Located at Sydney Olympic Park, the NSW Institute of Sport (NSWIS) provides world class facilities, services and sport programs to foster the talents of elite and emerging athletes across NSW. Every year the Institute awards approximately 700 scholarships to high performance athletes representing more than 20 different sports. These athletes benefit from a wide range of support services including individual skills development programs, the latest in sports science and world class coaches.

 Keeping track of the paperwork

Two years ago, Greg Baxter, Manager of Information Communications and Technology at NSWIS became concerned about the state of the organisation’s records management practices.

Unsurprisingly, given the number of athletes, peak sporting bodies, coaches, medical scientists, administrators and other involved stakeholders, the Institute was awash in paperwork. And although the organisation used a document management system, the software only offered a very basic level of support. Users could view lists of all the document folders on the system, but there was no way of easily identifying folder contents. As each year passed, and more scholarships, correspondence, medical and athlete records were added, it was becoming increasingly difficult to locate anything.

Research confirmed to Baxter that both requirements – the need for better document management and a more user friendly intranet – could be solved with the help of Microsoft SharePoint.

To help develop SharePoint as a collaborative intranet and document management solution, Baxter selected Microsoft partner and business solutions specialist, Professional Advantage. “Over the course of around two years we went to a number of expos and forums. We came across Professional Advantage and liked what they had to say. We started talking about the project and it developed from there,” he adds.

Start small and bed the software in

Based on Professional Advantage’s advice, Baxter decided to begin the SharePoint deployment by concentrating on two major areas of the business: Sports Science and Medicine, followed by Coach Athlete Program Services. “We looked at bedding the software in with these two areas before rolling it out to the whole organisation,” Baxter says.

With Professional Advantage’s help, Baxter and his team deployed SharePoint, making it the source for all Sports Science documentation. The initial design consolidated close to 54,000 folders from the existing File Share to around 30 document libraries. This approach allowed NSWIS to clean up their document structure while also adding metadata to each document, to facilitate sorting, grouping, filtering and searching of the library.

The introduction of SharePoint also enabled NSWIS to streamline processes by establishing automated workflows and document versioning, providing a major benefit to all users, not only those in IT. Given the personal and confidential nature of the information, permissions were put in place to ensure that only authorised staff have access to sensitive content.

A custom staff calendar was implemented to allow visibility and transparency into Sports Science staff availability, providing a fast and reliable point of reference when allocating resources.

Next, the team turned to Coach Athlete Program Services, an area of the business responsible for liaising with coaches, sports consultants and the myriad national and state sporting bodies to establish the expectations, required outcomes and necessary support services for each sport.

Both divisions were closely involved in the development of the solution in a bid to maximise user engagement. Within just two months Professional Advantage began conducting ‘train the trainer’ sessions with key Institute employees who were then tasked with preparing the remaining staff.

When the intranet went live in February 2012, everyone was ready and the changeover went without a hitch.

A mobile future

The look and feel implemented by Professional Advantage gave a fresh and modern appeal to the intranet which staff took to in numbers. Site structure and navigation closely suited their organisation and as such, all content was in a logical place making it easier for staff to find what they were after.

Today, Baxter estimates that 70 per cent of the Institute’s documentation is held within SharePoint, with only the Applied Research Centre and business services such as ICT, Finance and Marketing yet to move onto the intranet.

Further down the track, Baxter is keen to introduce internet access to the intranet – in other words, create an extranet. He also hopes to integrate SharePoint and the athlete CRM system, creating an extranet for partners so that Institute staff can more easily share information and conduct online meetings with peak sports bodies. There is also a plan to deliver more information and functionality for coaches.

You can download this case study here. You can read more about Professional Advantage and SharePoint here.

IT refresh cycle causes a rethink

Three years ago the Sydney office was due for an IT refresh. Servers were ageing and due for replacement. Internal software systems were over five years old and needed to be updated to remain current with the latest industry functionality.

