Eclipse system contract

1.On which date did Devon County Council contract with OLM to implement Eclipse?

Eclipse is not a new contract but falls within the existing contract as an upgrade. Work has been undertaken between Devon County Council and OLM as a development partnership for the upgrade.

2. Has the solution gone live?

No

3. Has Devon County Council been in touch with other Eclipse implementation customers to compare notes? If so, please provide copies of any correspondence, including emails.

Yes, the following councils have been contacted, or contacted us in respect of the Eclipse system.

Birmingham City Council – phone calls mainly, some questions and answers by email

Question : Please can you confirm if you have implemented ‘Signs of Safety’ into your forms? If so, please could you confirm whether you have used the Signs of Safety terminology or whether you have come up with your own version of the same thing? We are just exploring Signs of Safety as part of our configuration.

Response : We have developed a strength based approach commensurate with signs of safety but we have not used their language. Hope that helps

We provided copies of the principles we used when considering Eclipse and a process map outlining our approach to finance integration answered the majority of the questions from Birmingham City Council.

Brighton and Hove – questions answered by phone and email.

1. What made you choose Eclipse over other products e.g. Liquid Logic, Mosaic and did you go through a full procurement exercise?
Children’s Services took Eclipse as an upgrade to CareFirst, rather than as a separate procurement.

2. If you went for a direct award, would you be able to confirm which framework agreement you used? How did you evidence Value for Money using the LASA Framework and direct award route? Did you carry out some comparative exercise between providers to show that you were getting the best deal for Devon and how did you evidence that? Have you had to provide that information in the FOI requests ?

Children’s Services took Eclipse as an upgrade to CareFirst, rather than as a separate procurement.

3. Are you implementing Children’s, Adults and Fiscal (when ready) and how long do you estimate it might take you?
4. What resources do you have for your project team?
5. How many data migrations have you done to date and what kind of issues are you coming up against?
6. Did you do lots of data cleansing before you started your test migrations and if so what did you cleanse?
7. I’ve heard from another source that ‘open’ cases can’t be migrated – have you experienced this issue, and if so, how are you managing it?
8. Were OLM clear with you about what was live and what was still in development stage?
9. What EDRM system you currently use and if you are looking to replace this with the Eclipse offering or sticking with an interface to your existing system? If you are moving to Eclipse, how are you dealing with historical data?

Questions 3 – 9 were answered by supplying an extract from a project document.

10. Are you using mobile technology and rolling out as part of the implementation?

Eclipse is able to be used on mobile devices, though some of our old Microsoft handsets will need to be replaced to be compliant. This is because Microsoft are not releasing all the latest web standards for some of their older devices. Eclipse will be used on mobile devices in Devon.

11. What corporate finance system do you currently have and have you tested the interface with Eclipse as yet ?

Because Eclipse is the case management component only and adults are remaining on CareFirst, the existing CareFirst integration to our FINEST finance system will continue to be used. In due course this will be replaced with OLM’s Fiscal product, but this is not currently ready.

12. Have you opted for a hosted solution with OLM?

Devon switched to hosted for all products we take from OLM prior to upgrading to Eclipse. We are continuing to host with Eclipse.

Bromley – phone call only, no recorded information.

Cardiff – phone call mainly, plus some questions answered by email
We provided extracts from our Project Initiation Document (PID) – enclosed – which answered the rest of the questions from Cardiff.
Response : I’m attaching some sections extracted from the Project Initiation Document ( to answer Questions 3 – 9) which hopefully might be of some use. These include a summary of the original business case, the role descriptions for the main project team, and a list of the dedicated resources we have on the team – the ones highlighted in yellow are the people we have actually seconded to the project team (other roles are being delivered by colleagues as part of their day jobs). It also includes an overview of the original project plan which would have had us implementing last September – as discussed, sadly it’s taking a little longer, but the overall approach remains the same. (The scope hasn’t included development of an Early Help “model office” in the end – mainly because Devon has recently implemented a replacement Early Help system and they decided against further change at this stage).

Carmarthen – questions answered by phone and email.
1. What services in Devon use CareFirst?
2. Do you use CareFirst for your financial services? Which service areas (Adult, Children, Fostering etc.)?
3. When did you decide to move to Eclipse? Why – what were/are the key business drivers? Who was involved in this decision making? Are you able to share your Business Case?
4. Will eclipse be hosted by OLM? What arrangements did you put in place re this? (Hosting agreements etc.).
5. When did you start the implementation process? Are you able to share an outline/broad implementation plan?
6. How are you planning to migrate services from CareFirst to Eclipse – phased or ‘big-bang’? Were/are OLM involved in this process? If so, how?
7. What data have you decided to migrate? How was this decided and who (roles) was involved in the decision making?
8. What did you need to do with your CareFirst data in order to prepare for migration to Eclipse?
9. What will you do with data not being migrated? How was this decided and who (roles) was involved in this decision making?
10. Do you integrate systems or data with your local health board (i.e. for joint health and social care services)? If not, are there plans to do so with Eclipse?
11. From start to finish, how long has the implementation process taken (or is planned to take)? Is there anything you would do differently?
12. What type of costs have you incurred in order to implement Eclipse? What was the expected total cost to implement Eclipse? How was this calculated?
13. Have there been any unexpected or unforeseen costs?
14. Did you use existing resources to manage the migration and implementation, or did you appoint new roles? If so, what roles and over what length of time?
15. What have been the key lessons learnt? Do you have any advice to other sites planning to implement Eclipse?

We provided extracts from our Project Initiation Document (PID) and a Requirements Evaluation Appendix , both enclosed, which answered the questions from Carmarthenshire.

East Ayrshire– phone call and email about whether we were live and any data migration lessons, no further recorded information.

