Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Need to use a SharePoint intranet due to internal policies, company transitions, or legacy systems? When all the available information is overly technical or negative, where do you turn? Enter Fresh Perspectives: Living in the reality of SharePoint intranets. We provide useful, jargon-free insights and real-world examples to help you maximize the benefits of SharePoint intranets and tackle its challenges. Pro-SharePoint but realistic, we debunk misconceptions and share product management insights from Fresh Intranet.
Welcome everyone to a new
episode of Fresh Perspectives.
This time we have a
very special guest,
Andy Hall from Forbes Mazars.
I'm Jabez Host, Senior Product
Manager for Fresh Intranet,
and with me I have my colleague.
Hi, Dave Bowman, Product
Director for Fresh Intranet.
Andy, why don't you give us
all a little introduction
to who you are, your role,
and then tell us a little
bit about Forbes Mazars.
Oh, thanks, David.
So, yeah,
my title's knowledge
transformation manager.
I guess I'm somewhere between
a knowledge manager and an
internet manager
at Farbus Mazars.
I joined the firm in October
twenty two, twenty twenty two.
It was a time of
change for them.
They were sort of moving
away from their on premise
SharePoint intranet and they'd
already sort of selected
Freshers, the solution they were
going to go for moving
into M365.
So I was sort of brought onto
that project to sort of help
the firm sort of establish
their knowledge program once
they transitioned
onto fresh in M365,
and so my background is working
with SharePoint in intranets
and extranets over
the past twenty years
this year, so yeah, I've kind of
been on the journey.
I started with SharePoint
two thousand and seven
and have been through various
iterations of ones on premise
in the cloud.
And yeah, my background has
always kind of been in sort of
initially intranet multimedia
development when I went to
university, took a couple
of years to common, well,
not to common, I guess a
long term gap year post
university, teaching English
in Japan for three years,
and then when I came back,
I was kind of doing roles
which were a bit more sort of
knowledge intranet y based, and
then I kind of just fell into
SharePoint around sort
of two thousand and six.
SharePoint is very
easy to fall into.
Yeah.
And never be able to
climb back out again.
Possibly not. Although maybe
AI will help help me with that.
Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
And for anyone not familiar,
tell us a little bit
about about the company.
What do they do, sectors,
organization size, a bit flavor?
Yeah, so we're a consultancy
specializing in auditing
accountancy.
We also have specializations
in tax as well,
various forms of different
consulting as well.
So we offer a full
service to our clients.
I guess we're probably most
known as an audit firm,
but we do offer other solutions
within the consulting space.
And as a firm,
and I guess this is sort
of the main thrust of this
conversation we're gonna have,
we used to be called Mazars and
from, I think it
was like mid-twenty
twenty four, we were
formerly Forbes and Mazars,
where a US entity, Forbes,
joined together with Mazars to
form a two company network to
sort of embed ourselves deeper
within the US market with
Forbes' experience and for them
to leverage Mazar's experience
sort of across the globe.
So as a firm, I think we have
something in the region of
access into one
hundred countries.
So yeah, we're a pretty big
global player within sort of
the consultancy space.
Yeah, yeah.
And prior
to the acquisition, I mean,
felt like kind of knowledge,
content and information was the
sort of primary driver for the
internet in the first place.
Is that fair?
Give us a little Yeah,
so I guess they looked at what
they had with their previous
internet, which
was called Compass,
and I guess it had
sort of become a
bit unloved as an
entity within the firm.
It sort of housed your basic
corporate documents about
policies, procedures,
that kind of things,
but sometimes they're a little
hard to find or multiple
versions of copies, so the
brief when I joined the firm
was they were looking for
something that was streamlined,
single source of truth for
those sort of key documents
and also a sort of central
funnel for news as well for the
firm, so a lot of noise in
all industries, I guess,
with the way that people sort
of communicate centralized
corporate messaging and trying
to find an effective way to
house that so people could
access it quickly, easily.
And that's why they
were wanting to move to
the fresh solution
on SharePoint.
So in which stage was your
internet before the acquisition?
Before the acquisition,
so timeline of this.
I
think we selected Fresh
at some point in twenty
twenty two, I think it was
early twenty twenty two.
I joined in October
twenty twenty two.
