Legal Technology Journal

When Halliwells relocated its headquarters, it took the opportunity to create a connected, ‘follow-me’ environment that is meeting with great applaud.

Halliwells recently relocated over 750 members of staff from its five Manchester offices to a new eight-storey building within Spinningfields, Manchester’s pioneering new commercial district. The designer of the building, 3 Hardman Square, is the world’s most famous and productive architect, Lord Norman Foster. Within this stimulating building Halliwells has placed IT firmly at the heart of its new working environment.

To ensure IT’s pivotal role in the conception of the design and in the success of the move, Halliwells took the unusual approach of streamlining its project board, when the time came to erecting and fitting out the building, to just three people – the firm’s managing partner, the facilities director, and the IT director – putting IT considerations to the foreground rather than an afterthought.

Asked what he set out to achieve, IT director Dene Rowe explains: ‘I had two strategic themes in mind from the outset. The first was to create a follow-me building, so that Halliwells will benefit from an environment where people can work at any desk they need to at any given time, so that teams can be formed and reformed according to workload, without having to physically relocate computers, phones and printers.’

‘The second theme had to be simplicity, with particular emphasis on connectivity’, continues Rowe. ‘A streamlined infrastructure is easier to monitor, support and to keep resilient of course. But simplicity is also good from the end-user’s perspective. It means a hassle and distraction-free environment. So we knew for example that we only wanted people to have to carry a single swipe card to access the building, pay for their food, and log into a follow-me printer. And simplicity saves on time. If my desk phone gets its address book from my Outlook contacts, then I don’t need to maintain two systems with the same data.’

A tour of the building reveals the breadth to which Rowe and his project team have succeeded in delivering upon these aims. ‘Even the vending machines operate off the same streamlined infrastructure,’ he smiles. ‘So soon we’ll set up our monitoring tools to tell us if a coffee machine goes down.’

The follow-me desk

The move to a new headquarters was Halliwells’ milestone to entirely refresh its desktop estate with the purchase of over 800 new PCs, and they replaced the majority of its laptop estate too. ‘We standardised to just one desktop, and one laptop. As such, over 99% of our estate now requires just two images’, Rowe comments, with apparent relief. ‘And then we use Zen to deploy the right applications to the right people at login,’ he adds. Standardisation, Rowe explains, was essential to the followme concept, to enable people to move around the building and make the nearby technology behave as though they were at their usual desk. ‘As much as anything, it reduces the learning curve,’ he adds.

Only a few specialist printers made the move to the new building, with otherwise all printers and multi-function devices (MFDs) being supplied anew. ‘We now have around 500 printers in this building,’ Rowe comments, no doubt aware that this will lead to raised eyebrows, ‘with one laser printer between every two fee-earners and secretaries. They also have use of nearby banks of MFDs for large or colour print jobs.’ Has Halliwells never heard of the paperless office? ‘There’s no pretence of a paperless office here,’ he grins. ‘While we’re by no means neglecting our environmental responsibilities, and we aim to achieve our ISO 14001 this year, we have a need to readily produce paper documents. In this building it’s as easy to get a print out as it is to send an e-mail. Wherever I’m working I know that I can get a print out just a matter of feet away.’

Moreover a member of Halliwells’ Manchester office can send a document to print to their follow-me print queue, and then at any point afterwards swipe their card over a nearby multi-functional device to release their print jobs. ‘I see people picking up their meeting handouts from the MFD nearest to their meeting room, if and when the meeting goes ahead,’ comments Rowe. There are also environmental and security benefits from follow-me printing, since it avoids documents being left on print trays to be forgotten and never picked up, or to be picked up by the wrong hands. ‘Our analysis of printing levels has confirmed what we’d forecasted: that on balance we’re now printing less than we used to, not least thanks to the use of follow-me printing and the increased opportunity to avoid wasted print jobs.’