An increasingly paperless accounting environment was creating new demands that weren’t fully catered for by the current system. Rather than maintaining physical files, the office had switched to the far more efficient practice of scanning incoming documents and saving them in digital format. This made it far easier to access and share documents, and optimised office space. Unfortunately such practices had also greatly diminished the office’s digital storage capacity.

Nick Ferrara, Senior Accountant and IT Manager for UHY Haines Norton Sydney explains, “We were faced with having to move to Office 2010 and add an extra storage area network (SAN). At the time, the SAN alone would have cost $50,000 and then there would have been all the add-on costs to fix the system up and keep us going. We couldn’t justify it for an old system.”

The alternative was equally prohibitive: to replace all hardware and software at a cost in excess of $300,000.

Analysing the numbers

Ferrara put his accounting mindset to work and analysed all of the company’s costs at a per user/per month level. “I was astonished by the amount of money we were spending on IT, especially on an old system. Once a system becomes old, a lot of the maintenance becomes more expensive because in the first three years, it is covered by the license and maintenance. After that costs start to escalate. I saw straight away that what we had was costing us a fortune.”

Next, he did the same calculations based on a complete IT overhaul and compared the costs with cloud or hosted IT services. “I did my homework and spoke to other users of similar services. I looked at various hosted solutions with the big providers and last of all, I spoke to Professional Advantage,” Ferrara says.

He found that a hosted service could be provided at a reasonable price without the upfront expenditure of a new system. It would provide the office greater security and include two things that to date had been missing from the firm’s IT systems: redundancy and disaster recovery capabilities. There were other benefits as well. “One of our divisions is Audit. They get involved in tenders with government departments where there are stringent requirements as to how systems are run and how security is handled. Having a more robust and secure data centre setup would give us an extra ability with these clients.”

Keen to choose a partner that would deliver personal service, Ferrara opted for a private cloud service from Professional Advantage. “We’d been working with Professional Advantage for more than ten years, so it was obvious we couldn’t go too wrong in terms of the trust factor. After all, I wasn’t going to outsource our IT to someone we didn’t have a strong relationship with. Cost obviously comes into it, and at the end of the day, we also had to go with someone we trusted.” Ferrara says.

Building support

The concept of an outsourced or cloud service took some time to sell to other managers within the firm. Not everyone was familiar with the model and Ferrara had to spend time explaining the plan to allay any fears. “I could see where those fears were coming from,” Ferrara acknowledges. “Our livelihood depends on the data and if it were to go astray, there would be a huge impact on the business.”

To alleviate concerns, Ferrara and Professional Advantage adopted a two month transition, switching one application at a time to the cloud. This allowed staff to gradually become comfortable with the new platform, and allowed the project team to quickly resolve any issues arising from the transition.

By the end of the two months staff were completely confident with the environment and Professional Advantage had taken over the running of all of UHY Haines Norton’s software, including financial and auditing solutions, and a variety of accounting-specific packages.

Backup and recovery procedures had been put in place and system snapshots were being conducted twice per day for extra recovery peace of mind.

Time is money

In the past, Ferrara, along with the support of a junior staff member, had been the first port of call for any IT problem in the office. Whenever a problem occurred, Ferrara would try to troubleshoot and if all efforts failed, he would call in Professional Advantage. “Every hour that I spent working on the system was an hour of lost billings. If the entire system went down, we were potentially losing $150 per hour, per staff member. With 53 staff we could have bought a new system with the money otherwise lost through billable hours,” Ferrara notes.

Following the move to the cloud, however, the bulk of system maintenance and support became a Professional Advantage responsibility. As a consequence, Ferrara gained more time to attend to clients. When the junior staff member decided to move on, Ferrara realised there was no longer a need to appoint a replacement.

“Ultimately I’m hoping to increase my own billable hours by at least 20 per cent in the next 12 months,” he says.

More capacity, more functionality and more client services

Over the past year, the relationship between Professional Advantage and UHY Haines Norton has deepened. Ferrara notes that Professional Advantage has become more familiar with the firm’s system. “It means they are on the ball if there are any problems. The help desk is able to resolve issues instantaneously, so we’re saving time.”

