Chess ICT

Chess is one of the UK’s leading independent and trusted technology service providers, employing 300 skilled people across the UK, supporting over 20,000 organisations. By leveraging world-class technology, Chess helps you to connect your people, protect your data, grow your business, reduce your costs and work better together, which means your business, your people and your customers can thrive.
IT
Telecommunications
Private
550 users
Image Chess ICT

Summary

Chess is one of the UK’s leading technology solutions providers, helping over 33,000 businesses grow through proven technology and expert advice. Chess has relationships with all major UK networks and technical capabilities across Voice, Connect, ICT, and CyberSecurity.

Background

With over 550 people employed and being voted No1 in ‘The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work’ and hundreds of technology partners, it was very important for Chess to ensure consistent product training and personal development opportunities for their staff.

The Objectives

Chess wanted to implement a scalable Learning Management System to train staff internally and also roll-out training to its network of partners across the UK. Some of the major feature requirements were: Gamification, Surveys, and Personal Development Plans. Chess carries out hundreds of employee satisfaction surveys to generate feedback and ideas, that continue to improve the performance across all departments. It was also essential to keep a competitive environment internally and encourage staff to use the system more, often to gain enough points and badges to get into their leaderboard. Another important aspect was to digitise the existing one-to-one meeting and implement three tiers of self-development for each job role including both professional and personal goals.

The Challenge

One of Chess` strategies over the last couple of years was acquiring other ICT businesses around the UK and one of the key challenges was to successfully integrate new people into existing teams. Personal Development feature was a custom feature, unique in every sense and it took 2 iterations to get it right. My Learning Hub has assigned a dedicated project manager to visit Chess on-site at the very start of the project to gather all ideas and requirements from the team and go away to prepare several workable scenarios. After four weeks of workflow preparation, design and development, Chess realised that they envisioned something different.

The Solution

Sometimes unless you can actually see and play around with a prototype, it’s hard to tell whether it’s exactly what you want. Nevertheless, we gathered around the table again to look at the workflows again and establish what’s wrong and how the feature should work in an ideal world, went through realistic user scenarios, and went away to redesign the PDP feature from scratch. Thanks to professionalism and dedication from both sides, the feature was successfully developed, tested, and delivered, keeping everyone’s sanity, working as expected, and helping Chess staff to plan their personal development goals weekly and allowing line managers to keep an eye on their progress.

The Results

System utilisation: 95%
Number of users: 550
Courses built: 257
Numbers of material: 1023
Tim Wilkinson-Hall
Tim Wilkinson-Hall
Head of Knowledge and Office
“We were looking for a central system for all learning, documentation and courses and to be an essential system that could be used by people across our group at different sites and locations. It’s simple to use and that’s what we always wanted. The technical support is second to none and I think we would be very lucky to get that from another organisation.“