The Highlands City Council faced a very large and challenging project to remove out-of-date IT equipment and replace it with minimum disruption across its corporate buildings, schools and colleges, whilst giving employees the support they needed to feel comfortable with the new systems.
We were asked by one of our partners, contracted to deliver this significant transitional project, to support their capacity with our trained engineers. Our approach was to create local capability rather than the costly relocation of nationwide engineers.
We recruited and trained people living in the Highlands, meaning that 80% of our eventual project team were locally employed – a great result of investment in the local economy and limiting the need for accommodation expenses.
The Cerco team project managed, scheduled and mentored the engineers in partnership with our customer.
Around 80 team leaders, deployment engineers and build engineers worked on the project over an 18 month period.
The newly trained team worked in partnership to decommission old kit and build and install new systems, followed by desk side support for staff.
The expectations of the end customer, The Highlands City Council, were exceeded. Cerco and its partner had delivered on a project that had previously faced major setbacks with unsatisfactory suppliers and high costs linked to the challenging location.
The innovative approach of training local people for the local jobs saved thousands – a solution that had both environmental benefits and that helped people living in one of the worst unemployment areas of the UK back into work.