Questions : East Ayrshire Council are in the process of re-tendering our Social Work management information system. As part of the process of the process, we asked the companies to provide details of their experience within the last three years and references from other Councils who we can contact. OLM Systems have nominated yourselves as their referees for the process.

Could I now ask:

– Which of OLM’s systems are you currently using? SWIFT, CareWatch, Eclipse, or another system?
– Could you please advise of your experience of OLM system implementations?

OLM are proposing the Eclipse system to East Ayrshire Council and we would be keen to speak to any Council who have already been through a full system implementation.

I wonder if you would be so kind as to let me know if you received my email from last week? We have system demonstrations scheduled with OLM on Tuesday 12th of June but have concerns the system being proposed is not yet live. Since OLM have nominated Devon County Council as a referee, I’d be keen to hear about your current experience with the company.

Response : Spoke to xxx who wanted to know specifically about whether Devon was a live site, which we are not at the moment. Discussed issues (both sides) with reporting and data migration. Described history with OLM services. Described effective hosting and model office development, user feedback etc for Eclipse.

Plymouth City Council – questions answered by phone only, no recorded information.

Shropshire and Oxfordshire – meeting to share implementation experiences, no recorded information.

Somerset County Council – questions answered by email
I’d appreciate it if we could get some feedback on the following re training, either in terms of plans or experience:

• Training delivery method – classroom, online or a mixture?
OLM offer a skills transfer approach for their training.
They do a 1 day face to face training course mainly aimed at system administrators followed by a 1 day End user training on a train the trainer basis – where those trained would then roll out to the wider users.
During the implementation they also run workshops with staff to review the ‘model office’ build and discuss any local configurations that will be needed.
We are intending to do a mixture of on line, classroom and e-learning, written guidance.
Devon – for our “managed implementation” by OLM, we agreed they would deliver a full programme of face to face training across all of our teams. The training was planned with our two business change leads (both managers from Children’s Social Care). At each session the business change leads introduced the working culture and practice changes that will be implemented with the system, with a team of OLM trainers following on with actual system training. We did a half day introductory session followed by a half day team specific session with each team. OLM have also provided on line training videos for each aspect of Eclipse and the model office and teams have been using these since we did the classroom training. Post implementation, the training approach for new staff will be based on these online videos. OLM have done separate system administrator training sessions.

• How many hours of training are you allocating per user?

We are still working on our training strategy – should have a draft by the end of October and will share with you
Basically a day per user in our original rollout plan.

• What training material has OLM supplied, has it been useful?

We haven’t had training yet – but expect there to be something similar to Mylife .Eclipse user guide attached for info
Online training videos as above, plus the user guide Lorna has attached. These seem to be working ok for most of our staff.
• Does the material require customising / tailoring for different roles (e.g. frontline social worker, office based admin staff, finance staff), or is it modular, so users complete specific pre-defined modules appropriate to their role?

We’re expecting that we will want to tailor it as our training approach will be one of going through the process and the expected professional practice and then showing how the system will support them. Every Council will have slightly different processes I’m sure! Please see my answer under first bullet point – we needed to do separate sessions for each team with some general background and then some specifics in model office processes and forms relevant to them. The online videos are structured the same way.
• Have you created additional support material / intranet microsite etc?

We will be – we are planning on having on line user guides and online system training as well as video tutorials and also prompts and hints within the system. We’ve done a whole programme of “practice guidance” writing as well – linked from the guidance links within the model office itself. (This is more “how Devon does it” type of guidance rather than system guidance itself).
• Do you have plans for go-live floorwalking / superuser support to users?

Still working on this but we would expect to have ‘champions’ for the floor walking plus a telephone line for people to phone. Our staff are not all located in one place so this is going to be a challenge. Yes, with the size of Devon as you would imagine this is a bit of a challenge for this as well! We are trying to keep our internal project team in place to do the floorwalking but this is proving difficult the longer the timescales extend. However we also have champions across the service who we are expecting to support the rollout when it happens. As part of the “managed implementation” OLM are going to also provide 3 floorwalkers for the first week – 10 days but we are going to need to spread them across our all our locations.

Wolverhampton City Council – the following questions were referred to OLM as they covered areas we could not reasonably answer.

• How Guardian works in the MASH when interfacing with Eclipse Children’s
• How the Eclipse children’s interface with Carefinance works in the interim period until Fiscal becomes available in 2018
• How My Life integrates with Eclipse and whether it can be used to undertake self-assessments (Adults)
• How you’ve approached and planned for UAT
• How you’ve approached and planned for end user training
• Any other general learning points that you consider would be helpful

1. Wolverhampton has up to now relied on the ‘triggers’ in CareFirst to send desktop messages between teams and individuals. These have been particularly useful when used between our placement and brokerage teams for example as a means of ensuring that each is aware of the need to process ‘something’ payment related. However if I’ve understood our systems admin team correctly, in Eclipse this functionality has been replaced with a link to Outlook which requires the user to manually complete an email. If this is also your experience it would be really helpful if you could tell us: –
a) If you also used the CareFirst triggers in a similar way?
b) If you did, has the alternative functionality in Eclipse (e.g. link to outlook) worked well (or not) from a business UAT perspective?
i. If it did work well can you let us have a few sentences summarising how you tested this functionality and what the business outcomes were?
ii. If it hasn’t worked satisfactorily throughout UAT, has any other ‘work around’ already been developed or identified for imminent development?

2. The photo of the child/person on the person details screen does not pull through to the ‘relationship graphs’ in our test environment.
a) Is the same in your test environment?
b) If it is, have you been given any indication when, or even if, this issue will be resolved?

3. Lastly, if you haven’t already responded separately to our P&I (reporting) Manager,  about the issues you experienced/are experiencing around the reporting database, it would be very much appreciated if you could do so.