Staying top of the league: Premier Support in Lancashire

An increasing number of NHS trusts are taking up Microsoft Premier Support, a “managed support offering” that includes problem resolution, workshops and strategic planning services.

Declan Hadley and John Martland from Lancashire Care Foundation trust talk about why they opted for Premier Support a year ago and their experience of it since.


Lancashire Care Foundation trust provides mental health, substance misuse and other services to 1.3 million people.

Its IT team supports more than 4,000 trust staff at sites spread over a huge area down the Ribble Valley and from Blackpool in the west to Burnley in the east. It also provides IT services to a number of other NHS organisations, including NHS North West, the local strategic health authority.

Declan Hadley, the trust’s associate director of IM&T, says a desire to provide a competitive, world class IT service to so many clients was one of the key factors behind its decision to sign a Microsoft Premier Support contract last March [2007]. “You get support when things go wrong - but I want to stop things going wrong in the first place.”

“What I am constantly emphasising is that we need to optimise our infrastructure and get it working really well if we are going to be competitive [with other IT providers],” he says. “We need to be able to offer world class products and services and that is what Microsoft is offering us.”

Microsoft Premier Support

Microsoft Premier Support is a “managed support offering” that offers a mix of reactive and proactive services. It gives customers round the clock access to problem resolution support, the opportunity to attend dedicated workshops and other events, and a number of prevention and strategic planning services.

Matt Nelson, a service executive in Microsoft’s UK healthcare team, says trusts are often attracted by the problem resolution initially, but soon come to see the value of the proactive hours. However, Mr Hadley has always regarded these as the main benefit of the contract.

“It is a significant sum of money, and you do think ‘what are we going to get for it’,” he admits. “But the answer, for me, is a wealth of experience, particularly around prevention. Yes, you get support when things go wrong - but I want to stop things going wrong in the first place.

“When I look at some of the problems we have, with email for example, I reckon 90 per cent could be stopped. With Premier Support, we get the expertise we need to stop them. People come in and look at our estate and how it is configured and work with our engineers to stop them.”

Fixing problems, stopping problems

John Martland, IT shared services manager, also sees the benefit of this element of the contract. “We use Microsoft products across the area,” he says. “For example, we have been using Microsoft Active Directory for about five years and there have been a lot of support issues with it.

“Different consultants came in and recommended different things, so we wanted to make sure we had the best possible advice. That was the support side – but there was also an element of proactiveness; we wanted to push things forward.“We offer our service to other organisations, so it is just not good enough anymore for someone to sit around trying to fix something or making do and mend.”

“So last year, we looked at Exchange and Active Directory and did a security review. This year, we are looking at staff development, at server and desktop management, at better communications for staff and at improved information for business processes.”

Getting the most out of the deal

However, there have been some frustrations. “Initially, we were not quite sure how to use the contract,” says Mr Martland. “It took a few meetings with our technical account manager to really work out what we should be doing; but we have really picked things up over the past six months.”

One of the first things the trust did was to work through Microsoft’s Infrastructure Optimisation model, which, at the time, was a questionnaire with paper-based feedback (it has recently been put online).

Mr Martland thinks IO is a good idea, “because it focuses your attention on where you are and where you need to invest.”

“We came out as standardised on most things and I want to push for ‘rationalised’ this year, with better server management and better management of our desk-tops,” he says.

Meanwhile, the trust has also undertaken a number of risk assessment programmes (RAPs), which look at specific issues, such as Exchange and Active Directory.

And it has started to make more use of the events and workshops that come with Premier Support - although Mr Martland complains that these tend to be at Microsoft’s UK headquarters at Thames Valley Park in Reading – which is not the easiest or cheapest place for his staff to get to. "We’ve been saying ‘place a support call with Microsoft, then try and fix it while we wait for the experts to call us back..."

Changing the culture

Both Mr Hadley and Mr Martland say, however, that one of the biggest challenges presented by Premier Support has been helping their staff adjust to the new ways of working it requires.

“It has taken time to embed this into the culture,” says Mr Hadley. “What I find with IT technicians is that they can spend too long trying to solve problems without first seeking support. Often you'll hear them saying: ‘I can fix it, I can make it work’.

“We’ve been saying ‘place a support call with Microsoft, then try and fix it while we wait for the experts to call us back’. I think people are getting the idea of doing that – and of putting in calls to make sure that when they need to install something they really configure it right.”

However, both men are clear that this kind of culture change is necessary if Premier Support is to deliver the strategic benefits that they want to see from it.

“We offer our service to other organisations, so it is just not good enough anymore for someone to sit around trying to fix something or making do and mend,” says Mr Martland. “Problems need to be logged so everybody knows they are being dealt with in the best possible way.”

That football analogy again

Overall, Mr Hadley remains convinced that Premier Support is the way forward. “I often compare IT management with football management,” he says. “You are only ever as good as your last game.

“Nobody ever remembers how many good results you’ve had, nobody gives a stuff where you are in the league, if you have a bad result or everything goes down. I want Premier Support to keep us working and to keep us up.”

Further Reading

- League leader: Microsoft Premier Support in the NHS

- See how other trusts have implemented Premier Support

- Find out more about the Microsoft Infrastructure Optimisation online assessment tool

- Please contact the Microsoft UK Healthcare team for more information or queries about Premier Support