Surrey Police is committed to providing the best possible policing service to the people of Surrey, which includes driving improved efficiency and delivery across the organisation, from front line policing to the back office.
As part of this, an in-house change support team, the Force Improvement Team, was established to lead the way in best practice project delivery.
Typical projects range from continuous improvement programmes through to capital schemes, such as new facilities. The remit for the Force Improvement Team was to set standards and give guidance and support while maintaining an overall view of some 200 change projects.
Essential to this was replacing the Excel-based system with a mature, value for money Enterprise Project Management (EPM) platform offering a single project repository with clear and common processes, reporting, collaboration and coordination and which enabled improved decision making, governance and better management of resources and documents.
“There had been no consistency,” explained John Barrett, project assurance consultant with the Force Improvement Team. “We had many different reports all based on Excel and Word with summaries that could be up to 18 pages long and everyone wanted to save documents in different locations or save multiple copies.”
A key issue was highlight reporting, which the Force Improvement Team hoped to replicate directly from the EPM solution into Excel dashboards. Program Framework was able to configure this solution, resulting in a more efficient process. The new system was first rolled out to the Force Improvement Team’s Project Management Office, who set up and populated projects and started risk and issue logs.
The solution is built on a Microsoft technology platform and includes Microsoft Project Server 2010, Microsoft Project Professional 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise CAL, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 with Reporting Services, Excel Services. This combination of technologies provides users with the ability to collaborate effectively, and gives management the control and visibility they require to make effective decisions. The deployment was based on Program Framework’s pre-configured Project Server Framework™. This provides a pre-packaged set of configured features, additional software tools and out-of-the- box reports that support common processes and helped to accelerate the Project Server implementation while reducing deployment cost.
Said Gero Renker, director of Program Framework: “Surrey Police now has the tools to work more efficiently, share information across boundaries, have greater clarity of that information, to deliver the right projects to a higher quality with the right people and reduce the burden of administration.”
“It’s going to make a massive improvement in the efficiency of managing and coordinating projects – and in our ability to find documents where there has been an instant time saving because people no longer have to come to us to ask where they can find something,”
“Gero Renker and the team from Program Framework were brilliant. We set them quite a challenge but they were fantastic and flexible, going above and beyond to work out a solution that was exactly what we needed. It inspired confidence in them and their abilities.”
John Barrett, Project Assurance Consultant, Force Improvement Team, Surrey Police
