At the beginning of 2020, not one of us could have predicted that by mid-March we’d all be working remotely and under ‘lockdown’. We moved to remote working just before the official Government lockdown, so luckily we were well placed for making the transition.
Now in our fourth month of working remotely, our consultants have found their own ways of working together. As a close-knit team in the Manchester office, we’ve been very creative in finding ways of socialising online and ensuring we don’t lose that strong camaraderie we worked so hard to achieve.
A few examples of our recent work:
Innovation and digital transformation in healthcare
We work with a number of healthcare organisations, which have been providing vital digital services during the pandemic. An ongoing project with Well Pharmacy created a digital-first online pharmacy service, as well as an automated centralised prescription distribution service. Little did we know when this was developed, how essential the service would come to be in 2020, and how heavily used that system would get.
As one of the NHS’s digital partners, we’ve rapidly developed data platform services to provide data analytic tools in order to analyse trends and patterns relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Another independent pharmacy support group also engaged us to build out their digital offering, including a mobile app for prescriptions and medicine reminders, website and backend capabilities to facilitate orders and customer notifications, and including NHS integrations to streamline processes.
Other projects
A large project with Fibre Nation was completed in April, which saw a number of our squads design a modern full fibre broadband operation infrastructure from the ground up. Fibre Nation was set up by Talk Talk to offer a wholesale fibre broadband service and was recently sold to CityFibre. Our in-depth project created a vision of a modern, cloud-based, agile software delivery partnership that would allow a telecoms business to scale and grow very quickly with very flexible and cost-effective infrastructure.
After two years, our data engineering work with Photobox came to an end. Photobox requires huge amounts of data in order to identify important insights for marketing campaigns, especially through their peak period which is from Black Friday right through to Christmas. Through this period, our squads have supported the data queries and vastly improved the response times.
Tech community and events
The global pandemic hasn’t halted our well-known Manchester tech events – we’ve managed to successfully move them into the virtual space. Moving forward we’ll certainly be looking at running a combination of physical Manchester-based events and virtual events.
Onwards and upwards
Our Manchester team continues to grow, and we are now recruiting for a number of roles. Currently we have around 60 consultants based from Manchester and are still planning to move into larger premises in the next year.
One very interesting question we’ve been discussing is what does a post-COVID workspace look like now? We have a great opportunity to re-think how our organisation works and look at redesigning our work life for the future, based on fewer people being in the office five days per week.
So despite an unusual start to 2020, we’re working on many more exciting digital and agile transformation projects, as well as continuing to work within the Manchester tech community.
We’re now hiring, so if you like the sound of any of the above, please get in touch.
