Case Study PC Audit and Clinic

The Client

Details supplied on request, employs 100 members of staff, 60 remotely. Based in Cardiff it is independent of the National Assembly for Wales but is funded by it.

The Challenge

Westgate had to design and plan a short term 2 day project onsite in Cardiff where we could do a physical software audit of all 70+ laptops very quickly and smoothly and apply a standardised “locked down” software build with optimised security configuration settings. We then had to schedule to do the audit and return each users laptop to them on the same day, to avoid disrupting their work. So lots of time pressures for our network engineers!

Business Solution

Our understanding of the client, the users and the IT requirements involved meant that we could quickly plan out how we would run the 2 day Audit and Laptop Clinic and assess the level of network engineer resource we needed to do the audit and software installations very quickly.
Our solution was to agree with the client a 2 day period over which the audit/clinic work would be done. We then communicate with all the users located all over Wales about timings and responsibilities as well as informing all users what we were going to be doing to “their” laptop. In this process we wanted to flush out from each user any problems they were having with their laptop including software issues so that we could ensure that we dealt with them efficiently when we processed their laptop during the clinic.
As always at Westgate IT when providing mission critical services for clients, our main focus was on ensuring that we met users’ needs within the timescales that mattered to them. In this case the challenge was that we had large numbers of laptops being given to us over a relatively short number of working hours and with some of the users being from North Wales and only in Cardiff for one day then we had to schedule reconfiguration and standardisation over a short time period. The audit form was subsequently processed with digital copies produced for the client as well as the results input into a database for analysis by at a later date.
 

Outcome

The 2 day laptop audit and clinic was a great success with a happy client, happy users and subsequently Westgate found IT support calls were simpler and easier to fix as all the machines had a completely standard software build and configuration. Problems were experienced on the day, we would admit, as some machines had software builds with glitches that could not be easily fixed, requiring us to re-image the laptops. As re-imaging took almost a day due to the necessity to encrypt the laptop hard disks to meet Government Information Security policies.