How are you going to deliver your cost savings?

Due to government cuts, the head of a government department was under increasing pressure to find a £2.5M cost saving over 3 years. This public facing department generates £14M of revenue a year managed by over 100 staff. Cuts had to be made and performance had to be maintained.

Putting a business case forward

The IT system was the best place to start as it was underperforming and regularly crashing. Beside this impact there was a growing backlog and staff morale was affected.

Despite the impact, the board would not grant him a budget to fix the problem.

After a short study, Quadnet demonstrated that a yearly £200k saving could be made from reduced staffing levels by fixing the system problems. He was able to use this evidence to put a business case forward to justify getting the situation resolved.

Pinpointing the problem

The head had to know where the problem was and the next challenge was finding those responsible. All too often the IT teams blame each other. The networking team says it’s the database team, the database team say it’s the application team.

Through Quadnet's Diagnostic Services the problem was identified with the application. With this information at hand it was now possible to sit with the right team to start finding a resolution.

Holding the Developers Accountable

A plan was put forward by the application developers, an external company. A cost was negotiated against a measurable performance increase in the system. This was easy to monitor. Quadnet were able to prove that the developers did not produce the required results. So the developers had to optimize further. The system measurably improved after the second attempt.

At the end of the exercise staff were performing better and the service head is meeting his Cost Cutting target. He was able to reduce staffing levels showing a saving of £600K over three years.