Gary Pettitt, Chief Projects Officer at Delt Shared Services Ltd, talks about delivering for customers and giving back to the local community.
I expect many readers of Profile know of Delt Shared Services, a company born out of a joint venture between the IT teams of Plymouth City Council and the Devon Clinical Commissioning Group.
You might think we still just ‘do IT’ for those organisations but we do a lot more. We deliver managed IT services and a procurement service, a finance service, print and mail business, estates management, HR and organisational development, cyber security, management consultancy and project management.
Delt is a relatively unique entity, we are an agile private limited company owned by the public sector. We share our owners’ values, and in fact many Delt staff join the company because they want to give something back to their local community.
Delt is not a ‘Carillion-like’ outsourcer. In each of the seven years of Delt’s life the company has contributed c£14 million value added to the South West per annum, over 300 jobs remain in our region, and we support more than 200 services in over 300 locations. Our mission is to help people do amazing things.
We have two shareholders – Plymouth City Council and the Devon Clinical Care Commissioning Group – and each has an equal voice in how the company is run.
Most of the work we do is for our owners, but we often do more than this. We are currently working with Devon and Somerset Fire and Rescue Service, Transforming Futures Multi Academy Trust, Devon Partnership NHS Trust and South West Academic Health Science Network as well as many other public interest organisations. We generate a small surplus that our shareholders own, but our aim is to deliver improved services for the same, or at a slightly lower, cost.
When our shareholders need work on IT business change and transformation it is delivered by Delt as a project. Given the range of work done in the NHS and local government this makes the c700 projects we tackle each year extremely diverse.
Our project portfolio includes small, low-cost, quick to deliver pieces of work through to complex, high-value projects with strategic impact, such as the implementation of gigabit-capable broadband connections to over 120 public buildings in Devon and the subsequent delivery of the light up services.
Delt managed a project to deliver network capability to the Hoe and Millbay in support of Sail GP. This infrastructure was a critical part of the Sail GP setup allowing the live broadcast of the event to be transmitted to a global audience in near real time.
Working with the CCG is important to us, we really value the fact that we are contributing to the health and well-being of our local community. Our PMO provided significant support in the establishment of temporary vaccinations centres.
We enabled network connectivity, installed back-up systems and delivered additional laptops and scanning devices turning pubs, leisure centres, community centres and, in one instance, a car park into fully functioning vaccination centres.
Our project managers have experience working in Tourism, Economic Development, Education, Community Engagement, Health Management, Event Management, Bid Writing and Construction. We continue to explore opportunities to deliver a wider range of projects for our shareholders and are broadening and expanding the amount of work we do for commercial clients.
So Delt is not a rebranded IT department, we have several functions one of which is to deliver a wide range of demanding project work in many important areas. The capability of the Delt project professionals has been recognised by the Association of Project Management (APM), we have been selected as a finalist in the APM awards in the category ‘contribution to project management small to medium enterprise’.
We are all immensely proud of this and the work we do in our PMO to help people do amazing things.
