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GREENWICH LEISURE TAKES ON TECHNOLOGY CHALLENGE
Eighteen months ago social enterprise, Greenwich Leisure Limited, faced a significant technology challenge - to create a single working database to hold all business information for the fifty sports and leisure facilities it runs for twelve London boroughs. With a £77 million turnover and headquarters at the old Woolwich Arsenal (a rambling building not especially conducive to streamlining systems), the main information of its 250,000 members was held on seven databases which were outsourced to three different companies.
Realising that they needed some specific interim expertise to provide strategic management and direction on the project, GLL approached PrimeTimers, supplier of business skills to the third sector, who identified change management expert Margaret McKinlay, formerly a senior manager at Centrica, as being the right person to fill the role. PrimeTimers has a membership pool of over 120 highly skilled and experienced business people from which they can draw on and carefully match to each assignment.
Margaret's first task was to produce a revised project initiation document that, as well as covering all aspects of IT methodology, also presented a business case for the project which was in line with GLL's visionary programme on growing the organisation. “In my experience, IT projects always need to have a business ownership to make them really work” she explained.
“With 3,000 employees (many of whom were part-time or sessional), varying opening hours and differing pay structures for six categories of people including adults, children, senior citizens, peak and off peak,
this was never going to be a straight forward data transference project” continued Margaret. “In fact, a key requirement was to simplify the structure of the data to be held on the consolidated database to enable it to work efficiently and therefore leisure centre staff to access the information they needed quickly.”
There were four major challenges to overcome: understanding the business, understanding how much structure was useful to ensure successful delivery of the project, engaging the business people and engaging external suppliers. Initially contracted for two to three days week for 18 weeks, Margaret's input increased to a nine month, three to four days a week position as the complexity of the project revealed itself.
After having spent four months consolidating the database, the delivery phase involved configuring the system for every centre in each borough and then training the staff to use it. Transferring the data needed to be done borough by borough including testing migration, real migration of data to borough and the mop up of specific membership issues afterwards.
“IT projects are as much about people as they are about technology” said Margaret, “and during the last phase of the project I visited many of the leisure centres to see how they were coping with the change and get first hand experience of any on front line problems, which was extremely informative and rewarding.”
