Nottinghamshire County Council strikes the right balance of governance and innovation with Microsoft Teams Phone

Nottinghamshire County Council consolidated its telephony contracts and infrastructure into a single solution and chose to migrate to Microsoft Teams, working closely with the FastTrack team and leveraging its Unified Support contract. Governance and efficiency have improved. Teams Phone and Teams Rooms are facilitating true hybrid working. The council is now well-placed to pursue further innovation and digitalisation.

To drive efficiency and improve governance, Nottinghamshire County Council wanted to consolidate its telephony infrastructure. The existing setup lacked transparency, was unnecessarily complex, involved multiple suppliers and, as such, created unnecessary governance risks.

If things went wrong, it was hard to establish responsibilities and escalate support requests. Kirstie Phillips, Head of Service Delivery, Governance & Standards at Nottinghamshire County Council, explains, “We had five different providers all playing pin the tail on the provider. It wasn’t great.”

“I think one of the biggest risks for us was the number of solutions,” Kirstie Phillips continues. “In a challenging recruitment and retention market, the fewer products and technical skills you need to support your systems, the better. The fewer products, the easier they are to support. The fewer single points of failure. You need to think about who you’ve got supporting your products because that is an important part of the overall governance.”

Consolidating with Microsoft Teams

The council was certain it wanted to consolidate into a single, Microsoft-certified, Teams-enabled solution.

“We had started experimenting with Microsoft Teams in late 2019,” explains Kirstie Phillips. “When COVID-19 happened, we had 6,000 users we had to enable to work from home. We rolled Microsoft Teams out in double-quick time, so we already had Teams and people were familiar with it.”

“We did a six-month rollout in three weeks,” agrees Emma Murphy, ICT Head of Customer Support at Nottinghamshire County Council. “So then it became ‘why would we look at anything else?’. We were tired of the compatibility questions around whether software interacts with each other. Is it going to fit? Can we move data between systems? Will upgrading one impact the other? Of course, the luxury we have with Microsoft is we know everything works together.”

A rapid timescale suddenly thrust upon the team

Nottinghamshire County Council was investing in “pre-thinking” to identify and mitigate risks and address governance concerns when, in 2021, the project suddenly became urgent. The incumbent contact centre solution provider informed the council that the on-premises solution was going out of support.

To successfully meet the imminent deadline, the Nottinghamshire County Council team worked closely with Microsoft, including its FastTrack team, drawing on all the technical expertise and assistance available under its Unified Support contract.

How can we deliver the right pace and scale of migration?

Steve Hancox, Senior Project Manager at Nottinghamshire County Council, recalls, “We are very unusual in the number of hunt groups we have set up. We went through an estimating exercise with Microsoft, and it didn’t look feasible that we could manually rebuild that large a volume of groups within our timescales. That’s when we were introduced to Univonix as an automated PBX migration tool that could help us meet our deadlines.”

“It’s a bit of a single-use experience in one sense—we were trained on the tool, but we will never use it again,” ponders Steve Hancox. “But the investment of our time was worth it. We worked well with the Univonix team and we achieved the results we sought.”

The migration of 6,000 users, with 550 call queues, 300 auto attendants, and 300 common area phones to Teams Phone was a huge success. It was completed within three months with minimal disruption to the council’s day-to-day operations.

The team took the opportunity to rationalise the estate at the same time. For example, the 300 common area phones were rationalised down to 18 Microsoft Teams CAPS. As well as facilitating a new way of working, supporting softphones with laptops and headsets as standard equipment has delivered a considerable cost saving to the council, even allowing for new hardware costs.

Ensuring the end-user experience is not disrupted

As well as careful solution strategising and detailed migration plotting, Nottinghamshire County Council invested heavily in an internal customer engagement programme.

“Right from the start, we were very focused on minimising the impact, especially on the service desk, of something that could potentially be very disruptive,” emphasises Kirstie Phillips.

“I think that customer engagement piece was vital for the success of the rollout,” agrees Lewis Biggs, Service Desk Supervisor at Nottinghamshire County Council. “This work ensured the changeover went smoothly.”

