Case Study: Habinteg Housing Association

Habinteg Housing Association is a housing provider with over 50 years’ experience of providing inclusive and accessible homes and services. As a national housing association, they have 3,350 properties in England, across over 80 Local Authorities, employing around 120 staff based across the UK, either hybrid working from home, or from one of their offices, which are connected to Habinteg’s IT network. The IT infrastructure, applications, devices and staff are supported and managed by a small IT team consisting of a Senior IT Operations Engineer, a Senior IT (Applications) Administrator, an IT Assistant Administrator and 2 IT Service Desk Analysts.

Habinteg has a combination of on-premises applications installed on servers hosted offsite in a data centre and managed remotely, supplemented with several Software as a Service applications. The servers and SAN were approaching the end of their extended warranty prompting Habinteg to review how its IT infrastructure is delivered and consider all options available to enhance its IT infrastructure and the deployment of applications.

Habinteg were seeking a suitably qualified and experienced consultant to undertake a review of their existing IT infrastructure and IT requirements to carry out an options appraisal of IT infrastructure solutions available that will meet current and future working arrangements and deliver against the organisation’s business plan and strategic objectives, and through a competitive tender appointed 3C Consultants to undertake this work.

Working in conjunction with colleagues at Habinteg, 3C’s Director of Consulting Charles Brooks, undertook an extensive review which successfully encompassed the following phases:

• A review of the current and future requirements for the provision of the IT infrastructure with recommendations
• Due to Contract Standing Orders the contract had to be re-let
• Establishing the requirements and developing a comprehensive specification and the subsequent ITT
• Management of the entire procurement process from start through to contract award
• As the procurement process resulted in the appointment of a new supplier, 3C are currently assisting Habinteg as a critical friend to ensure the migration runs smoothly
• The transition is scheduled to be successfully completed by January 2025

“Charles has supported us through the initial review and MSP procurement exercise from developing the specification documents to contract award. As we are migrating from our incumbent supplier, he is now overseeing this process with all parties.”

Michelle Miller
Head of IT
Habinteg Housing Association