• About the customer

    Focusing on Customer Needs

    The Progressive Building Society is an integral part of the life of Northern Ireland. Born out of the merger of five tiny societies, it first opened its doors under the ‘Progressive’ name in 1914.

     

    The society continues to grow through strong and vibrant leadership, and counts itself amongst the ‘Top 10’ building societies in the United Kingdom with assets of over £1.6 billion.

The Challenge

Adoption rate of new technology is accelerating

Many of the business critical internal applications are deployed using a Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktop platform. As early adopters of server and desktop virtualisation, The Progressive Building Society had developed a relatively small, but capable in-house IT department. As demand from users and customers grew, the adoption rate of new technology also accelerated.

 

The in-house IT department recognised that their core function was to support the needs of their customers, aligned to critical applications, rather than the infrastructure that housed them. The Progressive sought a move to a more suitable support model which provided a proactive managed support solution, offering ownership and uptime guarantees on core infrastructure.

The Solution

Continuous Staff Training Requirement
The Progressive Building Society had previously engaged in upgrade projects spanning multiple hardware and software platforms. This led to recognition of the need to continuously improve upon staff training. With the focus on maintaining the internal service levels of their own demanding user community, the Progressive Building Society preferred to outsource this element of support.
Blended Managed Service Model
The Managed Service solution presented a blended approach, incorporating proactive reviews of the in-scope environment whilst maintaining the reactive function of customer lead call logging, akin to a typical reactive service desk.
Risk‑Based Change Management
As part of the managed service , we worked with the Progressive IT team to develop a Change Management procedure which applies a risk category to every requested change. Understanding the risk enables Progressive staff to make correct and appropriate decisions in relation to the IT environment thus ensuring the customer is protected both in terms of data integrity and the service available.
Independent Monitoring & Management Stack
We implemented an independent monitoring and management stack, accessed by key contracted support staff over a secured, private and dedicated network connection. This ensures only Progressive traffic is transmitted over the MPLS and also provides a direct route into the management infrastructure. With no reliance on primary or secondary network connectivity, we can guarantee constant access to the environment, even in the event of total MPLS failure.
Real‑Time Monitoring & Trend Analytics
Our monitoring software reports in “real-time”, enabling contracted staff to build intelligence based profiles of the Progressive environment. In depth understanding of the data enables staff to model the trend analytics to ensure issues related to typical hardware and software failures are avoided through proactive resolution practices.

What the customer said

  • “

    The robust managed service provided strengthens our ability to support our business and members and helps us to focus on our digital proposition and our new ways of working.

    Monique Silva

    Head of IT, Progressive Building Society

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