The Moray Council

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The Moray Council

“Fujitsu's benefits realisation approach has turned our normal thinking on its head - giving our planning process an outcomebased focus.” Donnie Macdonald - Quality Improvement Officer, Educational Services, The Moray Council

Customer's Challenge

Moray is a largely rural area in the north east of Scotland containing a rich variety of farmland, fishing villages and mountainous countryside. While The Moray Council is the eighth largest local authority in Scotland, it also has the fourth lowest population, with just under 90,000 people.

The Council is committed to providing its citizens with the highest quality educational facilities, including access to the new Scottish Schools Digital Network, Glow. When it is launched, Glow will be a national schools intranet, digitally linking Scotland's 800,000 educators and pupils and providing a wide range of high quality material to support educational development.

Donnie Macdonald, Quality Improvement Officer, Educational Services, The Moray Council, continues, “Glow is a powerful online tool, which uses engaging technologies that are designed to get people excited about learning. However, because of its advanced nature, the Council recognised that it would be challenging to create a local implementation plan that enabled our teachers and pupils to get the full value out of Glow.”

Fujitsu’s Solution

As part of the National Grid for Learning (NGfL) programme, The Moray Council had already awarded Fujitsu a £12.5 million contract to supply and manage the latest information and communications technology in its 54 schools. In particular, Fujitsu provides email, video conferencing and secure Internet access to the teachers, administrators and 13,000 pupils.

Donnie Macdonald explains, “The aim of the project is to provide the opportunity for everybody in primary and secondary education to have access to the same ICT resources. It is also about exploring new ways to use ICT and sharing good practice, and Fujitsu has always been very willing to offer assistance and help the Council in whatever way it can.”

In particular, Fujitsu suggested that The Moray Council adopt a benefits realisation approach to the deployment of Glow, so that its implementation plan was developed from the users' perspective and not treated as a purely technical challenge. Donnie Macdonald continues, “Fujitsu's recommendation about benefits realisation made sense as it meant that we could start by looking at the end-result that we wanted to achieve from Glow, and then work backwards to determine what initiatives would be needed to get us there and the risks involved.”

Following an initial discussion about how the benefits realisation techniques could be applied to increase the benefits management capability within The Moray Council, Fujitsu organised a series of workshops over four days to discuss the Glow project and identify the required benefits (or outcomes) of the programme through the use of its Benefits Map modelling technique.

Around 20 people from the Council took part in the workshops, who were chosen to represent key stakeholders from across the organisation, including teachers, administrators and directors, each with their own unique needs, concerns and levels of involvement with Glow.

“Everyone will have a part to play in the use of Glow, so it was important to capture everyone's needs and also get their buy-in,” says Donnie Macdonald. “That meant starting with a completely blank sheet of paper, but Fujitsu's facilitation of the process was excellent - first capturing everyone's input and then bringing order to the process by beginning to group these needs into 'early wins', medium-term benefits and the strategic 'big change' benefits!”

The output from the workshops has been used by Fujitsu to develop a Benefits Plan, which provides The Moray Council with a benefits management and measurement framework within which the identified benefits can be monitored, measured and managed. The associated Benefits Map captures, in an easy to navigate form, the path that must be followed and the steps that must be taken if the expected benefits are to be achieved. So, there are no “leaps of faith”, but rather a logical progression of clearly defined activities.

Donnie Macdonald adds, “The output from the benefits realisation process comes in a variety of formats, but having a Roadmap all on one page is particularly useful as it gives order to our initiatives and ensures that we can track progress to ensure that benefits are achieved. And it's all couched in 'teacher speak' not technical jargon, so they are all activities that people can relate to and measure.”

The Moray Council has subsequently used the output from the Benefits Plan to create a project plan for the local implementation of Glow, which it has now put forward to the Scottish Executive for approval.

“The whole process has been very innovative for us as we've learnt a new process and also solved a key problem!” explains Donnie Macdonald. “We're now confident that we're approaching the deployment of Glow from the right angle and have a robust plan. We also have a methodology to help us solve other problems that we face in the future, which is a big benefit for us. In fact, some head teachers are already using the benefits realisation process in their own schools as they recognised its potential at an early stage.”

Benefits to our Customer

Fujitsu's benefits realisation service has helped The Moray Council to optimise its use of the Glow system by providing:

• Strategic alignment - outputs are built around the needs of the entire organisation and reflect overall business objectives, helping to gain buy-in at all levels and achieve long-term success
• Measurable objectives - sets clear priorities for short, medium and long-term objectives that can be continually monitored in order to maintain momentum and maximise overall project value
• Clear accountabilities - provides a mechanism for the effective ownership and tracking of goals, so that activities are completed on time and to budget
• Improved resource usage - identifies the processes and resources needed to facilitate each activity, and aligns existing processes to support the strategy
• Better communication - improves the articulation of strategy by illustrating clearly what the organisation is trying to achieve and over what time period
• Reduced risk - highlights the obstacles that need to be addressed in order to achieve the desired outcomes.

Donnie Macdonald comments, “It's very easy to do things just because they need doing, when really you should be doing them because you want a certain outcome. Fujitsu's benefits realisation approach has turned our normal thinking on its head - giving our planning process an outcome-based, rather than just an activity-based focus. Glow is all about improving teaching and learning - not technology - and the benefits realisation techniques that we have learnt from Fujitsu will enable the Council to ensure that the right actions are taken to realise those benefits within an optimum timeframe.”

Our Approach

Fujitsu's benefits realisation approach is designed to help organisations to identify, structure, monitor, measure and ultimately realise the benefits arising from the appropriate application of IT.

Donnie Macdonald says, “Fujitsu's deployment of its benefits realisation techniques was very well organised and handled. The workshops were conducted in a relaxed manner, but there was a very quick turnaround of ideas, so people could see progress at each stage of the process. This meant that people got involved very quickly with what we were trying to achieve, because they could see the successes looming and that things were always moving forward. Fujitsu's ability to generate and maintain this kind of momentum was critical.”

The Expertise

With over 30 years experience of supporting the needs of government departments and local authorities, Fujitsu has a proven track record in providing complex systems integration services and mobile solutions that reduce costs, improve productivity and customer services and deliver a compelling return on investment.

“We have a very positive partnership with Fujitsu,” adds Donnie Macdonald. “While much of the work that we have done in the past has been technology based, it is now clear to everyone in the Council that Fujitsu's capability stretches well beyond that, and that's crucial.”