How digital transformation at the National Lottery Community Fund helped it work through Covid-19

Matthew Green, Technology and Data Director at The National Lottery Community Fund, explains how the programme, which included moving to mobile devices and leveraging technologies like Microsoft's O365 and Teams, meant that by the time of the first lockdown in March 2020, the organisation was well set up to cope

In 2020, The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK, awarded over half a billion pounds (£588.2 million) to communities across the UK.

Since April 2020, the Fund has made over 14,500 grants, which included the additional responsibility of making sure that £200 million in funding from the Government's Coronavirus Community Support Fund reached communities.

This extra work, coupled with the disruption brought by the COVID-19 pandemic created a major challenge.

Matthew Green, Technology and Data Director at The National Lottery Community Fund, said: "During the last seven to eight months we worked at around 150 per cent productivity to hand out around 14,500 grants. And that wasn't from ten offices like normal, but from over 900 bedrooms, kitchens, home offices and the like."

In recent years, the Fund's strategy took a new direction, locating funding staff in the communities they serve and it was important to make sure that the right technology was in place for that to happen.

"We had about 45 per cent of staff on laptops, with everyone else on a desktop. If we'd gone into lockdown with that situation we'd have found even a normal working year challenging."

The organisation's digital transformation journey proved essential to helping it navigate the year's choppy waters.

"By the time we got to March 2020, we were actually further along our digital transformation journey than we thought we would be. So it didn't all happen in a heartbeat, but over a length of time. Now we're all on mobile devices, and we shifted the core business system from on-premise to the cloud.

"We also moved onto O365 in 2019 which really helped, with Teams now taking over for video conferencing. When we first moved to remote working, we'd been heavily dependent on office to office communication, with our video links between different meeting rooms. Now we have 850 calls or meetings on Teams every day, and we're shifting all telephone lines from VoIP to Teams."

The organisation is now thinking about 2021 and working on making its offices COVID-19 safe.

"We're getting ready for a partial return, creating a hybrid environment so we can connect to people's home offices. We're moving into a new era where it doesn't matter where you work."

The Fund has made a very conscious decision to move at pace, but is aware of the need to take staff along on the journey.

"There's a wide variability in the organisation of what people call digital literacy, but I prefer to think of it as digital confidence. We have colleagues who are more confident than others and more familiar with O365 and its capabilities."

One of the biggest projects of the year was moving the core business platform into the cloud - a high-risk project at the best of times.

"It was a huge undertaking for the organisation, and not without some risk" admits Green. "We heavily bespoked an SAP solution for our funding management system. Because of that bespoke work we lost any potential upgrades from SAP very early on, which made upgrading more of a challenge.

"As the platform infrastructure was approaching end of life, I alerted the organisation to the immovable deadline approaching, so we needed to start immediately and at pace. We did an MVP [Minimum Viable Product] in nine months, and moved to a market-leading SaaS solution. We followed Agile principles together with the Government digital standards handbook.

"That's a huge success story to complete a full systems migration in nine months. Without it working effectively we wouldn't have been able to get money out of the door to the organisations that need it, so it's a critical customer-facing system."

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How digital transformation at the National Lottery Community Fund helped it work through Covid-19

Matthew Green, Technology and Data Director at The National Lottery Community Fund, explains how the programme, which included moving to mobile devices and leveraging technologies like Microsoft's O365 and Teams, meant that by the time of the first lockdown in March 2020, the organisation was well set up to cope

The old SAP system was switched off in January 2020, as the new system went live. Green dislikes the idea that the timing was lucky.

"It was a choice to move in this direction to the cloud, to make us location-independent. The timing was good admittedly. It meant we had three and a bit months of familiarity with the system before we all started working from home. So it was the right strategy at the right time.

Another example of ‘the right strategy at the right time' is the end user computing project. Front-line staff at the Fund are embedded in the communities they serve, meaning they're very mobile.

"What they lacked was any kind of mobile device," explained Green. "We were in an awkward place trying to find laptops for them all. One of the projects within our digital transformation programme was around end user computing and devices.

"This was a three-year programme to ensure everyone had the right device to enable them to work where they needed to. We eventually landed on the Microsoft Surface Pro, and by January 2020 we were about six months away from completing the project."

In January, the Fund decided to fast-track the final six months, which saw it complete in late February, right before the coronavirus pandemic took hold in Europe.

"By the time we were locked down we had 700 of 850 devices enabled. In the final few weeks we started to see some scarcity amongst the devices, but we have a really good supply chain partner, and we managed to get it finished in time."

Another supplier Green is keen to give credit to is Delta, the award-winning market intelligence service from Computing. The work with The National Lottery Community Fund is part of a group deal between Delta and the Charity IT Leaders organisation.

"We heavily relied on Delta during the pandemic. We used the research on Unified Communications and data analytics. Primarily it's for upskilling ourselves in those areas, and making sure we're all on top of our game.

"It also helps us to make the right decisions. We have to ensure we spend our money wisely," said Green.

There are many societal challenges a large funder such as The National Lottery Community Fund faces, each with nuance and complexity, but with the business now fully enabled to work from anywhere thanks to the digital transformation programme, The National Lottery Community Fund looks well prepared for whatever 2021 throws at it.