Behind the scenes of ramsac projects Q&A
Posted on February 4, 2025 by Tatania Riley
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Charlotte Braby, ramsac’s Project Delivery Manager, for a behind the scenes interview into what goes into delivering successful and seamless IT projects. From cloud migrations to cybersecurity upgrades, her team ensures that every project runs like clockwork. Here’s what she has to say about how they manage their projects with precision and how they make them as smooth and stress-free as possible for our clients.
Can you start by telling me about ramsac’s Projects Team and how long you’ve been running projects? We’re a tight-knit and driven team, passionate about delivering a 5-star experience on every project. We’ve been managing projects for over 10 years, and we typically handle around 200 projects a year for roughly 80 of our clients, with 96% of those completed on time.
That’s a lot of projects! Can you give an example of the types of projects you typically manage? We manage a wide range of projects, like email and data cloud migrations, office moves, SharePoint builds, software rollouts and cybersecurity improvements. Our clients come from various industries, and all have slightly different requirements, but no project is too big or small for us.
Quite a variety there; why do clients ask you to manage these pieces of work for them? Because we have great working relationships with our clients and our technical teams know their environments inside out so, we’re well placed to help them manage IT changes. As I mentioned earlier, we run around 200 projects a year so, we’re very efficient in how we do this and our clients know that when they come to us, we have a good track record and can guarantee a project is implemented within agreed timelines and budgets.
“The experience of the migration project was excellent from the very beginning. The pre planning stages to the regular project update meetings and the project document detailing every aspect of the project led by a dedicated project manager Charlotte Braby and Mark Cobb our onsite ramsac engineer. For a project of this scope, it was impressive how smoothly the entire process went. I am looking forward to working on the next project together.” – Sir John Soane’s Museum
Sounds good, but why don’t clients just manage their own projects? Well, most of our clients don’t have an in-house projects team so, when an IT change is needed, the person that is assigned responsibility for this will often have to manage this on top of their day job. This means that they might have competing priorities and implementing a change could take a back seat to fixing something more important affecting daily operations, which might cause a project to run for longer than expected. Our Projects team are dedicated resources assigned to a client to ensure that a project is managed accordingly and kept on track. They provide consistent communication and deal with any potential challenges that arise, all with a view of taking the headache out of it for our clients, allowing them to focus on their day-to-day priorities.
That makes sense so, what would a typical project journey look like for a client? Firstly, our Solutions Architects would meet with the client to understand their objectives and define and agree the deliverables, and then our Technical Consultants create a schedule of works in consultation with the client to align with their business and how they operate to minimise disruptions. All of this is documented in our project control document, which guides us through execution and delivery and at each stage of the project, we get sign off from various teams to make sure we are ready to start, that we can continue onto each phase and when we are ready to close the project off.
That’s sounds like quite the undertaking! What would you say are the most important aspects of managing a project for a client? Clear communication is vital to keep the schedule on track and avoid scope creep. We have a kick off call at the beginning of a project to make sure we’ve got everything in place to start, there are regular stand-up meetings throughout the lifecycle of a project to make sure it’s kept on track and a close down call to ensure everyone’s aligned on the project outcome before we close a project down. We also keep our control document updated so we’ve got a record of everything that happened throughout.
With so many moving parts all the time, what is your approach to dealing with issues when they occur? Computers don’t always do what you tell them and unfortunately, this means that we do have to sometimes deal with issues arising from a project, but we aim to address these quickly. We would typically meet internally to agree a plan and then implement that as quickly as possible, whether that’s working with a third party, reallocating resources or sourcing additional materials.
You make it sound so simple! How do you measure the success of the projects you run? A successful project for us means a good outcome for our clients. We aim to complete all agreed deliverables, within the agreed timelines and budgets and we also gather feedback at the end of a project to ensure we’re continually improving our service.
Lastly, if a client wants us to run a project for them, what are the next steps? Simply reach out to your Relationship Manager to discuss your business goals and requirements, and we’ll do the rest!
How We Can Help
We’d love to talk to you today about your specific IT requirements, needs, and goals. We’d be happy to offer a no-obligation assessment of your existing IT estate. If you’re undergoing organisational change, nervous about your current security, or just want to make sure your IT investments perform at their best, we’re here to help.
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