I realised when I was reviewing this blog that we’d made an assumption that everyone coming to the site would know what the project was all about.  This piece is intended to give an idea of what the project is, and how it came about.

When Service Center was first implemented the requirements for system funtionality were quite different to what we need today.  The system was configured and then subsequently heavily customised to meet the needs as they were interpreted at the time.  Over the past 2 years, the system has been quite limiting in it’s ability to support our move towards a more controlled but transparent way of working.

The real deciding factor came about when HP announced that our version of Service Center was out of support.  We’d need to upgrade to remain with HP, and this meant re-working the customisations in a newer version of the product – a costly exercise.  We decided that if we were to do that, we may as well seek to replace the system with one that would support our emerging processes and give us a platform on which to build for the future.

We decided to plan to configure, not customise.  That meant that we would need to be flexible about our processes, and bend the process to fit the solution wherever possible, not the other way around. 

We went out to tender in August 2012, and with support from our group of stakeholders, procured the system we thought would represent best value for money as well as having the flexibility we need to allow us to move forward.