The London Borough of Bromley Intranet... a bulletin! The PDF version can be downloaded from here:
Introduction
This short briefing document outlines the basic attributes of a SharePoint Implementation project managed in its entirety by Steve Dalby (steve.Dalby@sei-is.be) as Project Manager, Technical lead and Business Analyst. The complete project took 2.5 years and was delivered in phases that included a migration from SharePoint 2003 to MOSS 2007. Here are some of the highlights.
Scenario
London Borough of Bromley required upgrading of their intranet. The existing web site was built on technology that was several generations old and keeping the information updated was difficult. The decision to upgrade to SharePoint was taken Early August and with a target date of Early November to have a fully branded SharePoint site available to the staff for information to be updated and displayed for a council assessment in December. The target was delivered with a small 3 person team.
The delivery dates for the initial build was met and the service supported the council’s attainment of 3 stars for supporting services across the council.
Collaboration
The initial release of the product supported the published pages listed with in a new navigation. This allowed the time to define the information architecture required to support both the created content through collaboration of Office 2003 based objects and Wiki based information streams.
Work was completed with the Bromley knowledge team to define the organisation taxonomy. Various development scenarios was devised to support taxonomy [LGCS Local Government Classification Scheme] within the document libraries.
Structure
The organisation Structure was designed using the existing corporate hierarchy alongside the Information Structure, Owners and Audiences with published Pages and sites constructed to suit the result. Security Modelling was defined to parallel existing rules and regulations in place on network shares. onebromley was not designed to support confidential information but allowed searching of external data as required. Connections to external data sources were enabled and several workflow driven forms was developed to support account requests and approvals across the network for which we developed bespoke SharePoint templates.
Analysis and Benefits:
LB Bromley had 6 directors and 25+ senior management staff who were brought up to speed with our SharePoint tutorials and SharePoint training. The Information needs and Personnel Information needs was assessed over a period of 3 months through multiple meetings with each manager. This analysis was compared to completing the same tasks using SharePoint. It pointed to a saving of 94 hours per month in efficiencies which when carried across all management grades supported a saving of 4520 hours, or 3 full timeshared staff.
The same analysis also defined the location of collaborative team sites and their relation to the department published pages.
The business change
Resources for training and managing the transfer of Information onto the portal was carried out in-house by the Project team (now at 5 in number, supplicated by department based staff, seconded into the project team for 6-9 months).
A process of site assessment was defined that identified the usage of team sites. Low numbers of documents and custom Lists contrasted with sites that held many created documents. The former required more time from the project team to ensure that teams were actively using team sites. An assessment of the current ‘state’ and the end ‘state’ was made to understand the resources required to meet the project defined scope.
Governance
Using feedback from the Directors as the business, knowledge teams, Project sponsors and Programme leads a system A Governance was defined to support future development of the Intranet and to ensure that Security models, Information Architecture and taxonomy was maintained. It controlled the devolved publishing process ensuring only the right qualified staff could define content.
Applications
The intranet supported several applications designed the improve information dissemination across the business. This included:
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* Management processes as a wiki
* Local travel details and support for green travel
* Organisation and Department news feeds
* Events
* Email access
* Project documentation
* Network and building Status.
* Chief executive Blog
* Ideas and suggestions site
* Team collaboration sites.
* Published Pages
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Conclusion
As a project Onebromley encompasses a fully Structured SharePoint installation that was incorporated into the business. The platform is still being worked on as a corporate tool to deliver process work flow and a search portal for all information as well as a publishing platform to Intranet pages.
Currently the same platform supports Intranet and Extranet activity with plans to support the corporate Internet Web pages in due course.
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Next Steps:
If you would like help with your SharePoint Intranet project, or would like to talk to an expert then please contact me, I'll be glad to help:
[button link="/contact/" color="green"]Call Steve on: +32 54 51 84 46 or CLICK HERE>[/button]
If you have any questions or wish to share some feedback then please use the comments below.
Many thanks - Steve