UHY Haines Norton’s increased IT capacity has brought new vigour to the firm’s IT planning. With more storage and functionality, Ferrara is busy looking for ways that IT can add value to the business. “We want to be more efficient by utilising what we have. We’re looking at other software and ways to further reduce paper,” he says.

A new web portal is high on Ferrara’s priorities. He wants to use the website to provide clients access to their own data, thus streamlining communication with accountants. He’s also looking at creating a Dropbox facility to handle the transfer of large files, thus removing the need for clients to courier USB sticks or CDs of information. Other plans include a document management system and the capacity to deal with electronic signatures.

“We have flexibility now. We don’t have to worry about running out of room or about having to spend $50,000 to buy a new SAN. We can grow as we need,” Ferrara adds.

Twelve months since initiating the host services relationship with Professional Advantage, Ferrara remains enthusiastic about life in the private cloud. “We don’t specialise in IT so why should we try to be IT experts? We outsource everything else. If we need special advice on legal matters, we go to a lawyer. It’s the same with IT. Cloud services have taken us hopefully to the next generation. It’s given us a way to cater for future growth. Now we can add services on as we need them whereas in the past changes incurred a high infrastructure overhead,” he concludes.

You can download this case study here. You can read more about Professional Advantage and Infrastructure here. 

Headquartered in Melbourne, Witchery Group is a leading fashion retailer operating throughout Australia, the United Kingdom and Asia Pacific. The group’s interests include more than 180 Witchery-branded women’s, men’s and children’s wear retail outlets, plus the Mimco online and retail premium accessories business.

The problem

The group wanted to create a staff portal that would help to remove some of the growing pains arising from its rapid expansion and geographic spread. Specifically, Witchery was looking to improve internal communications, break down information silos between departments, bring greater efficiency to collaboration and document sharing, and improve visibility of internal processes. In doing so however, it needed to address the separate information needs of two entirely detached organisations – Witchery and Mimco.

The solution

In 2010 Witchery had already identified Microsoft SharePoint as a suitable tool for its portal but the group lacked the internal expertise to build the solution. Professional Advantage was appointed to manage the project and build the portal after creating a proof-of-concept that demonstrated to group management exactly how the collaboration tool could be put to use.

The project

Professional Advantage led Witchery management through a series of workshops, gathering requirements and mapping out the development of future intranet services. SharePoint has become an essential communications tool for the group. Every day hundreds of users log onto the home page to view fashion industry and company news, and to access the latest informal departmental or social updates. Everything from footy tipping competitions to car park plan changes and new staff appointments can be found on the portal.

SharePoint has also become the central source of human resources information, policies, processes and forms. It is used for project management, providing document management, task allocation and workflows that support the group’s business processes. It also provides a customised IT help desk solution which allows users to submit service desk requests and view product information and frequently asked questions.

An attractive but neutral design caters for both the Witchery and Mimco sides of the group’s business, bringing them together under the one look and feel at the same time as retaining their distinct and separate information identities.

The results

• SharePoint has removed the need to distribute a significant number of notifications, attachments and files throughout the organisation. Rather than hard copies or email, material is simply promoted and made available through the portal.
• The replacement of paper with digital processes such as online forms is saving the company time and reducing the costs of copying and distribution.
• Management always have access to the latest up-to-date human resources material, and process documents.
• The portal allows information to be shared instantly and easily.

 You can read more about Professional Advantage and SharePoint here.

Communication among geographically dispersed staff
Within Australia and New Zealand, Weight Watchers has approximately 140 corporate staff while out in the field it employs almost 700 weight-loss consultants and 1,500 support staff. For some years a global intranet has been one of the company’s key tools for keeping all staff in touch with the latest company news and information.

A local initiative however, identified a number of opportunities to improve internal communications processes for corporate employees. Declan Coady, Weight Watchers’ Director for HR and Training explains, “We have around 80 staff in an office in Broadway [Sydney] and another 60 or so spread out across Australia and New Zealand. We found there was little focus on communications for corporate employees, and much of what did exist was fragmented and inconsistent. There were lots of bits of paper floating around and a large volume of emails being sent out but there was no one source to turn to for information or updates.”

