No Limits – a charity helping young people build a brighter future
No Limits is an award-winning Southampton-based charity that provides free and confidential advice and support to children and young people under the age of 26. Since it was founded in 1993, No Limits has provided a lifeline to young people going through a variety of issues, helping them to build a brighter future. Trained youth workers help with a wide range of matters including mental health, housing, finances, benefits, substance use, sexual health, domestic abuse, parenting and legal advice. With over 150 staff and volunteers, No Limits supports around 7,000 young people each year, providing help without passing judgement.
Vicki Orba joined No Limits in 2002, initially managing a range of health-related services. Her prior experience in IT and as a data analyst led to her taking on responsibility for the charity’s data and IT systems. During her years at No Limits, she has overseen the evolution of the charity’s technology infrastructure from its early days of stand-alone PCs to using cloud-based services today.
A growing charity with evolving IT needs
As the charity grew from a single drop-in centre (in 1993) to multiple sites supporting 7,000 young people a year (by 2015), the team at No Limits saw their IT needs change and grow.
Although the No Limits team includes some IT-savvy personnel able to deal with many of the day-to-day issues, it became clear that the charity would benefit from the in-depth technical expertise that a specialist provides.
Vicki Orba explains, “We recruit people specifically because they’re good at working with young people, so we don’t have an inbuilt cohort of nerdy tech people… There comes a point where you think, ‘I really don’t know what to do about this’, at which point you start looking for specialist support services”.
Due to the size of the organisation, its needs and its budget, a full-time employee was not the answer. No Limits realised that they needed more specialist skill than they would be able to retain in-house. But they still wanted a strong relationship with their IT support, and they needed a company with expertise on relevant products as well as an understanding of the charity’s needs. Ideally, they wanted to engage a company that could work almost as an extension of their organisation, anticipating their needs and working as their IT partner so that No Limits could focus on what they do best, helping young people.
Co-managed IT support – an expert on your team
No Limits were introduced to HBTech via a personal recommendation. Initially, the charity engaged them for some ad hoc assistance. They soon realised that they would be a good fit to provide regular ongoing support.
Vicki Orba feels that “because of the informal support we’d had with them in the past, we knew that they knew the territory and would be a safe many pairs of hands to do it.”
Together, No Limits and HBTech established the type and scope of technical assistance required and came up with a system that would support the charity’s various IT needs. No Limits already had the data side of things well in hand, but they welcomed some help with IT support.
Vicki Orba explains, “We have quite a small resource. We’re three people, none of us full-time, with a lot of data crunching to do, we focus on that. But we do know how the rest operates, so that enables us to make the best use of the resources we’ve got. And that might be, ‘I can plug something in under that desk’, or it might be ‘I really don’t think that we can fix this. Let’s make sure that it’s on the list for HBTech’s next site visit’.”
HBTech provides a blend of day-to-day IT support and larger strategic project work, underpinned by regular meetings, visits and reviews, including a half-day visit every month to review IT matters as well as a quarterly video call to discuss and plan the charity’s IT strategy. This gives No Limits the benefits of a highly qualified virtual IT director to guide their strategy as well as access to the personnel to implement it. HBTech takes a pro-active approach and foresees project needs that otherwise might be overlooked, e.g. timely upgrades to equipment to ensure compliance and efficiency. HBTech helps No Limits stay ahead of issues by anticipating upcoming changes and requirements, which means the charity can budget for the future and avoid nasty surprises.
Their experience working with similar organisations coupled with the way they integrate with No Limits gives HBTech a better understanding of the charity’s needs than a standard IT company would have. Vicki Orba explains, “They have other customers who have similar requirements to us. With their ongoing knowledge of what the requirements are and what other customers do, they develop their knowledge in advance of then coming to us (and I dare say the knowledge of what they do with us then feeds into their other customers), so they are familiar with the territory.” This means that HBTech is able to recommend new products which are more efficient and cost-effective while also being compliant with relevant certifications and third-party requirements (which is crucial when dealing with public bodies that expect contract partners to meet standards such as Cyber Essentials).
It can be hard to navigate the various compliance and security issues, and sometimes it seems like you need a degree in understanding jargon just to work out what the documentation says. Fortunately, HBTech are fluent in plain English as well as IT, so they can bridge the gap.
Vicki Orba gives an example, “Microsoft’s own reference pages are sometimes imponderably weird and complicated and other times they’re using technology from two years ago and since then they’ve undergone a policy change to refer to this thing as a banana when once upon a time it was an orange. They do that quite a lot and they don’t instantly update all their resource pages. Sometimes I get quite exasperated, but I have at HBTech an entire resource of people who’ve already worked it out, so that really helps.”
“It really helps to have somebody who is that much more conversant with that territory to do it on your behalf and give you the result. There’s a limit to how many slightly technical things you can keep going in your head at any one time.”
As far as Vicki Orba is concerned, “It’s much better to have somebody come in who says, ‘I know how to do this for you, let me do that’. Yes, thank you. That’ll be perfect. It doesn’t make sense for me to goof around with it when they know.”
“We’ve got immediate access to HBTech and the entire help desk as required. We try to be very clear to our internal team members about who they should call for what kinds of support because it’s my team for data and HBTech for computer issues”
This co-managed IT support solution gives No Limits the best of both worlds. By keeping certain tasks in-house and delegating technical and time-consuming issues to HBTech, IT operations run smoothly. No Limits benefits from having IT know-how on call without needing to go to the hassle and expense of recruiting specialist personnel. And with their diverse team of IT professionals experienced in a range of IT fields, HBTech bring a breadth and depth of expertise that a single in-house IT manager would not be able to match.
A partnership that works
“HBTech know what they’re talking about,” says Vicki Orba, “and it works.”
Whether for strategic advice, compliance and security issues, big projects overhauling the IT system or simply translating jargon into plain English, she appreciates having experts she can rely on “Stuff like network security is technical. You need practitioners who are all over that stuff. And that’s really what HBTech are for us”.
But more than that, she values what it means for No Limits. Without having to worry about IT issues, the charity can focus on its vital work helping young people
Vicki Orba explains, “I want to make sure that everything is functional and that everybody’s connected and that people can look up the things they need to look up and all the rest of it. So it’s a responsibility, but I feel like we can maintain our obligations because we’ve got the resources we need to do it properly. And HBTech are a very big part of that. They are enormously helpful and pleasant to work with and it just means that we’re free to provide the service for young people that we need to provide.”
She sees the big picture, “This is just technical stuff. It’s nothing like the massive dilemmas facing the young people that this service supports.”
To learn more about how No Limits helps young people, visit: https://nolimitshelp.org.uk/
If you would like to hand over your IT headaches to professionals so you can concentrate on doing what you do best, contact us.
