Office 365 deployment with SharePoint intranet and Yammer for international fashion brand

Shaping the project

With rising infrastructure costs, bandwidth issues and a large support overhead managing their 250 Exchange and Office users, this international fashion brand chose Office 365 primarily as a means of reducing complexity and cost in their IT estate.

Our brief was to not only support the configuration and deployment of the Office 365 suite from a technology rollout perspective, but also to identify and deliver organisational and end-user benefits.

Through initial consultation the project objectives were defined as:

Business-focused

• Improve speed of execution and time to market
• Support globalised working
• Improve engagement

User-focused

• Provide improved tools and functionality
• Support improved internal communication & collaboration
• Feel connected to business and colleagues

Technology-focused

• Reduce costs and enhance tech infrastructure (email migration, mobile, cloud)
• Manage ‘Shadow IT’
• Enable new ways of working / Reduce email / Support effective calls and meetings

Our role was to directly support the IT team leading the project internally while also coordinating and liaising with the HR and internal comms functions in the UK, and engage with key stakeholders internationally.

Delivering technology, business value and change management workstreams

Following our standard methodology we carried out an initial assessment phase to map the current landscape and identify future opportunities and direction of travel across the three key areas of: technology (applications and infrastructure); business (strategic and operational factors); and employees (requirements, attitudes and appetite).

This phase provided a rich set of data and insights which fed the project strategy and detailed delivery plan. In particular we identified technology considerations and constraints, current operational pain points, key opportunities and cultural considerations.

The project strategy comprised two workstreams:

1. Technology: configuration and deployment of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Yammer in phase 1
2. Business value and change management: enhancing operational effectiveness and individual productivity through focusing on three business-critical use cases

Betterworking delivered the technology workstream through consultancy and services to configure the Office 365 tenant, support Exchange migration, design and develop a SharePoint online intranet ‘portal’, and help establish content and communities on SharePoint and Yammer.

We delivered the business value and change management workstream by identifying and coordinating use case ‘champions’, designing and managing the pre-launch Office 365 pilot, developing plans for launch comms, post-launch adoption and community management, and designing and delivering launch training sessions.

Successful launch and end-user adoption

The technology and business value workstreams were both delivered on time and as planned.

We set up and managed a pre-launch pilot which tested accessibility and functionality across a representative set of users and devices. No significant changes were needed and all users were quickly and successfully migrated to Exchange Online.

We designed and configured a SharePoint Online intranet which we helped populate with content for launch, focused on improved internal communication of company news and events. We also designed and implemented a SharePoint-based workflow to support a key marketing process identified as a phase 1 use case. We helped establish a number of Yammer communities focused on core internal communication and engagement use cases.

We designed a series of end-user training sessions which were successfully delivered (and very well received!) at the client’s offices.

“Thanks very much to Chris and Constantine for your help with last Friday’s Yammer & Office 365 sessions and the challenge of communicating key pieces of information to our users in a very short space of time!”

Customer Project Manager