Who
A large Australian accounting firm with more than 3,000 staff serving 200,000 clients throughout Australia and New Zealand through a network of over 100 offices.
Why
Following 10 years of huge growth via acquisition, the need for a next-generation intranet was identified to improve the way staff communicated and collaborated across organizational and geographical boundaries. The project was designed to address the many company-wide cultural and local collaboration requirements.
The primary objectives of the new system were:
- Apply the latest Web 2.0 and Social Networking technologies
- Facilitate easier information sharing, including news, at both a company-wide level, and a local/regional level
- Provide a rich People Directory, including details of skills and accreditations to allow staff to find and connect with peers and subject matter experts
- Enable staff to collaborate more effectively online, including via social networking capabilities – the cool tools
How
Unique World was selected to deliver this new system, based on demonstrated capabilities and a track record of success in similar engagements with Australia’s most complex organisations such as PWC, Telstra and Lend Lease.
We provided a comprehensive range of services from initial strategy and planning, through to launch. Our services included:
- Development of the intranet strategy and roadmap
- Business requirements gathering
- Content planning, content migration and content development
- Functional design and user experience design
- Technical build
- Liaison with the selected 3rd party hosted service provider
- Training for administrator and end users
- Post-launch support
- Change management and communications planning and execution
The Unique World team faced an aggressive timeframe of 6 months to deliver this project once the planning phase was completed.
We stretched SharePoint’s out-of-the-box collaboration and social capabilities, and complemented them with additional customisation and 3rd party products to provide a much more engaging and functionally rich solution. The team worked around the clock to ensure the desired launch date was met, and users would be instantly wowed from their very first visit to the portal.
Now
The intranet was successfully launched in September 2011 to all staff across Australia and New Zealand. The platform features a wide range of new features including:
- Dynamic homepage, with tailored content based on a users’ location (eg. local news)
- Rich People Directory, based on SharePoint’s ‘My Sites’ customised to capture additional profile information such as skills, and pre-populated with photos, contact details and About Me information for instant impact at launch
- Blog sites to keep staff up to date with news from the members of the Executive team
- Team sites – a structured area for online workspaces with tailored templates to suit the needs of different teams or projects
- Company-wide Discussion Forum
- Extensive training and support information, including video tutorials
User adoption has been very strong, as evidenced by the many team site requests and discussion forum topics from Day 1 following launch. The new portal also created an immediate flurry of interest from many parts of the company, with teams wanting to leverage more of the new SharePoint capabilities to address new business requirements.
Unique World continues to support the portal, and we are looking forward to planning the next round of enhancements.
User feedback has been very positive
(Portal name) made what has been painful – very simple. It’s just easier to have those discussions with people in the group that I’d not generally speak to within the Discussion Forum. Loved it….
Surely someone else in our nationwide firm had come up against this particular problem before, so I posted it on (Portal name). Straight away I had responses coming in from members of the broader (company name) Team.
The staff profiles have been very useful in helping with introductions and becoming more familiar with who does what and where.
