Project Home

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Project Home

Fujitsu won the contract for Project Head Office Modern Environment (HOME) providing the project management, integration, implementation and ongoing service management of a new IT infrastructure and 6,000 work stations.

Customer’s Challenge

The UK MOD’s Headquarters (HQ) in Whitehall was well overdue for refurbishment. The working environment was dated and there were numerous different IT systems with a widely varying range of modernity.

It was hard to locate information across the many different systems, which made day to day working a real challenge. The multitude of systems meant that any attempt to introduce modern working practises would have been time consuming and costly due to the legacy IT.

Many employees also needed to have access to news channels. They could only view them by sitting in shared television areas where they couldn’t necessarily see the channel they needed if someone else were watching a different one.

The decision was made and staff moved out to buildings all over central London while the HQ was gutted and completely refurbished.

Fujitsu’s Solution

Fujitsu won the contract for Project Head Office Modern Environment (HOME) providing the project management, integration, implementation and ongoing service management of a new IT infrastructure and 6,000 work stations.

A new electronic working environment, developed jointly by Fujitsu and Microsoft, was introduced, codenamed Accelerator. It included a Meridio Enterprise Document and Records Management (EDRM) solution, K2’s workflow product, Microsoft SharePoint Services and innovative hardware to enable collaborative working with multiple security levels.

A shared television service was also developed by Fujitsu, creating a cutting edge broadcasting solution to distribute ten unclassified television channels directly to the users desktop.

Fujitsu’s involvement was total, from development and implementation, to training and floor walking, to helping users in their first few days with the new systems.

Benefits to our Customer

Improved communications. The Accelerator environment has transformed the way staff work together and made communication easy. Collaborative tools give access to virtual communities, including my site, team sites, project sites and the head office portal site.

Easy access to information. Sharing documents is simply a matter of posting them on a team site accessible to everyone involved in a project.

Easy location and retrieval of information. The ability to find information from document libraries, as well as many other portals and intranets, has fundamentally changed the way the MOD works.

Questions answered. Fujitsu has developed a Freedom of Information toolkit to enable MOD to fulfil their commitments to Central Government in this area.

Access multiple television channels at users desktop. Users no longer have to leave their desk and can select their desired channel from the comfort and privacy of their desk. With a camera installed at the sandwich bar downstairs, they can even see if the queue is too long!

Objectives and deadlines met. All the MOD’s objectives have been met by Project HOME, including the tight timescales imposed, with the IT installation being completed on time.

Re-use of technology. The Accelerator working environment is now being rolled out to other parts of the MOD, including the RAF Head Quarters, the Royal Navy’s Headquarters and the Permanent Joint Head Quarters.

Our Approach

Despite an inevitably changing refurbishment plan and timescales, Fujitsu remained flexible and were able to make up for lost time by working extra hours and, at one point, installing twice as many workstations in one weekend than the contract required.

Users were trained on the new system before returning to the new building. In the first few weeks they also received floor-walking support, to ensure that their experience was positive and productivity was high from the start.

The Expertise

Fujitsu has great experience in designing and building multi-level secure systems and it was this, combined with strength in project management that made them the right choice for this project.

Bob Quick, DII IPT Team Leader, commented, “Project Home has delivered many benefits to the Head Office user community and was an example of an excellent partnership between the MOD and a responsive and flexible contractor. Fujitsu is to be congratulated on its delivery to a very demanding set of parameters.”

Fujitsu has a strong understanding of the MODs requirements that comes from 40 years of working together.