Also standardised is the desk phone. Every member of Halliwells’ Manchester office has the same high-end VOIP phone, from office junior through to managing partner. While the reduced learning curve argument is evident again, ‘it also means that whatever desk you’re at, including in a meeting room say, you can log into the phone and suddenly, it’s your phone. It will ring out when people call you, it will display if you’ve got voicemail, and it will let you browse your phone directory,’ Rowe enthuses.

And for the Halliwells laptop user there’s wireless access from every floor and every room, so they can work without need to find a network point (though there are plenty of those). Clients benefit from the wireless access too, and in case they need wired access, the meeting rooms and ‘business lounge’ all have network points thoughtfully placed on the desk surface, to avoid what Rowe describes as ‘floor point scrabble’.

The audio visual (AV) equipment can to an extent be considered follow-me enabled. First, the same high-end AV can be found on all floors (bar one), so that once you’ve learnt to display your slides, play a movie or videoconference on one unit, you’ve mastered them all. ‘Rather than AV being for special events only’, says Rowe, ‘it’s now available as standard, and you can use it on the fly’. And second, each such media-enabled room has the familiar desktop PC (albeit tastefully tucked away), so you can log in as though you were at your own desk and pick up, say, a PowerPoint slideshow or Word document that you want to share with others. ‘And the screens are great for watching Sky Sports on,’ Rowe is keen to emphasise.

Even the lifts seem to be imbued with something of this followme intelligence. ‘The lifts don’t follow you and you can’t log into them,’ Rowe clarifies, ‘but they are a bit more intelligent than the average lift. Before you get into a lift you enter the floor number you want to go to, rather than just press up or down. Then the display tells you which of the lifts to get in. In this way the lifts minimise the number of stops they need to make to satisfy all the floor requests. It works. Though with the lifts still being new, people do occasionally forget about the need to select a floor first. It’s so tempting to jump into a lift you see about to go, but when you do, you then find yourself going to an unintended floor.’

Simplicity through connectivity

The single swipe card, mentioned above, provides Halliwells people with access to the building, logs them into the multifunctional devices, and helps them to pay for their lunch (which, incidentally, they can pre-order over the intranet). But it isn’t the only example of how systems have been brought together to benefit people with simple-to-use functionality. The Cisco VOIP phones are the second prime example. Using the menu system with a large digital display, users can browse through address books drawn from two systems, namely Active Directory for the corporate directory and the user’s own Outlook account for their personal address book. ‘Again we see the benefit of combining two systems together,’ says Rowe. ‘First, it means that no one has to maintain separate phone directories.

Second, it means that if someone calls with a CallerID, then instead of just seeing a telephone number you see the matched name, for example Gordon Brown, UK Government. It helps you to avoid missing a call from an important client, if you’re otherwise in the midst of a discussion or other work. And it helps you to divert that incoming sales call that it’s really not a good time.’ Moreover, because Halliwells has Outlook contacts syncing with InterAction, the CRM solution, it means that a fee-earner can just tick an existing contact within the CRM system and it then appears within all of the fee-earner’s electronic address books within Outlook, BlackBerry and their digital phone.

A third example of simplicity through connectivity is that Halliwells’ Manchester members can now pick up their voicemail via Microsoft Outlook. Voicemails are available as attachments within e-mails, enabling people to forward them, store them, and pick them up via a BlackBerry and so forth, with the same simplicity as any other e-mail. ‘It’s powerful functionality made usable by sheer simplicity,’ explains Rowe. ‘Voicemail menu systems aren’t the easiest to use, but Outlook is. Combine the two systems together and you get exponential benefits.’

Behind the scenes, Halliwells is benefiting from integration of such systems as security cameras, switchboard, cashless vending, meeting room management, VOIP and building management systems into the same multiple redundant, CAT6- cabled infrastructure. ‘Whilst the obvious benefits are reducing cost of ownership and ensuring reliable performance a simplified infrastructure also supports our ability to conduct performance monitoring, configuration management, capacity management, security management, and the list goes on,’ asserts Rowe. ‘And bearing in mind where we’ve come from in Manchester, with five separate offices including the semidiscrete legacy systems you can expect after mergers, this is bliss.’