We launched the new internet
which was called Hive in March
twenty twenty three and
then it was late twenty
twenty three where this merger
was announced around about,
I wanna say it was
October time, but I might
be wrong about that timing.
And then the actual
merger of the two firms
into the two firm
network was done
April twenty twenty four.
So yeah, so it's
quite a lot of change
a relatively short
period of time,
and we've gone through another
change since then that we've
moved from our M365
being based in the UK
tenant to a global tenant,
which happened in November,
and we're still sort of
going through a few teething
problems with that post migration.
Yes, I can imagine.
I can imagine.
Having done that a few
times ourselves, yes,
certainly feel the pain.
What was the, I guess,
kind of looking back on
the kind of journey from
Mazar's intranet
through acquisition
into a tenant move,
what's been the
kind of main uncertainties,
friction points that
you've dealt with?
I guess a lot of it is just
the communication of change is
always challenging.
I
think the amount
of change in such a
short period of time has
also been challenging for just the
business to absorb and trying
to do that in an effective way.
So one of the ways we'd
looked at doing it,
particularly for the rebrand,
was having a centralized
page that all the comms,
the FAQs, the documentation,
the videos that the group were
putting out about the reasons
for the network formation
were all housed in
one place that we could just
keep pointing people to.
So if they missed an email
or they missed a webinar that
we'd arranged to
sort of talk about,
so an element of the merger,
they were there to sort of
send them to and they could
catch up on what they've missed
and I think the success of that,
we've used that for other
sort of big communication campaigns
where we've had to house a
lot of information that maybe
people aren't interested
in all the information,
but they want to dive in and
get a little bit of it and it
really helps to sort of have
a centralized page that other
pages are then pulling in from.
Using Freshworks parts for
that's been really useful as
well with page cards and
curated document cards,
things like that.
Yeah, I think there's something
reassuring about having,
and it certainly isn't the
only thing that contributes to that,
but there's something
reassuring about having a place
that you can go to that if
you need to know something,
you can open a browser and
find it pretty quickly.
Not digging through emails or
trying to find someone in the
know to be able to have
a conversation with.
And I guess that's a challenge
for a lot of firms sort of post
COVID as well with more people
working from home that you
don't have that reassured
source that you could actually
go to in an office space and
ask them the question that you
don't know you are sort
of struggling with the,
I think it was in
an email somewhere,
I'll try and search it and
oh no, that's been archived,
I can't find it anymore
and similar with the migration,
was having a centralized
place for all the,
what was going to change
with the migration,
where there was going to be
friction on the point that
migration's gonna happen,
what you needed to do to
fix things post migration.
Again, we used central source for
that so that we could always point
people to that and as
things were changing sort of within
the flow of the
migration process,
we were able to
update in one place,
which again is really
useful for people just to,
they know where to go and
also for the teams doing
this sort change management
within the firm as well,
for them to know where they
need to update with their
little bit of the story to make sure
that everybody's fully informed.
Yeah, yeah, I was speaking to a I was
on a call with a potential customer
last week and they
were talking about the
amount of change that's gone
on in their organization,
which has included being
bought by an American company.
And they've kind of introduced
the conversation saying that
they didn't have an
intranet at the moment.
And kind of listening to them
talking about the amount of
change they've been through as
a business, just kind of going,
how have you communicated
any of this to anybody?
And they were like, well, we've
been sending a lot of emails.
And one of the guys on
the call said, Dave,
it's been a nightmare,
to be honest with you.
We haven't had a place where
we could publish anything.
And trying to keep
everybody updated through distribution
lists at the same time, getting
information out, you know,
we've kind of got this culture
of some people that know and
some people that don't.
It just becomes very uneven.
Yeah. Yeah.
If we look here in
terms of strategy,
so did Forevis have
their own intranet?
Did you have to switch to that?
Yes, so they do have
their own intranet.
So sort of pretty much most
countries that Mazars and
Forbes operates in have their
own country intranet.
So as a UK entity, we
have Hive as our intranet.
Our German colleagues will
have theirs, the Dutch ones,
but our American colleagues
will have the Forbes one.
At the moment, there
isn't a centralized
intranet on SharePoint.
