Tendring District Council

Tendring District Council is a local authority in North East Essex, responsible for a rural and coastal population of
approximately 145,000 people.

With responsibility for services that range from housing, planning and recycling to leisure centres, public parks and beaches,
the council administers an area that includes some of the most deprived wards in the UK.

In common with all local authorities, our client has seen central government grants drop substantially over the last decade.

One of the main challenges of a digital change programme was the ability to move many “on-prem” services into the cloud.

One key area which the client has worked to achieve major savings and efficiencies is its IT infrastructure, systems and software.

Additionally, the council was keen to improve its customer portal software alongside the customer experience, making self-service simple for residents and less expensive to provide.

Tendring was also using a number of third-party managed security service providers (MSSPs) to operate various security services connected to several areas of their network infrastructure.

However, most of these services and vendor solutions were coming up for end-of-life replacement. 

Intergence worked closely with Tendring to produce a detailed migration plan and costings which were tracked through our Stratiam portal.

As the project progressed it was vital to employ an adaptive evaluation approach alongside our agile methodology.

As part of a ‘discovery process’, we undertook both top-down and bottom-up analysis of the council’s IT usage and needs, giving us a much deeper understanding of the IT estate and enabling us to re-evaluate both hardware and systems in the light of the client’s evolving requirements.

We deployed our tooling and quickly identified the root cause of Tendring's infrastructure issues.

We recommended changes to stabilise the network as part of our “Quick Win” objective, and immediately restored a consistent high level of service availability by eliminating periodic network freezes.

We then presented our HLD (High-Level Design) for re-architecting the entire network infrastructure.

One of the most important parts of the Digital change programme was to improve the website.

A decision was taken early in the process to ensure that all of the back-end functions were fixed and migrated to the cloud before the website upgrade.

Tendring now has one of the most advanced Intranets in the UK which provides internal services but also importantly improves the whole customer experience. 

Adopting this agile methodology ensured that our client was never working in the dark.

By a process of constant evaluation, adaptation and re-prioritisation, the local authority’s digital transformation journey has been shaped and re-shaped to its changing needs.

The client has worked in close partnership with us to do this, implementing effective changes while making sure that costs are controlled and significant savings are made.

Not only did migrating to Microsoft Azure Cloud improve many of the applications and performance, it also meant that during Covid, Tendring were not affected to the same level that other councils were because the services were much more resilient.

Our highly secure VPN solution also enabled Tendring to continue to operate seamlessly during this unprecedented period.

Over the migration programme Intergence managed to achieve efficiency savings of £600,000.

Much more accurate financial forecasts could be made instead of conservative / optimistic estimates.

Network performance increased, and the network has been 100% available for the last seven years without a single client-impacting failure.

Intergence continues to work with the council using its highly agile methodology, ensuring that the digital transformation strategy can always adapt to new insights, events and technologies – and deliver measurable and predictable financial and operational benefits to the client.

We are currently working with the authority on a number of other related projects such as our end-to-end Network and Security Infrastructure Managed Services.