Keeping an island running: how Jersey Electricity extended Halo from the service desk to the drawing office

About

Jersey Electricity (JE) is the main electricity provider for the island of Jersey in the Channel Islands, supplying homes and businesses for over 100 years. The organisation employs around 400 people and is currently focused on Jersey’s transition to net zero, investing in a modern resilient network, EV charging infrastructure, solar farms and helping customers switch to low-carbon heating and transport.

The Challenge

Jersey Electricity keeps an island running. Every cable, every road closure, every rerouting decision affects the people and businesses that depend on the network. The systems and processes that sit behind that work need to be just as reliable as the infrastructure itself.

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With their previous platform Jira, Jersey Electricity had been unable to embed it properly into the business. Tickets came in via email with no categorisation, and there was no change module, no self-service portal and no knowledge base. Change management was handled through a PDF form, filled in manually and emailed around. The vendor relationship offered limited support for developing the platform further, leaving ITIL maturity at around one or two.

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But nowhere illustrated the consequences more clearly than the Drawing Office. The team maps every piece of live infrastructure across the island on a daily basis. Any inaccuracy on those maps is a direct safety risk to the engineers, construction workers and field staff relying on them on site. Yet requests were still arriving by phone, Teams message and in person, with no single place to log or track them and no visibility of workload or priorities.

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For a business responsible for keeping an island’s electricity network running, working across disconnected systems and inboxes was no longer an option.

"We didn't really embed it into the business like we wanted to. We didn't feel it was the right fit.”

Steve Cyples, Information Technology Operations Supervisor 

The Solution

Halo came recommended via Gartner. When the team looked at it, the difference from what they had before was immediate. It was simple to set up, everything was included in a single licence, and named and concurrent licences gave the team the flexibility they needed. For a team that had spent years working around a platform that never quite fit, that simplicity was the deciding factor.

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But it wasn’t just the product. From the first conversation, Halo felt like a company that would stay involved rather than implement and move on. The Halo team came on site, spent time understanding the business and made sure the platform was embedded properly from day one.  

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That relationship gave Jersey Electricity the confidence to think beyond IT from the start. The Drawing Office, Facilities and the EAM team all had their own ways of working, their own request types and their own challenges. Halo gave each of them a home on the same platform without requiring heavy customisation or separate implementations.

"It was so simple to set up. The biggest selling point was the ease of use and with the licence you get everything.”

Roy Bedward, Technology Service Delivery & Governance Manager

The Results

These changes gave IT and operational teams a consistent way to manage work, with visibility and structure that had not existed before.

• ITIL maturity rose from one to above four, more than doubling from where the team started.

• Change management moved from a manually edited PDF sent by email to an automated portal with structured approval workflows routed through technology leadership, bringing the number of manual change forms to zero.

• New starter onboarding was integrated with HiBob, Jersey Electricity’s HR system, automating ticket creation, manager notification and the tracking of kit and access requests from day one.

• The Drawing Office, which handles hundreds of requests per week, gained full visibility of team workload, priorities and performance through dashboards, replacing a process where requests arrived by phone, Teams message and in person with no central record.

• Road closure letters and rerouting maps for customers are now produced and communicated more consistently, with clearer information for external stakeholders.

• The platform expanded from one department to four, with further teams in discussion to join.

"Since the implementation of Halo it was a complete transformation in our day to day operations — dealing with all our jobs and internal requests via a unified and central platform.”

Salwa Collas, Lead Drawing Office & ArcGIS Engineer

What started as an IT project has grown into something the whole business relies on. The Drawing Office, Facilities and the EAM team have each come on board, and discussions are underway with the engineering team at the power station and the Evolve EV charging team. There are also plans to open the platform to external stakeholders – contractors and customers who need to request cable records or engage with the Drawing Office directly. For a business in the middle of transforming how an entire island generates and uses energy, having one platform that grows with it matters.

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