Wednesday July 09 2008

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Case Study
Charity Commision for England and Wales

The Charity Commission is the government department that maintains public confidence in the integrity of charity. It is accountable for its decisions to the courts and for its efficiency to the Home Secretary. There are four Commissioners, appointed by the Home Secretary.

The Charity Commission controls the Register of some 180,000 charities, adding around 8,000 new registrations each year. To help charities, and the charitable sector as a whole, make effective use of charity resources the Commission provides advice and guidance to help charities achieve their objectives efficiently and effectively within the law.

The Charity Commission also tackles abuse and bad practice in the sector, using a range of advisory and regulatory powers. In 1998 The Charity Commission protected charitable funds worth £32million.

The Challenge
Towards the end of 1999, The Charity Commission were seeking to upgrade their desktop computers, ensuring Year 2000 compliance and offering greater desktop processing power. At the same time, the Commission were keen to re-deploy the most powerful of their legacy PC's.

The proposed systems upgrade was to encompass all three of The Commission's main sites in Taunton, London and Liverpool. The deployment was required to take place over three weekends, one for each site. The work was due to commence on the Friday night with all machines installed and operational by the Saturday morning - a 100% success rate was also essential. Any legacy PC's that were not suitable for re-deployment were dismantled and their hard disks de-gaussed and rendered inoperable.

The Solution
Using the Elonex Project Management Approach, the project was split into key stages. The 300 new PCs were manufactured at the Elonex facilities in London and packaged ready for deployment to each of the three sites. Elonex consultants refurbished the third-party legacy systems.

The Elonex Project Manager visited each of the sites to formulate the most efficient deployment schedule working with the local Facilities Manager and Security personnel to ensure a seamless installation. Elonex project teams commenced work at each site on the Friday night and completed the installation in time for breakfast on the Saturday.

The Results
Elonex delivered and deployed 300 new ProSentia 2000 PCs, refurbished and installed over 100 third-party computers working through the night to achieve the 100% operational target. Every PC installed was certified by The Commission as being fully installed and operational by the Saturday morning. The Commission were presented with certificates for each of the hard disks that were de-gaussed and destroyed. The Charity Commission were very satisfied with the efficiency of the project and the quality of service provided.