Becoming a trusted IT partner for Get Living

After several years of rapid growth, Get Living’s 130-strong team now manages over 3000 properties across the UK. With two more sites looking to launch in the near future, there’s no time for downtime, so they initiated a transformational move from their incumbent technology provider to a Jigsaw24 managed service powered by a streamlined, efficient technology stack that would deliver value for their leadership, front line staff and tenants.

By Liz Sunter May 19, 2022

Get Living launched in 2013, and gained industry attention when they took over the former Athlete’s Village in London’s Victory Park and announced that development of the 1439 East Village properties would follow a truly tenant-focused philosophy: there would be no fees, no deposits, long-term tenancies would come as standard, and rents would only increase in line with CPI.

This unprecedented transparency was embraced by residents, and the company rapidly expanded to sites at Southwark, Elephant & Castle and Manchester – their portfolio currently includes 3000 homes.

However, delighting tenants is only one part of Get Living’s vision. They want to deliver excellence to all stakeholders across the business, from customers to colleagues to investors – an ambitious goal given how quickly their IT function is having to scale. “Our vision is to provide Get Living with advanced technology, our mission is to put our customers first, and our purpose is to improve our systems, improve our support, and reduce our overall baseline costs,” explained Head of Technology Lee Pyle.

“Technology underpins not just what we do internally operationwise, but also the five-year business plan. To achieve the advanced levels of support required for the growth of our business UK-wide, we needed a technology partner that complemented our strategy and understood our roadmap to excellence when delivering enhanced tech services.”

"Jigsaw24 really dug into what we wanted our roadmap to look like and where they could save us money, improve our internal business processes and improve our governance going forward."

Aligning business values – and service goals

Get Living’s previous supplier “didn’t understand how we operated from a technology perspective or how downtime affected our brand and customers,” Lee said. “We wanted a new managed service provider that understood the role technology plays in our operations, our profit and loss models, and our five-year plan.”

At Jigsaw24, we know how important a shared culture is to successful technology transformation. Our senior leadership engaged with Get Living’s on a range of topics to ensure that we understood their entire business philosophy, not just their legacy IT situation. We wanted to be a trusted partner for Get Living’s short and long-term goals, their CSR efforts, their sustainabilityinitiatives and their overall mission.

“The material that Jigsaw24 provided and the engagement with their team on the RFP was above and beyond what we’d asked for,” said Lee. “It wasn’t just a one size fits all submission, they really dug into what we wanted our roadmap to look like and where they could save us money, improve our internal business processes and improve our governance going forward. It was a bigger picture than just a managed service contract, and that’s what set them apart from other organisations that came to the table.”

Delivering a seamless transition to a streamlined stack

Our consultants held a series of discovery workshops with Get Living’s leadership, and quickly established that a number of disparate technology platforms were in place. There was a clear opportunity to rationalise solutions and drive a return on investment by aligning Get Living’s technology stack to Microsoft’s comprehensive licence solutions and public cloud platforms. We built a technology roadmap that set out clear goals and savings for Get Living, and worked to ensure that the new target operating model linked into a services transition programme.

Throughout the migration our transition teams were integrated with Get Living’s. They worked closely with key stakeholders to plan and implement the migration of the technology while minimising downtime, and ensured a low-impact transition for end users by following a strict acceptance into service process that ensured Get Living’s service users experienced no dip in service or performance.

The result? The company now manage all of their IT operations through a single, centralised Microsoft ecosystem across Azure and Microsoft 365. Not only does this reduce complexity for their in-house IT team, it’s also given them more long-term control over their IT operations, as everything is hosted in their own Azure instance rather than one where access is ultimately controlled by a supplier. Get Living are now set up for long-term success, with a secure, scaleable and efficient platform that doesn’t add complexity to their working day.

"Jigsaw24 has played a pivotal part in delivering against our strategic objectives, and we look forward to them being at the heart of our service delivery going forward."

Ensuring continuous improvement for years to come

Get Living now take advantage of our best practice service model, and have seen a significant drop in downtime and improvement in CSAT scores as a result. We provide end users with multi-channel support services via LiveChat, a dedicated ServiceNow portal and other means, so they always have access to resources and support. We provide ongoing support for Microsoft 365, Azure, and Teams Room, in addition to the company’s remaining on-premise server, network and firewalls. Our service model also encompasses managing existing third parties, so and end users are served a single, aggregated service offering. All of this is underpinned by our ITIL process framework, which is certified to ISO20000 standards and ensures we maintain a proactive approach to services and problem management, but that changes and assets are controlled.

Our continuous improvement approach means we are also identifying further opportunities to develop and mature our service offering for Get Living. We’ve formulated a future technology roadmap to ensure the company’s services remain relevant, secure, and take advantage of technological developments. We’ve also switched Get Living from a quarterly reporting model to a monthly one. 

“Now it’s far easier to see how you’re performing, how we’re performing, how technology’s performing in the business,” said Lee. “We’ve got a better vision now of what we need to do and what is going right or wrong, which assists us with our strategic approach going forward.”

Raising SLAs and CSAT scores with a hands-on approach to service delivery

Throughout the transition to this transformative new service model, the Jigsaw24 team have been on hand to support Get Living and identify further opportunities to improve ROI. We identified a series of critical updates and patches which had not been carried out by the incumbent, and managed their installation in order to standardise and secure Get Living’s estate. The revised technology stack we delivered means Lee and his team have far better visibility over their estate and the status of each device.

We also took steps to ensure end users took advantage of every aspect of the new service by providing key resources, collateral, training videos, and even an on-site engineering presence of launch day so that staff could get to know the Jigsaw24 team and get answers to any questions they had around the transition. Get Living’s dedicated Jigsaw24 Service Delivery Manager went on-site to deliver a series of hands-on demo sessions, and provided a series of recordings and training materials to guide staff through tasks that had been identified as pain points.

As a result, staff are making full use of the new system. Nearly five hundred tickets have been raised in its first five months of operation, and there has been no dip in the service level we’re delivered in that time. In fact, issues are being resolved above SLA levels.

“Everything about working with Jigsaw24 aligns with our goal of having the best technology people possible in the organisation,” said Lee. “The SLAs we have now are higher than before. Our own technology team has gained knowledge from Jigsaw24’s third line support guys; the team that carried out the transition were fantastic. We’re getting support out of office hours, and the Jigsaw24 system is even making us aware of faults elsewhere – recently we had a major issue caused by our ISP, and Jigsaw24 were working on the problem before the ISP even notified us it existed.

“We went through a lengthy RFP process but it was well worth it. Jigsaw24 aren’t just a managed service provider – they’re a partner to us. Their C-level team have met with ours to ensure that there was synergy between the businesses beyond just the technology we’d be using, and that business alignment is a key part of our five-year plan.”

Download this case study as a PDF. Want to know more? Fill in the form below, or get in touch with the team on 03332 400 888 or at solutions@Jigsaw24.com. For the latest Apple news, follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.