How a modern digital workplace unifies and engages a global team

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Published on the 21/02/2018 | Written by Empired

AT A GLANCE

Woods Bagot

INDUSTRY

Architectural consultancy

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

Replace ageing and limited intranet
Improve collaboration and cooperation across global workforce
Reduce support/maintenance costs associated with obsolete technology

SOLUTION

Office 365 including Skype for Business, Delve, OneDrive
Empired SNAP methodology for rapid deployment and configuration
Integration of Dynamics CRM and Power BI

BUSINESS BENEFITS

A modern cloud collaboration platform for ease of communication
Reduced overheads
Improved employee interaction, ease of sharing and communicating
Integrated insights and reporting thanks to CRM and Power BI

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Empired
W: https://www.empired.com/
E: contact@empired.com
T:
Perth – 08 6333 2200
Sydney – 02 8355 8100
Melbourne – 03 8658 5300
Brisbane – 07 3067 5400
Adelaide – 08 7333 4200

SNAP 365 makes employee communication, knowledge management and collaboration easy, integrated, targeted and relevant…

As a global architectural design and consulting studio with a team of over 1100 experts spread across 17 studios in Australia, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America, effective communication and collaboration is a key business driver for Woods Bagot. With continual growth and a need to operate as one connected organisation, moving to a Modern Workplace became an even more integral part of the company’s business strategy.

Woods Bagot describes itself as ‘a People Architecture company’. It places human experience at the centre of the design process to deliver engaging, future-oriented projects that respond to the way people use space. The company’s Global Studio model allows for collaboratively working across time zones and borders, using the latest technology to share design intelligence and strengthen its knowledge base around the world.

Situation
Woods Bagot’s legacy intranet was a key tool in managing communication and knowledge retention. While it had served as a successful platform to store and share information and knowledge, time marches on. What was once fit for purpose was recognised as obsolete, hosted on ageing technology which needed a refresh.

With the advent of Microsoft Office 365 (O365), Woods Bagot saw a golden opportunity to not just strip back and remove some of the maintenance costs it was incurring, but also to look at benefiting from the advances that can be achieved through the introduction of better and more modern collaborative features built into the O365 toolset.

Tom Leyden, Woods Bagot Global Leader – Information Technology, sums it up: “Overall, we were after an intranet that could underpin our stance as a leading global design firm – showcasing our work, inspiring our designers while providing trusted and useful reference data.”

Solution
Empired proposed a move off the existing on-premise intranet to a more robust, mature and best practice toolset in O365. The move had goals including improving the way users share, engage and communicate with each other, whilst also giving every employee a greater appreciation of the company’s corporate goals, values and strategies.

This was achieved by applying the features and benefits of the O365 platform in a fresh and innovative way, with a contemporary and stunning visual interface.

By combining creativity, technology and design, Empired delivered an engaging, intuitive and useful solution that sets a new benchmark for communication, knowledge management and collaboration.

This solution was architected using Empired’s SNAP 365 solution, which offers organisations the ability to deploy a templated portal to O365. By using Empired’s existing IP and knowledge of how organisations collaborate effectively, SNAP brings together O365’s collaboration tools creating an integrated, targeted and relevant experience for the user.

Results
By moving to O365, Woods Bagot has benefited from an advanced engagement portal for its employees, built in a way that redefines how the company communicates and shares knowledge.

By taking the conversation to Woods Bagot’s UX designers to achieve an engaging platform, Leydon has implemented UX design in a design-driven workplace. The company now has a visually improved front page with a focus on news, essential information and feeds from its design platform. The portal offers trusted sector pages to consolidate key sector information such as exemplar bids and templates. And the new project area equips employees to leverage Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Power BI to see the progress of certain projects.

By integrating the external systems that Woods Bagot developed in-house, it also incorporates all data across the organisation into the new portal. This is great from a search perspective, with Delve and back-end integration making a seamless experience for employees.

Woods Bagot uses most of the O365 suite of features, predominantly Delve and search, OneDrive for business, and Skype. The combination of these tools directly addresses the central goal of making employee communication easy.

Leydon notes the importance of the successful delivery of the portal:

“It reflects who we are as a business today. It’s reflective of our DNA, who we want to be and what’s important to us.”

The SNAP portal allows the creation of virtual communities to share ideas and information and connect with one another in ways which would not be possible in-person, considering their different geographical locations.

The portal provides a complete, end-to-end user experience with the greatest gain being seamless collaboration, with a single location for all information, a dashboard for all projects, and the latest up to date feeds from all systems, all in one place.

Source: This article was originally sourced from Empired