THE PERFECT UNION: 

Doherty supports University and College Union (UCU), the UK’s largest trade union for staff working in further and higher education.

“Doherty proved they can adapt to our changing needs. Their readiness and ability to cover the full range of work has been crucially important to us.”           

 
With over 120,000 members, University and College Union (UCU) is the UK’s largest trade union for staff working in further and higher education. UCU was formed in 2006 by the merging of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) with the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE).

Doherty Associates had worked with both associations since the mid-1990’s and was therefore perfectly placed to handle all IT during the merger as well as to support the new organisation.

Paul Cottrell (National Head of Public Policy at UCU) first contacted Doherty in 1995 when he wanted to network AUT’s systems. “We were looking for a company that had specialist knowledge and experience in networking and were the right size for us. We wanted personal service and advice on how we could develop our IT resources, rather than just keep them ticking over. We felt Doherty had good ideas and could suggest real improvements.”

Since the first complete network and hardware upgrade was conducted, Doherty have completed a range of other projects, including the development of a membership database and two office moves.

MAKING THE CONNECTION

For the merger in 2006, Doherty was in charge of bringing together the two separate systems so all users could work from the same network. This involved consolidating 200 mailboxes into a fault-tolerant server configuration, as well as integrating file, print and other application servers and backing up all data.

“There were big risk factors, especially on the weekend the mailboxes were merged” recalls Paul Cottrell. “Some of them were huge and downtime creates big problems for an organisation like ours. We have 120,000 members and pretty much all of them communicate with us via email. I was very impressed with the planning that Doherty put into the project; they are very strong in this area. As a customer, I was very confident we would get exactly what we wanted.”

Critical to UCU’s success was their ability to connect two London HQs with ten offices in the regions. The newly-formed Union had 180 members of staff, many of whom worked on the move. Staff needed to be able to access emails and files at all times, wherever they were.

Doherty successfully interconnected all the offices by installing a secure Virtual Private Network (VPN). As Lynne Walker says, “It was very important to increase the efficiency of the way we worked by getting all the staff working together. Doherty played a central role in making the IT side of that work.”

LEANER MEANER AND GREENER

In the second quarter of 2009, UCU integrated their two London HQs and moved to a single, larger building. They saw this as an ideal opportunity to simplify and upgrade their IT systems, though they wanted to keep their expenditure as low as possible. They reduced the number of servers in the network from 24 to 8 through virtualisation, thereby saving space, time, energy and money. They also introduced Data Protection Manager, and a clustered Exchange Server environment to ensure that their systems are as safe as possible.

As Steve Foulger, Network and Databases IT Manager explains, “the whole migration and installation took place over one weekend. There were a tremendous number of things that all had to come together at the same time and I believe it was quite amazing that we opened for business as usual the following week. I put this down to the fact that it was very well planned. Doherty managed the downtime of Exchange so well that people in the head office and the regions didn’t notice. They made sure that as much was done before the move as was possible, so it went without a hitch.”

Altiris software was used to deploy 150 PCs during the two day period. Elena Gillen, the Desktop Systems and Deployment Manager, now uses Altiris to deploy images on a regular basis. “I like Altiris very much. It’s saving me lots of time. Even if you don’t have the time to find a solution to a problem, you can just deploy an image and because of the folder redirection the user’s desktop is exactly the same when they come back to their PC. There’s much more Altiris can do and I’m currently looking into how we can use it to apply patches and how we can roll out new software across our regional offices.”

MAINTAINING THE RELATIONSHIP

UCU has three dedicated IT staff based at their head office, however, they retain a Doherty Associates support contract to provide cover and extend their in-house expertise. “Doherty are an add-on to the UCU support team. We wouldn’t be able to manage the head office and all 10 offices in the regions on our own. It would be too much work” says Elena Gillan.

If key IT staff are out of the office, sick or on holiday, UCU can still rely on Doherty. When Elena commenced work for UCU towards the end of 2008 for example, one of her key contacts was on sabbatical, so having a third party team with in-depth knowledge of the internal systems proved invaluable. “Doherty have been fantastic. It was great to have a team that could transfer knowledge to me. I was able to get up and running much faster. It would have been so difficult without them.”

In addition, if IT staff have a problem that can’t be resolved in-house, they can call the Doherty helpdesk for remote or telephone assistance at any time. “The people on the helpdesk are great. They know our systems inside out and they are always able to give us an answer straight away” says Lynne Walker. “Also, they really understand their customer’s level of skill and the fact that I will ask different questions to the IT Manager at our other site. If it’s something I should know because I need to do it more than once, they always explain it patiently. But sometimes I’m busy and I just want the job done, and they are happy to do that too.”

As UCU have grown, so has Doherty. Despite this, many members of the original team remain in place - which UCU regard as a significant benefit. “The strength of Doherty Associates is in the abilities of their staff and continuity of personnel. When we were AUT, Simon was the first engineer who came to the building to do some work on a PC. We’ve been with Doherty for more than 10 years now and he’s still working on projects for us.”

Lynne Walker

 

Visit UCU's website.