There is a centralized
group intranet that is using
different technology that
people can access sort of kind
of the group brand documents
and assets and things like
that, group campaigns,
which are across the whole
firm globally,
but each country at the
moment is still operating independent
intranets, most of them
being based in SharePoint,
so that was one of the, I guess,
of the longer term benefits
of moving into a centralized
tenant will be the ability
maybe to create a global
intranet there that then the country
based intranets can feed into,
but with our industry there's
so much country specific kind
of policies and processes that
it wouldn't make sense to house
that all in one global intranet
because I could imagine that
the way that you'd have to
permission that would be
an art form.
Yes, yeah.
So everyone is in
a global tenant,
so you are sharing the same
tenant and there is a global
internet and the individual
countries have their own
internet within this tenant?
That's correct, yeah, and
it's multi geo as well,
so for certain entities
they needed that
because of sort of
jurisdictional reasons of data
residency and things like that.
So we have a UK geo
within the global tenant.
Yeah, particularly
in your sector that
data becomes
absolutely critical.
Yeah.
So I presume that there
was a fairly significant
rebranding activity that
went on around the internet.
Can you talk a little bit
about what was changed,
the impact, whether
it was complicated?
Yeah. I mean, in some
ways, was quite easy.
So the simplistic things about the
brand color didn't change too much.
I mean, there's a very,
very slight change to the hex
code in a couple of the brand
themes, but mainly the
Mazars brand got adopted,
color palette got adopted.
Obviously the logo changed
because the names changed,
so there was a logo change,
but obviously that's one place
in SharePoint to change that.
The main sort of branding issue
was we had spent all this time
getting single source of truth
documents onto the new intranet
when we did that in twenty
twenty three, and a year later,
we're then asking people to
review all those documents that
they have put on there because
the template has changed.
Even if it's quite
a small change,
the name has changed at the top,
but there were some other
elements of brand on that,
so we had to just make sure
that people were aware of those
brand changes and then look
through all their documentation
that was housed on the internet
to say what is crucial needs
to be changed day one.
Then we had a third party
helping us rebrand those
documents, letters that go to
clients, that kind of thing,
mainly the client
facing sort of stuff,
then what was more nice
to have and then we
had a tag that we added
to the internet type of
content taxonomy
called rebrand and
then people could tag a
document with that rebrand tag
so then I could use the
governance web part to kind of
have a helicopter view of all
the documents that have been
tagged as rebrand so
that we could have
a bit of surety about the
documents we're getting
rebranded first of all.
They were replacing old
documents so we weren't having
two versions of a document,
one in the old brand,
one in the new brand,
and it was a really useful way
of us being able to very sort
of high level helicopter view
audit what we'd sent out to
people to do because obviously
there's a lot of moving parts
between people who day to day
use those documents and then
people maybe who are impacting
it more from a sort of a
brand comm sort of perspective,
like sort of the
team that I've seen.
Yeah.
Was this a good exercise, like
to do some cleanup on the data?
Because everyone is going
through the content.
Did that happen also
as part of this?
It did, yeah, and it was
pretty clean and we were only
away from when we
launched the new intranet,
so I would say compared to
other intranets I've worked on,
it wasn't too much of a
cleaning up exercise but it did
make sure that we addressed
any concerns that we had about
where our governance
processes being followed.
We did a lot of onboarding with
people when we moved to Hive.
We had a lot of in person, well,
sort of webinar based
sessions, but you know,
people joined team calls and we
talked a lot about the reasons
of like why we want to use
certain naming conventions,
where you saw your documents,
how you use the tagging,
what's the purpose of that,
and it was quite good to
have a bit of a purpose of a
refresher, and again,
we've done that process again
when we migrated to the new
global tenant because we
were looking at certain SharePoint
sites within the internet state,
were they still fit for purpose,
were we still using them,
did we need to
change them at all?
I think there was about ten
that we just didn't bring
across with us because they'd
been set up and then we
realized actually we didn't
want to structure that part of
a service line
that way, so yeah,
I think every opportunity
that you have,
and this is probably good
advice for anybody who goes
through change
within an intranet,
if you have an opportunity to
sort of test assumptions about
your governance structure
and the way that your sort of
documents are stored and have
something like this as a bit of
a carrot for a
reason why to do it,
it's always great to sort
of hitch it onto to that.
I was gonna say, it sounds like
a sort of busy period
of organizational change
has actually had the sort of
side benefit that your content
is pretty fresh.
