IT decisions have been peer checked to ensure they meet best practice.
Successes
At Deaf Aotearoa our ITMaaS Consultant facilitates and advises the IT projects and Deaf Aotearoa executes. Examples of major successes that have been achieved / projects include:
- Teams was already rolled-out and actively used which allowed for seamless collaboration and communication between staff during COVID19 lockdown.
- Implemented a number of PowerBI dashboards to allow easier access to KPIs and data by management and staff, allowing them to turn data into actionable information.
- Streamlined the process used for the NZ Sign Language week “Taster Classes” to reduce the amount of manual work required.
- Streamlined the process for the Deaf Aotearoa membership database.
- A number of additional security features implemented such as multi-factor authentication, conditional access, “safe links” and “safe attachments”, full disk encryption.
- Development of internal IT processes such as entry and exit procedures.
- Streamlined the process for deploying new computers using an imaging system to reduce the time required and ensure consistent applications and configurations.
- IT Disaster Recovery plan created and ratified by management
Best Practice Review
The Best Practice Review is a comprehensive process that considers every aspect of your IT. The Review helps uncover what you should be doing with IT to improve your business and identify priorities for your organisation to achieve strategic and short-term goals. The Review provides senior executives and directors a clear view of how they are managing the risks and benefits of IT for their organisation.
IT Manager as a Service (ITMaaS)
ITMaaS is contracted IT Management that is flexible and scalable based for your organisational needs and IT strategy. Whether it’s a CIO, part-time IT Manager, Project Manager or IT Support Resources, we work with each organisation to understand what is critical and relevant to your business then create a workflow of required activity.