Introducing TSG's dedicated housing team

TSG has built its reputation, and developed a fantastic track record, by working with housing associations to deliver market-leading, Microsoft-first IT solutions and services built on the latest cloud technology.

We’re now proud to announce the expansion of our dedicated housing team which has access to over 250 highly qualified IT professionals. TSG’s housing team is made up of knowledgeable people with a passion and deep understanding of the housing sector, its challenges, and opportunities.

Kirsty Marsden, Housing Service Design Lead commented, “It’s been an amazing year supporting housing associations to innovate at pace, we have significantly grown our customer base and this has led to an expansion of our team.”

Tony Hughes, Housing Solution Strategist says, “I’m really excited to talk to our housing association customers about the latest developments in TSG’s document management platform and Microsoft cloud computing services including artificial intelligence and machine learning.”

TSG understands that housing associations are having to rapidly adapt to substantial changes within the environment, with a demanding regulatory regime, the housing white paper requirements, consumer standards and health and safety compliance to manage. The housing sector is going through an accelerated business transformation built around new ways of working and the latest developments in digital customer service and the pandemic has only served to increase that momentum and the scale of change.

These circumstances have generated a demanding and unprecedented resourcing requirement to maintain today’s IT services, delivering high performance, high availability, 24×7 ‘always there’ operations whilst concurrently resourcing business transformation projects to create tomorrow’s next generation digital capabilities. This resourcing tension, and overlapping workload, inevitably creates a resource bottleneck in most associations drawing on the limited and overworked expertise across the internal digital and IT teams.

This suggests current technology is becoming increasingly unreliable and unstable and the strategic programme of digital transformation projects stalls. Data quality, business intelligence and cyber security can often become secondary considerations.

The challenge for most housing providers today is how they approach this issue, adequately resourcing and securing today’s business platforms while also concurrently building out tomorrows. The shape and composition of IT and digital teams has got to change to keep up with this demand.

TSG has partnered with hundreds of housing associations to help them solve these resourcing problems and challenges. This is achieved by blending our experts with your experts to create a high capacity and unified talent pool that is able to contract and expand efficiently and flexibly to meet the variable and uncertain demands for skills experienced on a daily basis. TSG offers fair value which represents an optimised approach for our customers to achieve value for money by enabling them to make a significant return on their investment.

TSG has talked to the sector about a Microsoft first approach for a number of years and has delivered many successful projects, however, our wider technology offering includes:

• Designing and resourcing projects with their digital experts to deliver and fast track their customer’s transformation programme.
• Supporting and working alongside their customer’s current 1^st, 2^nd or 3^rd line technical services through their world class support service desk.
• Providing out-of-hours systems availability, monitoring and support services so that their customers can have confidence that their systems and IT services are ready to go at the start of each working day, keeping their users happy, productive and satisfied.
• Delivering cyber security services to help you avoid a serious cyber-attack.
• Commissioning advanced threat protection and advanced cloud information security services to protect critical data assets and information systems from leakage or attacks.
• Business voice services including unified communications as service, Gamma Horizon and Gamma SIP.

Our experts understand your business, your priorities and will work with you to maintain today’s technical estate while simultaneously developing your digital capabilities and service platforms for the future. For many organisations this form of progressive, blended, business partnering is fast becoming the only solution that can satisfy the unpredictable peaks and troughs for on-demand premium digital talent at an affordable price point which scales up and down as you do.

Meet the team

Kirsty Marsden: Housing Service Design Lead

With 28 years working in the sector, Kirsty specialises in building strong partnerships with housing associations and ensuring positive engagement from initial conversations through to the delivery of successful projects for all Microsoft and managed service offerings. Kirsty takes pride in her honest and hands-on approach to understanding requirements before recommending solutions that align perfectly to the organisational needs. She is recognised by many in the sector as the host of TSG’s regular housing specific webinars and the first point of contact many HA’s have when they speak to TSG.

Tony Hughes: Housing Solution Strategist

Having worked in the IT sector for almost 30 years, Tony now works exclusively in the social housing sector at TSG dedicating his time to helping clients identify the most appropriate solutions that take advantage of the feature rich Microsoft 365 suite and enabling organisations to maximise their return on investment. Tony regularly presents at sector events championing the use of Microsoft solutions for the likes of document management, modern workplace, governance and compliance as well as utilising the new artificial intelligence features coming from Microsoft. Tony is passionate about the latest innovations and enjoys nothing more than delving into the technology and translating this to use cases that can benefit the sector.

Richard McGrath: Senior Customer Success Manager

After a 20-year career working to deliver large scale transformation and change across blue chip clients Richard is now working exclusively with many of TSG’s customers supporting their long-term success as Senior Customer Success Manager. Richard will now be supporting TSG’s housing association customers and is committed to providing a high-quality level of service. Richard’s goal is to ensure that TSG’s customers achieve successful outcomes and value for money.

Rob Fletcher: Housing Sector Solution Lead

Rob is an experienced digital/IT leader and has worked exclusively for housing associations for over 22 years and the IT industry overall for 30 years. Rob joins a hugely successful housing team which is dedicated and committed to working with and supporting housing associations. He is a passionate advocate for the work of the sector and its core social purpose building communities and providing homes. Rob joined TSG to make a difference so that he can help the entire sector develop a strong digital capability using advanced cloud technologies that enable TSG’s customers to achieve their strategic objectives. He brings deep housing knowledge and specific expertise which helps TSG’s customers align technology to their business problems.

To find out more about TSG’s housing solutions, download our brochure here.