technologyreseller.co.uk 19 END USER COMPUTING that balance between personal life and professional life is important.” Enhanced collaboration Another benefit of the new infrastructure is enhanced collaboration between project teams working in SimpsonHaugh’s three offices – its Manchester HQ, where 75 or so staff are based; its London office, home to around 25 employees; and its Birmingham office, opened last year, which currently has a headcount of two. “Sometimes London and Manchester work on the same project – Battersea Power Station is a good example. Moving the data backwards and forwards between each office, depending on who was doing what, was a nightmare, and making sure that there was only one file for the first floor and one file for the second floor to avoid duplication. “We have the same issue when we deal with third parties. We send them a file, they do what they have to do and we get it back. In the meantime, we might have been doing stuff on the file so it’s out of date. It just wastes time. Now, we allow those third parties, via Citrix, to work on a VDI machine on a specific project. They become more like an extension of the design team, rather than an integral to the firm’s working culture. “Because architecture is collaborative, it is important for architects to be in the office, but there are cases, for example if somebody’s doing a door package or a drywall package or a window package, when they don’t need to be in the office and can work just as well at home. Previously we were using RDP and VPN off a laptop. Obviously, opening a 250 MB file over a VPN connection is not the nicest experience and not knowing the quality of people’s personal infrastructure was also an issue. “My goal was to find a really simple solution for staff to be able to just walk up and connect onto a remote PC and drive that remote PC as if they were in the office. Citrix gives us that window into the office compute, that platform for them to come in and out of as they need to and, with the VDI behind it, it doesn’t matter whether they’re coming in from a physical desktop or a virtual desktop.” Moyes adds that the ability to work remotely, productively and efficiently, gives employees more flexibility and enables them to optimise their work-life balance. “We’ve got quite a number of people who come from the near continent, and it’s given them the ability to go home during summer for longer and remote in and work from there. Rather than having to spend just a week with their family, they now can spend four weeks with them. It also means that people who are in the office from 9 til 5.30 can go home, have tea with the family, put them to bed and then log back in at eight or nine o’clock and work for a couple more hours. Architecture is very much a vocation, and being able to have also designed to provide the capacity and resources needed to support the firm’s greater use of generative AI. Moyes says that a productivity boost powered by the new, more reliable IT infrastructure and faster opening applications could save SimpsonHaugh as much as £1.79 million a year in lost earnings (17% of its 2023 turnover). This estimate is based on a big reduction in IT downtime caused by hardware failure and sluggish applications leading to a 15% increase in hours worked by the firm’s 80 architectural staff over the course of a 38-week year. “There are an awful lot of tangible and intangible benefits that we get back from it, particularly around the downtime for the architectural staff. If they’re on a physical piece of tin and something goes wrong with that piece of tin, it might be a 10-minute job for IT to fix or it might be a three or four-hour job, in which time that individual isn’t doing what they should be doing. Based on having 100 users, you can guarantee at least one or two people a week are going to have some kind of issue with a machine playing up. At least with the VDI environment, all you have to do is turn it off and turn it on again and they’re up and running. If somebody is on a physical box, we can put them onto a VDI box within 10 minutes, so they are back and working on it as quickly as possible.” Remote working Moyes adds that performance improvements are particularly beneficial for remote work, which has become continued... ©Daniel Hopkinson ©Simon Kennedy Circus West Village Deansgate Square
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