Moving pains

When asked whether the lead up to the move was as successful as the results, Rowe replies thoughtfully (or perhaps that’s carefully), ‘On the day we officially moved in, people were delighted with how well everything had gone. People could log into their computer, get their data and applications, and get on with their work. There were snags of course, but we received an overwhelming amount of praise for a job well done. So that’s good. But there were times in the lead up to the move that it allgot a bit hairy.’

The IT department found its work increasingly difficult as the building’s completion kept slipping, yet Halliwells was determined to still meet the move date of 10 December, squeezing the amount of time that IT had left to them to install and test the technology. ‘There was too much to lose by not hitting that day’, remembers Rowe, ‘but there were whole floors that didn’t have any power until the 11th hour, so we were unable to get PCs on to desks. Some floors didn’t even have desks! And I can think back now to the training team having to train in the new building while construction continued around them. I remember the entire IT project team being escorted off the building on the last day for not wearing full personal protection equipment, when the floor we were working on was as good as finished.’

‘There was a leak, just a couple of weeks before we moved in, that took out half of the structured cabling on the fourth floor’, Rowe continues with a hint of a sigh. ‘And though we did manage to move our servers with a minimum of disruption to the business, often those moves were fraught, with having to wait around on freezing street corners at obscene times of the night or early morning, whilst we waited for delivery vans to arrive. And I remember that we had to take crowbars to the old racks to get the servers out. But my over-riding memory is of good people cracking on with their work in good humour, but there were plenty of challenging times too.’

One more challenge was dealing with the high volume of support calls as they came in during the first week of going live. ‘We decided to have a temporary supportwide service desk, largely manned by the training team, who took calls on any move issues whether it was facilities, IT, training or other support area. That was very successful, it meant that people didn’t need to think about whether, say, their swipe card issue was IT or facilities related.’

The IT department itself was split into small teams distributed across each of the eight floors, with an escalation team kept centralised so that they could deal with issues remotely or be deployed to where they were needed most. In addition to the Halliwells staff, the teams were backed up in the first week by teams of people from each of the main suppliers, assisting Halliwells’ members with the phones, PCs and multi-function devices.

‘The move, and the whole project, was helped by the fact we took the time to choose the right partners,’ continues Rowe. ‘We used Dell to supply our desktops, laptops and laserjets, M2 for our MFD estate, and Lynx for our phone systems. They did an excellent job helping us to get ready, and their support since go-live has been invaluable.’

‘Halliwells Manchester office is now back to normal incident management procedures,’ says Rowe. ‘The call volumes are still high, as snagging issues continue to arise as people move on to different work or stretch their use of the technology, but it’s testament to our support teams that we’re on top of it. Hornbill’s Supportworks has also proved a god-send. Although we only launched it a few months before the move it’s paid dividends in helping us to dynamically organise calls by priority and type, and to analyse our issues most in need of attention.’

Next steps

So what next for the IT department, now that the move has been completed? ‘There are many projects in the pipeline, most of which are infrastructural in nature,’ explains Rowe. ‘In particular, we’ll be taking much of what we call “the Spinningfields technology” to our other offices, to create a firmwide followme environment. For example if you visit the Sheffield office and log into the phone and it will become as though it’s your own desk phone. Or you can send a document to print while you’re still in the London office, and then release it to print when you get to Manchester. And there’s functionality that we’ve bought for Spinningfields that we’ve yet to exploit, such as “presence”, which amongst other things will mean that your phone will tell you whether a colleague is away from their desk or on holiday, the second you’ve entered theirextension number.’

‘And we want to spend time consolidating, for example to get more from our monitoring system in this new environment. For example we want to detect before the user does that a printer is nearing the end of its life. And let’s not forget the detection of faults in those coffee machines,’ Rowe grins.

John Salt is head of IT services at Halliwells. Halliwells was awarded City/National IT Team of the Year at the 2008 Legal Technology Awards.