“We put materials together, hosted awareness sessions, ran pilot adoptions. We used Microsoft Teams to connect with everyone, and delivered our ‘show and tells’ and training content virtually over Teams,” remembers Emma Murphy.

Migrating alternative service delivery models for greater consolidation

In addition to the council’s telephony and call centre operations, the team also migrated another five arm's-length bodies to the new setup.

Kirstie Phillips explains, “As standalone legal entities, these five alternate service delivery models have their own Microsoft tenancies, but we provide them with an IT service, including telephony. That presented an extra layer of complexity but they have been successfully migrated over, either with our support or by us, to ensure maximum consistency and consolidation.”

Via Midlands, Inspire Culture and Learning, Adoption East Midlands, EMDevCo, and Midlands Engine have all been successfully migrated to Microsoft Teams Phone as part of the project. The Nottingham team has eliminated its local legacy calling platforms, reducing overheads and minimising the support burden.

Being part of a joint team with Microsoft

“I don’t know how we could have pulled this off without our Microsoft Unified Support contract,” states Kirstie Phillips. “In fact, with Microsoft’s support, this has been one of our biggest successes in terms of delivering massively complex, large-scale projects.”

“It has felt like a joint goal and a joint team, really,” agrees Steve Hancox. “Microsoft made people available to us at short notice, and we had access to some really excellent specialist advice. Microsoft put us in touch with a good partner, and we really gelled with them. And Microsoft extended that support post-migration, so we’ve had access to technical expertise and product specialists.”

At the same time, the council was very cognizant of the need to build skills internally. Building the right digital skills is vital to ensure good governance, low ongoing support costs and enable further digital transformation.

Steve Hancox explains, “We utilised Microsoft’s online computer-based training and we’ve felt supported with the transition. There has been a good handover and development of skills in our dedicated team.”

Benefits are being felt across council operations

The migration has delivered some unexpected benefits.

“Our Microsoft Teams implementation has made our strategic direction and digitalisation objectives a lot easier for us,” states Kirstie Phillips. “We can build in rationalisations. For example, the vast majority of our workforce now has the option to work from home. We have reduced our desk capacity in most of our council buildings significantly. We use Teams Rooms for meetings where we can—so we very much have a hybrid estate.”

“That’s enabled us to make savings in all sorts of places you probably wouldn’t think—like heating and lighting. For example, we can close certain buildings with low occupancy levels over holiday times. And we’re going to be able to introduce more automation, too.”

Consolidation is a good way to manage risk

“We’ve been able to decommission all the infrastructure services and the physical infrastructure services underpinning the old system,” advises Kirstie Phillips. “We’ve saved the real estate that the old system was taking up in our data centre and the overheads of running that. And, of course, running out-of-date hardware was a security risk—and you can’t put a price on resolving that. Well, you can—it’s potentially four percent of annual turnover.”

The council expects further cost efficiencies to come. In 2025, when the last of the copper wires and hard-wired telemetry is switched off, there will be additional cost savings.

“I think there will be support savings as well,” says Kirstie Phillips. “Things have been good since we rolled this out, so we don’t have any experience to compare. But we won’t be playing pass the responsibility with different suppliers again.”

A future of exciting possibilities

With a successful implementation behind them, now the Nottinghamshire team’s focus has shifted to future innovation and the potential to maximise the returns from its Microsoft platform.

“I think we always had it in the back of our mind that moving onto Microsoft Teams would open up new digitalisation opportunities for us,” admits Kirstie Phillips. “I’m excited about the potential of Microsoft Copilot in helping with major incidents. The work of organising and minuting meetings and sending out updates can be automated, removing a lot of the administration and helping us to focus on the problem and to respond faster.”

“I really like the potential of Copilot in the contact centre,” adds Emma Murphy. “We don’t want to eat the elephant whole, but we want to get some simple bots in there first. Then introduce more complex bots later. We can introduce bots for the most transactional conversations. And from an IT perspective, bots can help with call routing, so enquiries go to the member of staff with the most appropriate skillset. It will make us more productive. And we can remove the tedious work of taking people’s name and user ID all day long—so we can free staff to focus on the challenging, rewarding tasks.”