Customer Stories: Professional Standards Authority

professional standards authority

About the Professional Standards Authority  

The Professional Standards Authority (PSA) is an independent organisation that is responsible for promoting the health, safety and wellbeing of patients, service users, and the public.  

Accountable to Parliament, the organisation helps to protect the public by improving the regulation and registration of people who work in health and care.  

As part of the PSA’s cloud strategy and office relocation program, Littlefish provided PSA with a high-level cloud adoption and transformation plan. The plan would empower PSA to focus on business IT improvements, efficiencies, and benefits moving forward, whilst supporting their aspirations for the future. 

Customer Challenge 

After completing a technical discovery phase, Littlefish concluded that PSA had a large infrastructure estate in comparison to its relatively small headcount and that its digital estate was geared around the traditional ethos of centralised security (i.e., where the only way to secure services and data was to ensure that access was tightly controlled through, and coupled to, a central point).  

Additionally, the balance of infrastructure needed by PSA to provide and manage user access to their key services was much greater than the one needed to actually deliver these under the Microsoft umbrella. 

Littlefish Solution 

The cloud transformation would promote coherence across the sector and facilitate cross-disciplinary teamwork and remote working by transforming PSA’s IT estate to a largely serverless model. The project would also establish and drive further benefits from PSA’s use of Microsoft 365 and Azure. 

Littlefish worked closely with the key business stakeholders to develop, redesign, and transform PSA’s IT service, continually reviewing the plan and architecture at key stages to ensure PSA’s business objectives remained the focus of delivery and to achieve the highest degree of success for the organisation. 

 

Overall, the cloud transformation offered PSA the following gains: 
  • Removing on-premises IT infrastructure, reducing storage and maintenance overheads
  • Removing the requirement for offsite DR, reducing costs and maintenance overheads
  • Enhancing the ability for ease of hybrid working, utilising collaborative tools such as Microsoft Teams, including the telephony function
  • Implementing a robust back-up solution to minimise data loss
  • Designing an efficient method of assigning devices to end-users which would enable remote fixes and rebuilds (previously done onsite)
  • Introducing a secure ‘bring your own device’ policy
  • Licence consolidation – Sophos AV to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

 

A major goal of the transformation was to deliver growth and efficiency gains through optimised user experience. To ensure this, along with the project delivery itself, Littlefish also supplied business communications around the transformation, signposting PSA’s users to useful and informative resources at each stage of the project.  

The collaborative approach that Littlefish applied throughout this project was refreshing. Littlefish demonstrated that they were really focused on enabling us to meet our goals through a strategic digital transformation that leveraged the public cloud and bolstered our operations for the future.

Jane Carey, Director Corporate Services, PSA 

Outcomes 

Littlefish were able to facilitate PSA by designing and implementing new IT architecture which focused on sustainable business IT improvements, efficiencies, and benefits, and which aligned with the above business objectives. This in turn has also enabled PSA to be forward thinking in their approach to their IT strategy.  

Through the project (and the below gains), we were able to offer PSA further value from their existing investment in Microsoft E5 licenses, basically unlocking what PSA had already paid for but hadn’t been able to utilise. We shall continue on this journey with PSA to further unlock the benefits of the powerful E5 license and ensure PSA are fully benefitting from what this license has to offer.  

The desired state architecture for PSA was predominantly serverless and service orientated. The focus being to create operational efficiencies within the IT service by reducing the time and effort required to “water and feed” the IT infrastructure. This, in turn, enabled PSA’s IT resources to focus on, and drive the adoption of, further improvements and efficiencies within the business. 

The project enabled a secure, boundaryless information flow which would promote cross-team collaboration and provided new operational capabilities for the business. 

The transformative work carried out fulfilled two criteria: both improving PSA’s current return on investment for their digital estate (allowing them to utilise already-paid-for services, for example) and delivering additional workstreams that delivered new, more efficient, and user-friendly functionalities. 

We were impressed with Littlefish’s user-centric approach and the fact that they were very keen on becoming a true partner. It resulted in a smooth transition to the new service allowing us to get on with the day job. 

Jane Carey, Director Corporate Services, PSA

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