NHS Windows 10 Migration
Case Study
Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust are located in Greater Manchester and include Rochdale Infirmary, Fairfield General in Bury, Royal Oldham and North Manchester hospital sites. The trust have 6500 physical devices and a VDI estate of 3000 all running Windows 7.
HRP were engaged to migrate all physical devices to Windows 10, whilst replenishing and repurposing old equipment. The estate comprised of circa 13,000 users and a VMware Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) providing 3000 non persistent desktops.
We faced many challenges, such as the aggressive timescales, the geographic spread of the Trust over 4 sites, an unrationalised and largely unmanaged application portfolio, manual and undocumented installations, increased home-working due to Covid-19 and the criticality of healthcare service availability in general.
As part of the solution HRP produced a Windows 10 build and integrated/tested over 20 hardware models. We performed in-person site audits to identify accurate machine locations. We rationalised a list of over 1,000 applications down to 555 based on usage metrics and business criticality, of which 302 were packaged. From this rationalised list we identified the core business applications and thoroughly tested each of them on the target operating system.
We developed a Power BI dashboard combining data from multiple sources (LanSweeper, App-V Reporting, SCCM, Active Directory, ManageEngine and more) to produce a data-driven rollout plan and assembled a project team of over 50 people including deployment engineers, build engineers, support technicians, project coordinators, application packagers and stock controllers.
We provisioned a new VDI environment for Windows 10, set up clinics for end-user support and device swap-outs.
The output of this project provided the NHS Trust with a fully documented application portfolio, a managed hardware estate and an optimised VDI environment with virtualised clinical applications. HRP implemented one of the fastest and most successful Windows 10 migrations in the healthcare sector.
With a highly complex programme to run in a very challenging set of circumstances it was clear that the Trust would need external capability and capacity in order to stand a chance of hitting demanding timelines.
HRP’s knowledge of the environment and experience in the desktop domain, made them the logical choice. Their professionalism, technical expertise, and ability to scale good quality engineering and deployment resource rapidly meant that the internal project team were quickly able to turn what had been a badly failing project into an exemplar of great agile delivery within an astonishingly short timescale
Howard Bethell
Head of Transitional Service & Stabilisation
Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust