How we help

Information Technology has moved from an operational service to a business enabling service. To do so, it must remain relevant to your organisational requirements, delivering tangible business outcomes. Here at String, we remain focused on the business outcomes that solutions deliver, ensuring that your business continues to benefit from your investment.

Historically, the IT function in an organisation has operated in a technical silo. In this mode, the specifics of the IT function are largely unknown; being considered a cost-centre rather than a business-enabler. Here at String, we work closely with our clients to ensure that their IT function operates in complete alignment with their wider business strategy.

By focusing on the long-term business requirements of our clients, we remain relevant to their business needs in the long term. The very nature of IT in today’s fast-changing world means that our ability to focus on the important technical developments, and how they related to each of our clients, remains one of our greatest strengths.

Step 1: We learn about your business from the day-to-day to mid and long-term strategy. We understand your current challenges and review your current IT services.

Step 2: Identify your business’ tech needs and deliver a strategy discussion document including strategic options tailored to suit your business goals and budget
Review the options with you, allowing you to chop and change elements so that we can develop your ideal plan.
Support you along the way by building business cases detailing cashable and soft savings, plus, we’ll present any plans to anyone you wish within the business.

Step 3: Once we’ve reviewed your options, we’ll finalise them, detailing your best plan of action.
From cloud options or hardware and software to the right suppliers and partners, we’ll have detailed everything you need.
From here you can implement your IT strategy, if you’d like support with that, we’ll do that too.

Step 4: Should you choose us to implement your IT strategy, we’ll begin, ensuring we work closely with you.
You’ll get a dedicated team with the specialisms that are required.
We’ll source any cloud subscriptions and hardware, put any planned systems and programmes in place, carry out migrations and more. All done in smooth transition so that your business is unaffected.
Plus, we’ll continuously support your business going forward.

During the design phase, our consultants work with your team to translate the business outcomes expected of your solution into technical requirements. Once all parties are completely clear on these, our consultants will pass your solution to our Projects Team for delivery.

Clear communication is at the heart of our Project Management approach. Whilst we maintain our PRINCE2 certification; most of our clients prefer a modified PRINCE2 methodology that better reflects their budget and needs. The Project Plan (where required and appropriate) is defined with you during a Project Definition Workshop; following which we strive to keep you informed at every step until completion.

The implementation phase itself comprises four primary stages:

1 Build Stage – where we complete the initial build of your solution ready for testing.

2 Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT) – where we conduct thorough testing ahead of user migration and go-live.

3 User Acceptance Testing (UAT) – ensures that the functional requirements of your solution meet the standards and criteria agreed during the initial solution scoping phase.

4 Training – administrator and end-user training ensures that you can get the most out of your new environment from day one.

Our migration services are designed to ensure minimal disruption to your business during transition. In many cases, for example migrating your email services to Microsoft 365, your users won’t even be aware of the transition.

Of key importance is the smooth transition from implementation to production support. By ensuring that your IT environment is fully documented on our Service Desk management system prior to beginning your managed service, we ensure the best possible experience for your users.

Each IT system, network, or service is continually monitored by our IT Service Management system. This provides us with up-to-date information on IT system health, automated IT ticket creation, and technology asset management and deployment.

From Microsoft user change requests to major IT system failure incident resolution and technical support, we ensure that our Service Desk has the range, quality, and quantity of skills necessary to respond to anything that is thrown at us. At every stage you are kept informed of the IT service ticket’s status and progress, ensuring that you never need to chase us for updates.

We also monitor the long-term health and performance of all IT networks and services under management. This allows us to identify ongoing trends that might affect IT user experience before the impact is felt.

We take care of things like Windows, Microsoft, and other operating systems updates, ensuring that our clients’ devices such as computers, laptops, tablets, and mobiles remain safe and secure.

Many of our Managed Service elements include the provision of development services. These ensure that you receive ongoing training, are able to adopt new feature releases and gain the maximum benefit from your IT system.