Marriott Harrison
Creating a professional IT environment with managed services & sector expertise
Marriott Harrison is a boutique full-service law firm whose high quality, partner-led approach sees the firm operating at a level that is often only matched by firms several times larger.
Services
Fully Managed Services
The Brief
When its IT function started to fall well short of the standards expected, compromising efficiency and effectiveness, it took steps to address the issues.
Specifically: Ageing systems – Marriott Harrison needed to consider the expensive reality of a technology refresh
Poor network management – The firm’s IT resource was one individual, whose skill sets and skill levels were proving unequal to the task of ‘keeping the lights on'
Lack of strategic direction – The firm was devoid of any IT leadership, making it difficult to see any way out of its dilemma as well as risking missing out on the tech-driven business advantage
Management time – Senior figures were expending too much time and energy in ‘managing the manager’ and the firm-wide fall-out from persistent outages and general poor delivery to the desktop
Business risk – The firm recognised the dangers inherent in IT responsibility being invested in just one person, and in running with a substandard network, poor remote access and negligible contingency for disaster recovery
The Benefits
According to Simon Charles, there were a number of qualities that were critical to the success of the project:
Professionalism - “From start to finish, Nasstar was a pleasure to do business with - they were straightforward, open, honest, and for the first time in a long time we now have complete confidence in the calibre of our IT provision.”
Experience - “Nasstar has helped many law firms make a successful switch to managed services, and its understanding of law firm dynamics and the way we think and operate was invaluable in ensuring a smooth transition.”
Capability - “Nasstar unpicked a very poorly configured and run network, migrated our users across to a modern, resilient hosted platform, and managed the actual go-live in the space of a weekend, with a supportive floor-walking service for the first week. All this without fuss or fanfare, and always with great courtesy - and if we need something now, like a new user, we just have to ask.”
“Quite frankly, we were in a horrible position with our internal IT and Nasstar steered us very confidently out of that to a place which is very much nicer! Things work as they should, help is always available if we need it, and we can get on with our proper jobs without the constant stress of systems falling over and having no real capacity internally to make things better. It works so well and has had such a positive impact on the business and each individual that our only regret is that we didn’t do it sooner.”
The Solution
Marriott Harrison’s Simon Charles knew that managed services could provide the perfect resolution to the firm’s ongoing challenges: “We didn’t actually have that complex or extensive an IT requirement, we just wanted our everyday systems to work every day!
Migrating our whole IT function to Nasstar, entrusting a sizeable specialist provider to deliver services to the desktop, having them available 24/7 from any device with support on-tap, and the ability to add users with a quick email or phone call. What wasn’t there to like? For us, it was the perfect route out of that impending perfect storm.”