Know, up to date,
good, nimble, agile,
not suggesting that maybe using
a rebrand or a tenant migration
every couple of years
is a governance problem.
Yeah, it's a governance charging
horse that you should use.
Yeah, yeah, yes, yes.
Maybe very expensive
in other ways,
but certainly has some benefits.
Look, you Well, sorry.
No, go You mentioned the
internet name as Binghive.
So is that selected name?
And how did you come up
with such a nice name?
Because from the
experience I have,
the tendency is to have your
internet being called Hub.
That's the most common one.
How did we come
up with this name?
I might come back to Hub later
because I have a real problem
with things being called hubs.
It's like the one word that
gets hitched to all sorts of
things at my firm, and I try
to eradicate all hubs if I can,
even if things are in
what would be a hub.
So Hive, we basically
asked the firm,
we sort of wanted some
engagement with the new
intranet, and so we
thought, you know,
we'd set a competition amongst
people, suggest a name.
We had over two hundred
suggestions of different names,
and then we narrowed that down
to a shortlist and we actually
asked the firm to vote.
So it was the one
that was chosen most
out of the top ten.
So I was really happy with it.
I thought it was a great one
for sort of talking about the
intent of having sort of a
knowledge system where you're
wanting to sort of collect the
knowledge out of people's heads
and create that
hive mind online.
It sort of fitted in with a
sort of a nice ethos and it
shifted away from what the old
internet was called because
unfortunately that name was so
tarnished in its association
in people's heads that we
couldn't carry forward,
even though Compass was quite a
good name and that linked back
to the old brand of the former
name for the UK entity of
Mazars, that they had like a
compass point within their logo.
Yeah. Yeah.
I think
naming
competition, as it were,
in the organization
and any accompanying kind of strategy
or objectives for the internet.
It's a really good way of
communicating that this is an
important thing that the
organization is investing in.
And I think it's a
good way of advertising
its purpose, right?
Yeah.
And it's great as
well, I would say for,
because it's a single
word, it's like a term now.
It's like the Hoover of intranet
for our firm that
if you use Hive,
you know what people
are talking about.
It's good in that sense and I
can also differentiate between
when someone comes to me and
says, oh, I need to do this,
and I'm like, well,
actually that's a Teams site
you need or that's SharePoint
that you need, it's not Hive.
Hive is this,
and I can very clearly explain
it and articulate it to people
and they get it really quickly.
So having a very strong brand
for your internet, I think,
is really useful.
Yeah, I've talked about this
with other organizations about,
I think it's very easy for a
SharePoint intranet to just
start bleeding into everything
else that's going on in
Microsoft three sixty
five and SharePoint.
And
having some edges to what you
consider your intranet to be in
SharePoint, giving it a
name, giving it a brand,
walling it off, making
sure that there's you know,
it's scope to define is a really
important element of its identity.
Because without any
of those things,
it's just it's just more
stuff in SharePoint.
Yeah.
So during the rebrand,
were you using SharePoint for
helping employees to kind of
identify with the new
brands of the organization?
Yeah.
So we were putting out quite a
lot of news stories through our
different news channels and
creating news pages to support that.
So that was informing
people about basic
things that were changing,
the brand guidelines
and things like that,
but also some of the more in
market things that we were
doing to make our customers
and clients aware that we were
rebranding and what
that meant for them.
When we were sort of launching
in all of the places that we
have offices in the UK,
we did some big billboard
posters outside train stations
and things like that saying,
Farbis and Zars is coming
or it launches today,
that kind of thing, so
people were walking from the station
to their place of work on
the first day seeing that,
so that was the first sort of
tangible sign beyond sort of
all the internal
comms we were doing.
In the background,
we did a lot of work on making
sure that each of the offices
were rebranded
for the first day,
so on Friday we ceased being
Mazars and by Monday morning,
so all the glass was etched up with
Faubus Mazars in all the meeting rooms.
I mean, was quite the effort.
I personally went
into Leeds office,
which is my local office and
helped them put up bunting and
make sure things were organized
and they were set up for the
first day webinar for everybody
to come together and talk about
the new MC, but those
new sort of perspex being
put around the reception desk
and the sign as you came in the
office was all changed.
I mean, it's all, in the
grand scheme of things,
it all kind of seemed
that little stuff,
but trying to pull that together
in ten offices across the UK,
making sure that cupcakes
were sent correctly.
