JANET(UK) manages the UK's education and research network and relies on effective communication and collaboration across the community. It turned to Huddle for IT project management and cross-firewall collaboration needs. Huddle provided an easy to use and scalable solution for sharing information and tracking project progress. JANET(UK) used Huddle to organize documents and evidence for IT accreditation, providing online access instead of paper documents. Huddle adoption has expanded beyond the IT team at JANET(UK) and improved project management by providing a centralized record of questions and responses.

1. Case study
JANET(UK)
JANET(UK) turns to Huddle for IT project management
and cross-firewall collaboration
About JANET(UK)
JANET is the network dedicated to the needs of education and research in the UK. It connects the
UK’s education and research organizations to each other, as well as to the rest of the world
through links to the internet. JANET(UK) manages the operation and development of JANET on
behalf of the Joint Information Systems Committee.
Location UK Challenge To share information and track
Sector Public sector project progress quickly and
Industry Education efficiently.
JANET, the UK’s education and research network, connects UK universities, further education
colleges, Research Councils, specialist colleges and Adult and Community Learning providers. “Huddle has made our working lives far
Managing the operation and development of JANET on behalf of the Joint Information Systems easier and now we can ensure that we
Committee, JANET(UK) relies on effective communication and collaboration across the education have a record of all the questions and
community, with suppliers and within the organisation itself. responses associated with specific
projects. We certainly rely far less on
Peter Kent, Head of ICT Services, JANET(UK), explains: “We frequently work on ICT projects with emailing project documents than we
suppliers and need to share information and track project progress quickly and efficiently. Email often used to, and Huddle’s task functionality
results in confusion over document versions and overburdened inboxes. Having used online should significantly improve the way we
collaboration tools when previously working in the construction industry, I did some research into manage our IT projects in the future.”
suitable services for JANET(UK) and came across Huddle. Its simplicity and scalability made it the - Peter Kent, Head of ICT Services
ideal choice.”
Huddle recently proved invaluable when JANET(UK) decided to take part in the National Computing
Centre’s (NCC) IT Department Accreditation Scheme (ITDA), a business improvement programme
designed to help organisations align ICT with the business. The ITDA specifies a set of requirements
in five key business areas: management, direction, business or service generation, delivery and
operations, and customer relationships. Faced with the challenge of gathering evidence, such as
policy and process document, audit trails of work orders and projects, and other content that fulfilled
the ITDA’s criteria and creating the accreditation process documents, JANET(UK) created a folder
structure in Huddle that matched the ITDA’s requirements.
“Rather than dumping a wealth of paperwork onto the accreditation assessor when they visited us
onsite, we decided it would be far easier to share all the information online,” Peter continues. “Using
Huddle, the 51 documents we prepared for the audit were easily accessible to both parties in one
secure online place and the response from the NCC was extremely positive.”
While the ICT Services team was the first department in JANET(UK) to use Huddle, adoption has
become more widespread and Huddle is now being utilized on projects run by the Training, Product
Management, and Finance teams.
“Huddle has made our working lives far easier and now we can ensure that we have a record of all the
questions and responses associated with specific projects. We certainly rely far less on emailing
project documents than we used to and Huddle’s task functionality should significantly improve the
way we manage our IT projects in the future,” Peter concludes.
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