Newcastle based Croft Technology plc has recently completed a major project at the headquarters of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) in Sandy, Bedfordshire.
The RSPB was founded in 1889 and manages over 200 nature reserves. It is one of the largest organisations of its kind in the world and raised and managed £63million in voluntary contributions in 2005 alone.
Croft has worked with the RSPB for over 10 years and won a competitive bid for the work to plan, manage and implement a complete upgrade of the RSPB’s HQ network infrastructure. Information Technology is vital to the efficient running and management of the RSPB, which must maintain close links with its widespread facilities, members, the media and its global partners.
Croft’s Managing Director Phil Renton explained: "We needed to deliver a stable, cost effective infrastructure that would meet current and future needs and provided resilient links between buildings. The system also needed to allow the RSPB to take full advantage of new technology such as VoIP as well as the latest desktop applications.”
Renton continued, “The project brought with it some significant challenges. It involved the removal of old category 3 and 4 cabling and installation of structured category 5e cabling. All this in a series of busy offices, based in grade II listed buildings, located in a wildlife reserve that imposed strict regulations on how we could work!” Croft also had to remove the old ducting, open new trenches to connect the buildings and reinstate the whole site without causing disruption to people or birds on the reserve. "We also had to ensure the whole installation was wildlife proof. The network cabling criss-crosses the site and is the backbone of the whole IT infrastructure. Any failure due to birds damaging cables would be catastrophic and expensive so 12 core fibre was armoured with steel.”
To ensure the project ran smoothly, the Croft Project Management team liaised closely with their RSPB counterparts. Croft surveyed the entire site and developed a multi-stage project management plan that worked in logical phases to ensure the work progressed on schedule. The installation of over 10km of new cabling was a major undertaking and 6 engineers worked mainly at night to minimise disruption.
Fiona Lynch, RSPB Project Manager said: "This was a very significant project for us. We are a leading global charity and IT is central to what we do and how we engage our partners. We have a long standing relationship with Croft and were again impressed with their approach. The whole project was started and finished on time and has delivered an exceptional new network solution."
