01
Measured before changing anything
Two weeks of ticket analysis and a short survey of fee earners. The picture was clear: logon times and document access accounted for roughly three quarters of the lost time.
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Professional services
A professional services firm that stopped losing billable hours
Nothing was broken enough to complain about. Laptops took several minutes to become usable, the document management system timed out mid-afternoon, and everyone had quietly built their own workarounds. Added up across 30 fee earners, that's real money.
- Organisation
- 45-person consultancy
- Size
- 45 people, two offices
- Location
- Yorkshire
6 min
average logon, down from 14
~£70k
estimated annual fee-earner time recovered
38%
fewer repeat tickets after six months
Where they started
- No one could say how much time was being lost, only that it felt like a lot.
- Support was reactive: tickets were answered, but the same tickets kept coming back.
- Laptops were between two and six years old, bought in ones and twos as people joined.
- The document system sat on an ageing server in the smaller office, with everyone else reaching it over a slow link.
What we did about it
02
Separated the cheap fixes from the projects
Some of it was configuration that could be corrected in an afternoon. The rest needed a hardware refresh and a move off the on-premises server. We put the cheap fixes first so people felt something change quickly.
03
Matched the bigger work to a specialist partner
The document system migration needed vendor-certified people. We shortlisted two partners, sat in on both scoping calls, and stayed involved through delivery so the firm wasn't managing it alone.
04
Replaced kit on a rolling plan
Rather than one large bill, laptops now go on a four-year cycle with a set number replaced each quarter. Predictable cost, no more six-year-old machines.
Where they are now
- Logon and document access complaints effectively disappeared from the ticket queue.
- The firm now has a hardware budget it can forecast, rather than reacting to failures.
- Partners get a quarterly summary in business terms, not a list of ticket counts.
"The useful bit wasn't the technology. It was someone finally telling us what the problem was actually costing us, so we could decide what to spend on it."
The part that didn't go to plan
The document migration ran about five weeks longer than the partner's original estimate, mostly because historic files needed tidying first. We should have pushed harder on that during scoping.
Recognise any of this?
Tell us what's getting in the way and we'll talk through what's realistic - no pressure, no jargon.