A corporate staff engagement survey confirmed the problem. “Communications were identified in the survey as something that needed to be worked on. People wanted to have a better view of what the executive team was up to. We offer lots of career opportunities for staff but they were saying they didn’t know when vacancies were coming up,” Declan notes.

At around the same time, management was also looking for a way to centralise access to policy and procedure documents. In line with compliance requirements for all U.S. listed companies, Weight Watchers had to ensure fast, easy access to current policies and procedures. As Declan points out, “This was a problem when we had paper files on peoples’ desks as you could never be sure what version they were looking at.”

An intranet is born
Declan realised that an intranet could provide an effective solution to both the internal communications and compliance requirements. An intranet would overcome any problems arising from the geographic spread of corporate staff, plus it would create an up-to-date, centrally controlled, readily available information source. “SharePoint suited our needs. All we had to do was brand and customise it,” Declan says.
To help develop the intranet, Declan turned to Professional Advantage. “We met with a few providers but we already had a relationship with Professional Advantage and they understood our needs. They were enthusiastic about the project despite our relatively small budget,” Declan smiles.

To ensure a representative, useful intranet design, the company brought together a focus group of stakeholders from different departments. Together they decided what Weight Watchers needed to get out of the project, what the intranet should look like and how it should work. They defined the sections and structure to a Professional Advantage consultant who, over the next six weeks, turned their vision into a reality.

Meet The Hub
Weight Watchers launched “The Hub”, its new, dedicated corporate staff communication channel. The Hub landing page is the first thing employees see as they log on to the company network each day. It contains everything from news and announcements to reminders of when the next stationery order is required, and the company’s history, philosophy, vision and values.

A “Working at Weight Watchers” section outlines employee benefits and health and safety requirements. It’s become an integral part of the induction process for all new staff.

Also contained within the intranet is a document library that holds the definitive version of all of the company’s policies and procedures. The system includes workflow processes that allow each department to upload, approve and manage its own policy documents.

The Hub also offers a “who’s who” of staff in each department, employee profiles, social club news and photos from past events such as the fun and educational “Lunch and Learn” sessions held monthly. There’s a guide to the local area surrounding the corporate office identifying services such as banks and restaurants. Good news stories, sometimes sourced from the global intranet, help connect staff with clients. “People love reading stories of clients who have had a turn-around in their health,” Declan points out. “It’s a big engagement driver for us.”
An internal communications employee conducts minor content updates every few days depending on the availability of news, followed by a major update once a fortnight.

Employees have responded enthusiastically to the new channel. Declan says, “Rather than having your inbox clogged up with 50 emails every week that may or may not be relevant to you, now we have a fortnightly email newsletter which contains all the information we want to highlight. From there, people know to go to The Hub to get more information.”

A gateway to other systems
Declan is aware that other departments are interested in extending The Hub so that it becomes a gateway to other corporate systems. “We’re thinking about making it more like a portal so that for example, finance or IT have their own sections where they can roll out dynamic reports to field managers.”

In the immediate future however, his priority is to conduct a review of the intranet. “We want to evaluate how it’s working for people and to see what content they are using.” He’s also keen to develop more opportunities for staff engagement. “We’ve been trying, from an internal communications point of view, to develop The Hub as a two-way street. We’ve put in some basic functionality around being able to ask questions of the Managing Director. While we’re only in our infancy with this, it’s something that we definitely want to do more of in the future.”

You can download this case study here.

You can read more about Professional Advantage and SharePoint here.

A SharePoint 2010 intranet is best served as a degustation menu. Each dish (feature) serving a specific purpose, resembling perfection in its own right and complimenting the rest of the course. One of the most common pitfalls of SharePoint implementations is the desire to achieve all goals at once. If you break them down into different independently measurable components you will not only achieve success but achieve it over and over again. Replace one failure with many small successes and suddenly SharePoint becomes a buzzword in your organisation instead of a swearword.

