Manchester City Council Boosts Productivity and Collaboration

The Organisation

Manchester City Council (MCC) is the local government authority for Manchester, a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. Looking after over 530,000 citizens, MCC strive to support the whole city by delivering services and enhancing the experience their residents receive.

As a democratic entity, the Council is run by 96 elected members, three for each of the 32 electoral wards of Manchester. To deliver services for the city, the Council employees over 7000 staff, with many based at Manchester Town Hall and Town Hall Extension and over 150 sites across the city.

The Challenge

MCC’s ICT challenges are based around the need to deliver financial savings, an outdated ICT system and the need to bring the Council, its partners and residents closer together to collaborate and work more efficiently together for the good of the city. Dealing with financial challenges means finding new ways they can deliver more, for less.

Having over 7,000 employees and 530,000 citizens, MCC recognised a real need to develop a modern IT strategy that would provide enhanced capabilities to staff. This would involve replacing Lotus Notes for email and calendar, and increasing staff collaboration and efficiency.

Emails with document attachments where they are having to be downloaded, updated, and re-sent was inefficient and can become frustrating. They needed to rethink the problem and transform how they work. With the functionality of Google Workspace’s document editing tools (Docs, Sheets, Slides) to collaborate on one document together at the same time – completely removing the need to send attachments – staff at MCC quickly recognised the benefits and how they can better interact with each other.

The Solution

MCC decided to transform the way that they work and make the move to Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) so they can deliver their services in a very different, and better way.

As part of their initial strategy, MCC have rolled out thousands of new smartphones, tablets and laptops to enable greater flexibility and mobile working. Their key focus was to provide their staff with the right tools that will allow them to work flexibly with cloud based apps; Gmail, Calendar, Sheets, Docs, Slides, Drive, Hangouts and Chat.

With such a change to the organisation, they made the decision that Cloud Technology Solutions (CTS) would help implement the technology and use their expertise to help the organisation to embrace the technology and the smarter way of working.

In the run up to and during the first week of the migration, Google, CTS and the MCC project team were helping out and getting staff to utilise the change of technology.

CTS also trained up over 700 Google Guides – MCC’s own staff – supporting the deployment across teams and sites helping their colleagues to understand and use the tools.

The success of the deployment of Google Workspace has had an enormously positive impact on Manchester City Council, and has completely changed the way the organisation works and communicates with each other

Working with CTS, they migrated 6,100 users over to Google Workspace and helped MCC utilise the tools and collaborate within the organisation. This helped drive innovation, new ways of working whilst saving time and money.