I think it was a bit of a
snafu with all the gluten free
chocolate went to one office
instead of being distributed to
ten, but apart
from that, I mean,
was a Herculean effort to sort
of pull it together and so our
brand manager, Adeen, who was
kind of heading up a lot of it,
she did a great job of sort of steering
everybody through that process.
Yeah, I think
that, sorry, go on.
Sorry, no, was just gonna say,
and the internet was a really
good sort of solution for us to
make people aware of those touch
points when they were coming to
sort of flag them up to people.
Yeah, yeah, and I guess for people
in London to be able to see what's
going on in leads vice versa,
having that content available
digitally, it's like,
suddenly we're part of
this single organization,
new brand everywhere.
A really nice investment on
the organization's part in the
culture and what it means to
be an employee of this new
organization now.
Yeah.
And I think it's
connecting both points,
like the physical world
and the digital world.
Because people spend
a lot of time in the
internet, in Teams, in Engage,
if you are also using that.
But also, of course, in
the physical offices.
The more you can bring them the
content, the better that is.
In terms of the digital space,
did you have campaigns
going on, videos
on the internet as well?
Yeah, so there was a mix between
There's a webinar series that
our group colleagues were
doing, which was for
all across the globe,
so we were sharing those,
but then there was some
internal ones that our CEO at
the time was doing, talking
about what it meant for Mazar's
employees in the UK so that
everybody was sort of aware of
the change and then obviously
how to talk to clients about it
because you've had longstanding
relationships with clients for
many years and why is your
name changing, what's it mean,
how much is going to change
for me so that they could have
those kind of
conversations with people
from day one was
crucial, I think,
to sort of making sure that
brand awareness was there but
also we weren't losing any of our client
base because of this change of brand.
Yeah, for me Sorry, Jarvis,
I've done that No
worries, go ahead.
Go ahead, Ian.
I was gonna say, and I've
now completely forgotten
my own question that
I was gonna ask.
I'll take over that.
Looking at all of the things
that you did on the internet,
and I think you also configured
something in the search.
Was it a Q and A or a book?
Yeah, so what we did was
we created a series of
FAQ pages
that were for sort of specific
areas of the business,
so sort of if you're
client facing,
if you have any legal questions
about entity name changes,
how it's gonna
impact IT equipment,
so they're grouped into
different pages that we created
and then they had
about, I don't know,
some had ten questions
on, some had fifty on,
and then we pulled those all
together with the curated search,
curated pages,
added the search components
onto it so that somebody could
actually type in what their
question was and it would
filter down the FAQ page to
the one that they wanted.
Although somebody
mentioned templates,
think that was on three pages
so they didn't have to fish
through three pages but then
I had the panel view set up on
that as well so it like pop out,
they could quickly
filter through,
have a look at it and I guess
if I was to do that now,
I'd probably create a
SharePoint agent for that job
and it would do it better but
obviously I didn't have that
technology at hand at the time
but it was a really nice way
for us to sort of utilize
the components of Fresh to really
get a rich search experience
that was very much ring fenced
around what we wanted people to
look at and they weren't having
fish through loads of other
content that might have
mentioned those terms.
Yeah, awesome use case.
From all of these different
measures that you have here
now, so the FAQ
pages, the webinars,
what do you think had the biggest
positive impact on the employees?
I think having those
FAQs are really useful.
It's always really
disappointing, I find,
with video content on intranets.
The viewership isn't where
you'd want it to be for the
time investment that you put into
producing that kind of content.
If you can reuse that video
content in multiple different
ways, I think you get
a much better return,
but if it's purely for
an internal audience,
I'd say it's very tricky to justify
if you look at the hard stats of it.
Obviously for the
people who did watch it,
it's really useful and you can
get out a lot from it and I
think it's good as well
if you're kind of treating it
almost like an audio experience
where you can listen in the
background while you're getting
on with doing your work,
and I think with anything
the team that I sit in does,
internal comms is always kind
of fighting against the fact
that we're a fee earning
business and everybody's time
is based on client work and
trying to get those maybe two
minutes of a day that we
have of their attention where they
can't look at news content.
It's what
gets fed to the
internet homepage
and then how do we
alert them to something extraordinary on
the internet homepage so that
they can click through to it.