Information Architecture (IA) is an integral part of any web based content management system, you need to keep a close eye on the overall IA while designing the smaller and more manageable solutions. When breaking the IA down into manageable components remember two things: IA is not merely the sitemap and navigation, it also consists of metadata and classifications. Secondly, the IA will change over time. Build in a governance plan from the start on how to tackle IA changes and how to implement them.

As much as you would not put the strawberry ice cream on the steak and cover it in gravy, nor should you mix information, knowledge and processes up on your Intranet. Always keep your target audience in mind. Who is the benefactor of the solution you are attempting? Often you will have several goals in mind for your Intranet. Some of them might be

• An Increase in productivity
• To automate business processes
• Increasing knowledge sharing
• Making documents easier to find
• Helping new and existing staff to find critical information

Don’t put the “New Employee Form” into the HR team site together with some HR policies and internal HR documents. Instead, design an informational area of the intranet which can be centrally managed by a webmaster. This way, staff can find policies, information and reference material. Create an area for process automation where staff can navigate to, to get specific things done such as: equipment request, travel request, expense approval or new staff forms. Then build up workspaces for the different departments/teams where they can collaborate in a secure and managed environment. Cross promote links to the most relevant forms/processes to each team for faster user access. Use custom publishing workflows to allow content to move from the collaborative environment to the informational part of the intranet.

That way your IA can grow in a managed way instead of sprawling out of control and each audience will be served the course they requested. Tip: When designing the workspaces, treat each workspace as its own mini homepage project. Each department will have different needs, processes and types of information and the workspace homepage should reflect that individuality (while maintaining the brand guidelines of course). This way you can ensure maximum user uptake as the intranet becomes more and more relevant to how staff actually work.

Finally, give your staff the right tools to do their job. Ever tried eating a steak with no knife and fork? That’s how staff without any training will feel about the new Intranet. Frustrated. Worse still, they might actually use the tools badly and start making a mess of things. Training them on SharePoint and more importantly on your processes and how they are supposed to work will help keep staff in line with your vision and ensure a healthier IA for years to come.

To sum it up:

• Break down the intranet into the core tasks at hand (Find Information, Activate Processes, Collaborate) and build according to those core tasks.
• Build the intranet in stages. Start with one of the pillars while keeping the others in mind.
• Build mini homepages for increased user adoption.
• Give them the skills to do their job.

Disaster recovery refers to IT services – and usually only in relation to a “system failure”. Business continuity goes beyond that, and addresses the non-IT resources and non-IT related disaster scenarios, such as a major impact on the people, processes, physical facility, communications and suppliers.

The importance of a Disaster Recovery strategy

In recent years Australian businesses have become all too aware of the importance of a practical disaster recovery strategy. Protecting operations against the effects of power outages, human error, natural disasters and malicious cyber threats has become an essential consideration when establishing an IT infrastructure.

A suitable IT Infrastructure to deal with these threats is crucial and will depend on your organisation’s needs and budget. Some considerations are;

• The nature of your business
• The nature of your data captured
• The priorities for your data
• How will downtime impact customer service, contractual commitments, compliance and the bottom line?
• Your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

These sorts of questions will help you define your exact disaster recovery requirements.

Business Continuity

Although a Disaster Recovery plan offers some reassurance for IT, it is still a long way from being a complete business continuity strategy.

So what are some of the key steps in developing a Business Continuity plan?

1. Solid plan activation and decision making framework – Take note of your organisation’s critical skills and of the people who need to be authorised to take action in a crisis.
2. Never entrust Business Continuity Planning to a single department – Asking individual departments to create their own plan is the best way to ensure that departmental interdependencies fall between the cracks.
3. Streamlined communication plan – allowing you to get news and information out to key players quickly. The greater the number of channels the greater the likelihood the message will get through.
4. Dual supplier arrangements – a safer bet than appointing exclusive suppliers.

This is only the beginning and an example of some steps to consider. A Business Continuity plan should be a complete, thoroughly tested and dynamic document.

To secure your copy of our Whitepaper, and to learn the 10 essential considerations for any Business Continuity plan, please click here.