Turnkey Regional Office IT Infrastructure Rollout for a Central Government Department

A Central Government Department needed to bring a consistent IT baseline — structured network cabling, core switching, a small server room, and perimeter security — to a set of regional offices that had grown organically over the years with inconsistent, ad hoc setups. None of the offices had dedicated IT staff, and headquarters had no reliable way to specify what "consistent" should actually mean across sites with different building layouts and existing equipment.

The Challenge

A turnkey rollout across multiple sites is only as good as the specification behind it. Without a clear, site-surveyed requirement, the department risked either an RFP too vague to hold a vendor accountable, or a rigid one-size-fits-all design that didn't fit every building. Procurement rules also required a level of technical detail and evaluation-criteria rigour that the department's own staff had not written before.

Our Approach

• Site-by-site discovery: Surveyed each regional office's existing infrastructure, physical layout, and connectivity constraints before writing a single line of specification.
• Vendor-neutral turnkey RFP: Wrote a single RFP covering structured cabling, network, server room fit-out, and perimeter security as one turnkey scope, with per-site variations documented as annexures rather than separate incompatible tenders.
• GFR-compliant evaluation design: Structured technical and financial evaluation criteria to meet General Financial Rules procurement standards while still weighting genuinely important differentiators, not just lowest price.
• Independent rollout oversight: Acted as the department's on-the-ground and remote PMO through implementation, verifying each site's handover against the original specification before sign-off.

The hardest part of a multi-site turnkey rollout is rarely the technology — it's making sure "done" means the same thing at every single site, verified the same way.

The Outcome

The selected vendor delivered a consistent network, server, and security baseline across every regional office on the agreed schedule, with each site independently verified against the specification before final payment. The department now has a documented, repeatable turnkey specification template it can reuse for any future office expansions without needing to rebuild the requirement from scratch each time.