Standards and accreditations

When you work with MLCSU IT you can enjoy the confidence that we apply the highest standards to our services:  not only overall standards of governance but also key technical standards, which increasingly separate the best suppliers from the rest.

In terms of Programme and Project Management, we have our own full-time PMO office including our own Programme and Project Managers, each appropriately trained and certified in PRINCE II and MSP.  They boast an excellent reputation and track record in successful delivery and, in bringing to bear their experience, they don’t burden our clients with undue project management effort, but rather deploy an appropriate subset of PRINCE, for example, to suit the scope of your project.  As a result, your people are included, consulted, informed and in control.

Extending such discipline to a wider scope, we also adhere ITIL (the IT Infrastructure Library) for our service management offer.  We manages problems and issues correctly, we run formal structured Change Control and our Development Teams practice formal Release Management.  Our clients experience this on a day-to-day basis in interacting with our Service Desk.  Our two centres in Chester and the Midlands manage thousands of requests every week, be they incidents, change requests or procurement requests, all governed by KPI and SLA.

In 2018, MLCSU received CyberEssentials accreditation, reflecting our robust standards of IT Security and Information Governance and assuring you that we have the best approach to security.  At present, government departments mandate that IT suppliers be CyberEssentials accredited and it is widely expected that in the future local NHS, Local Authority and other public sector organisations will be required to prove that their suppliers have CE accreditation and we can offer you that assurance now.

As an NHS / public sector organisation ourselves, we are acutely aware of the demands of the NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit, which replaced the Information Governance Toolkit, and we can advise and contextualise our proposals to you to help you stay within the constraints of that and equivalent assessment frameworks.  CyberEssentials Plus is next on our radar.

In terms of specific technologies, as an employer which likes to develop its staff, we support technical training and certification appropriate to the myriad of IT roles in our teams.  The majority of our technicians are Microsoft trained and certified; as above, our PMO staff hold the appropriate PM qualifications and our Development Teams are variously trained in disciplines such as SQL Server, Umbraco, Sharepoint, .NET, MVC, Office 365 deployment, Linux server management and a variety of content management platforms.

For its wider performance, MLCSU was awarded the NHS RightCare kite mark in February 2018, which accredits us to support CCGs, STPs and other fellow NHS organisations to provide the highest standards of care to patients, focusing on best use of resources, performance analysis and proven evidence-based processes.