About the client
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) is a ministerial department of HM Government.
Energy & clean growth
Business
Industrial Strategy
Climate change
Science research & innovation
BEIS has around 3,000 employees
Office locations: London and Aberdeen, as well as around the UK
Cirrus programme – transformation at scale needs expert help to succeed
As part of the Government Transformation Strategy, BEIS led a joint project named Project Cirrus with the Department for International Trade (DIT). The goal was to deliver better citizen services and improve services for civil servants – cost-effectively, of course – by transforming the workplace experience through technology.
Total employees supported by Project Cirrus across BEIS and DIT
The complexity of the rollout, and the diverse age range and skillset of BEIS employees, meant that Project Cirrus was especially challenging. Mitchell Leimon, programme director at BEIS, knew the project would benefit from external expertise:
Cirrus was initially envisaged as a tech refresh, but it had a huge business impact and changed the way people worked. It involved much more engagement, change management and transformational thinking than we had originally envisaged.”
Enter The Inform Team – change experts with a proven methodology
The Inform Team were recommended to Mitchell by a colleague. “The fact that they were on both the G-Cloud and the DOS framework made the decision incredibly easy,” he recalls. Mitchell was immediately impressed with the team’s approach:
The Inform Team astutely assessed what needed to be done to connect the technology we were rolling out to our people. Whenever we saw a change problem to which we didn’t know an answer, Inform would come back with a solution and people who could execute it.”
The Inform Team implemented their trademarked 4E’s methodology, splitting the project into 4 phases: Establish, Excite, Equip, Embed.
The project in numbers
Change, business relationship, comms and training consultants working on the project at its most peak time.
days of professional floor–walkers post-rollout to help employees with any teething issues.
Face-to-face appointments arranged to familiarise employees with new equipment and software (2 per employee).
Employees trained as knowledge information managers and digital champions to support the rollout.
Of employees knew what to expect, when the change was happening, and what they needed to do.
The 4E’s methodology supported BEIS and DIT across the entire project lifecycle. In the beginning, The Inform Team rolled out an OASIS communications plan and produced training content, user guides, news bulletins, case studies and visual displays – all housed on an easy-to-find intranet hub.
As natural extroverts, Inform took the time to learn our organisation’s language and culture and build strong relationships with all sorts of stakeholders to bridge the gap between IT and the business,” Mitchell adds.
As the rollout progressed, The Inform Team took proactive steps to ensure employees were aware of the change and comfortable with it. These included Look, Select, Collect events where employees could come and choose their new devices in person; classroom training to help them get to grips with their new device; and floor-walkers who supported users with any issues and ran 15-minute clubs covering common problems.
We decided mid-project that we needed a much higher class of floor-walker to keep momentum up,” Mitchell recalls, “and within just five hours Inform had come back to us with a creative solution.”
After the rollout, The Inform Team worked with IT and HR to adapt the onboarding process for new starters and to further enable digital champions through technical immersion courses.
Widespread tech adoption leads to incredible savings
The vast majority of BEIS and DIT are now happily using modern IT tools, built on a modern infrastructure, delivering massive savings for the department.
At every step of the project, The Inform Team was careful to involve and listen to the Adaptive Technology community, who advocate that any new technology caters effectively for those with additional needs. As a result, the AT community reported the highest engagement of any project ever during Project Cirrus. Mitchell observes:
I don’t believe we’ve ever had so successful a rollout. I know of none in government in which the adaptive technologies dimension has been handled so sensitively or so well.”
Project Cirrus has also helped BEIS and DIT attract top talent, as they boast a modern working environment with the very best tools for employees. Mitchell concludes:
The thing I’m proudest of, is that we took a classic IT programme, traditionally done badly, and we made it fun for ourselves – despite the hard work – and we landed on time, and we can clearly see areas of the business that are buzzing about the change.”
