Zipporah's team & its new challenges

Hello again.  Yes, I’ve been away lately and other team members have been picking up my blogs valiantly trying to balance the poignancy of my writing with its laugh out loud comedy.  You’ve probably noticed as it lost that Oscar Wilde level of wit.  But I’m back now so you can rest easy.  It’s not that I have been on holiday or have been sitting with my feet up, oh no….it’s been the hard task of expanding the business as I described recently, bedding everything in, handing things over and generally getting us ready for the future.  So it is with some pride that I have seen the new team form and the development team pick up their new responsibilities with aplomb.  So let’s get you introduced.

Luke has joined us as a Business Analyst colleague and project manager as part of the delivery team.  Although young he quickly impressed with the range of skills he showed and has developed with a very interesting life story.  He’s from Atlanta Georgia so he can’t pronounce half the counties yet but we will give him time.  Alongside Luke we have Kathryn who has joined in the same position with a wealth of experience in this area, working with software development and running her own business.  It’s a very lucky find for us that just as we were looking for Kathryn she decided to return to project management.

In addition within the new delivery team we have Byron.  A tester with lots of experience of testing large applications in very complex areas (his last role involved testing software for underwriters and they have almost as many rules as a registrar!).  He’s also used to doing this in a small company and has already become an invaluable resource in testing the new software versions from a new perspective and delivering us a new process which we can implement to better catch any gaps.

Of course you know Will, Andrew, Evan, Dan, Tom and Mike from development and Jon and Jordan from sales but under our new structures you will get to know them even better as they get even more closely involved in development and client interaction.  Jordan will be picking up a whole host of clients to keep the business development links alive.  Scott White has also joined us and we have another recruitment search underway to bring you another development resource.

Emma and I aren’t retiring but we want to ensure you get all the support that you need (and deserve).  We will still be around and will be planning to develop our relationships with you so that we can better anticipate your needs for the future and keep ourselves at the forefront of delivery.  So we welcome the new team members and the new process that gets our clients closer to development and we look forward to seeing our clients delighted with the new service.

Zipporah's overseas projects: Republic of Ireland

Zipporah has always been looking to expand overseas and most recently we have begun to engage with organisations in the Republic of Ireland, not quite as far as Australia whom we have been progressing with for some time now, but overseas nonetheless.

It was on recent business trip to meet with an organisation in Ireland, that I was quite surprised by just how different they were from our own UK organisations, especially since we are only a short hop across the sea. The relaxed nature in the manner in which we were greeted on arrival at the location for the meeting made for a refreshing change, no interrogation into our entire background history or the reason for our visit at the front desk here, just a quick and polite hello, sign in and then sent off to find our own way to the meeting room.

Mind you the simple instructions of “top of the stairs, turn right, then left, right again and at the end of the corridor is your room” in a large building that you have never visited before can in itself present you with a few problems prior to a meeting, fortunately we didn’t make any wrong turns and I hope to be able to report in the near future with some developments on the outcome of our meeting.

Government and IT spending

After recently reading an article on how Government are wasting an ‘obscene’ amount of money on failed IT projects, I was pretty surprised to hear the number of these projects that actually fail to get lifted off the ground. The fact that Zipporah now have close to 60 live systems with authorities throughout the UK, with strong, solid relationships with each of its clients proves that this idea that IT systems being a waste of money is not always true.

I think it comes down to experience of suppliers, and those without the knowledge of how to overcome potential problems within the public sector can sometimes become unstuck, resulting in projects being cancelled or being listed as failed. Luckily Zipporah have a wealth of experience of working with local authorities and are aware that sometimes you can be presented with challenging obstacles. However this doesn’t mean that this could potentially result an unsuccessful project, we feel that we have the required communication skills and key knowledge of how local authorities work to ensure that these problems can be overcome and the project can continue towards a successful implementation.

Government Procurement Service

Attendance at the LGSAS framework induction day in London was the ideal opportunity to learn more about just exactly how the Government Procurement service will work in practice to deliver its mutual goal with us in targeting savings for the UK Public Sector as a whole and its role to specifically to deliver centralised procurement for Central Government Departments.

It was interesting to learn about a wide range of topics that included just who can use Government Procurement Service, why they should use Government Procurement Service through to matters about how we as organisation can market and utilise our solutions via the procurement portal.

One of the more interesting facts that came to light was just exactly how the organisation was funded. After all an organisation that operates and manages so many government procurement exercises and framework must surely come at some significant cost to the taxpayer before it can actually deliver the savings its promises? Well absolutely not, as the Government Procurement Service is a Trading Fund, using a supplier commission model to fund operations and support continuous improvement in Government’s procurement capability, which to mind is the only government service delivering significant savings at absolutely zero cost to the British taxpayer.

Yortime at the City of York Council

 

Yortime starts to take shape as phase one is delivered

The City of York went live recently with its Yortime Website, which is completely powered by Zipporah. Yortime is the place to find activities, events, clubs, groups, open days, courses, taster sessions, family fun days and much more. With a constantly changing events calendar and hundreds of local community groups in our directory York residents are sure to find something happening in their local area.  

The Lifelong Learning and Culture service arm of City of York Council Learning, Culture and Children’s Services Directorate required Zipporahs solution to allow the following services to introduce on-line booking for their events, rooms and courses via the Yortime website:

• Parks & Open Spaces
• Libraries and Heritage
• Adult and Community Education
• Play Team
• Arts and Culture
• Sports and Active Leisure

The solution now facilitates on-line booking and payments for any of the mentioned services in a central place where they can be marketed and promoted to both the residents of York and the wider population, where they were once managed via either standalone IT systems or manually.

The solution was not only required to provide the functionality to deliver on-line bookings and payments via our Yortime website for the above services in the first instance but has the flexibility to be expanded to include a wider range of services in the future in other areas of the Council.

I hope to bring you news of this expansion over the coming months.