So we had a
banner that was
on the front page
pushing people to this kind of
page that we created for all
the content around the
rebrand so that they, again,
the homepage loads up in
everyone's browser in the morning,
they had one place that they
could click to go and find that
information and it wasn't lost
in sort of the general news
flow that we'd get
on the homepage.
And then anything that was
extraordinary news wise,
that would get into a promoted
news feed on the homepage as
well so that there was hopefully
no way people could miss stuff.
I mean, people always miss
stuff because they're really
busy, but we tried as hard
as possible to make sure that we
could get eyeballs in front
of stuff as much as possible.
Yeah.
I think
these kinds of scenarios
where SharePoint, I think,
really comes into its own
because of how flexible the
platform is.
Stuff happens, being
able to edit a page,
drop components in that are
calling attention to something
important that's going
on in the organization.
You haven't got to call some
third party that's then got to
write lot of code and deploy something
to a server before it can be used.
It is an incredibly flexible
platform and allows you to
respond very quickly to
these kind of things.
And we've always actually had
really good leeway with that,
that the senior leadership
haven't been too precious about
us changing the homepage.
They've always said to us,
If you feel that there's
something you'd like to try,
just try it and see if
it works and refresh it.
So we've had so many iterations
of how we've laid out the
homepage to try and get
the best response possible.
I think it was like,
use different channels
and the repetition
connecting with
physical activities.
I think you had a big
impact or a big reach with
the measures here.
Yeah, yeah, I think with
any kind of campaign of this
scope, you need to repeat it
often and in different ways,
face to face if you have the
opportunity to maybe have an in
person team meeting or on a
webinar where you've got your
wider team together, our
CEO webinars which everybody
would like them to attend,
mention it on there,
newsletters that were
going out to people,
on the front page
of the homepage.
I mean, I think
communication channel wise,
we probably had about ten or
eleven different channels that
we were using to sort of
send different bits of
information out about the
rebrand so that hopefully
people were aware of some
components of it and we always
try to refer them back to the
fact that there's just this
button on the homepage.
If you feel you've
missed anything,
if you've got any questions
about it, just click on that,
you should be able to
find what you need.
Yeah, I mean, I think you said it
yourself that employees are busy,
particularly in a fee
earning organization.
So just making sure that you've
got the kind of key talking
points, the narrative is
there's some repetition in
there across those channels
and that, you know, as you say,
you have one place that they
can go to, click a button,
and they've got access to all the
information that they need that, you know,
you I think it's easy to
underestimate the amount of
work that you've got to do to
fit into people's available time.
Yeah.
All right. Look, let's
try and wrap up then.
So what would you
say was the kind
of hardest part of the journey
that you've been on so far,
Andy?
I would say that the recent
activity of the migration was I
thought at the time the rebrand
was because I felt like it was
a big ask change wise for the
firm a year after we'd moved to
this new intranet that they had
to change a load of documents.
I felt there'd be a lot
of pushback about that,
but there was understanding
about it and there's been
understanding about
the migration as well,
but I think just the
complexities of trying to
migrate from one
tenant to another and
the downtime you
have to have,
even as much as
you try and sort of
pre provision stuff
in the background,
there's always certain things
that need to be done over that
final weekend and then the
switching over of all your sort
of systems on that
first day, I mean,
we lost half a day's
worth worth work at least,
in some cases probably more where
there was certain IT glitches.
The whole firm couldn't have
sort of client meetings and
calls on that Monday,
so it's like, yeah,
three and a half thousand
people that you're telling
can't do that, so I mean,
not everybody's fearing and not
everybody's face to face with
clients but that's tough and
I think people did find other
ways to do it,
mobile calls with clients
keeping in touch with them,
but that's the biggest
challenge I've ever
encountered actually,
firm where there's
a big change and
everybody's got to do it and
it's impacting everybody.
It's not just
impacting a few people,
it really is
impacting everybody.
I feel
like it's always in these
scenarios where I feel like
maybe I need to just make sure
that it's clarified that it
wasn't fresh internet
that caused that down.
No, no, it's not.
Good, good, good.
I'd like to expand on that.
I'd say sort of the support we
had from you guys getting us
into the global tenant
was really, really useful.
We did a lot of pre
provisioning work of all the
sites, making sure that
when the data migration happened,
that was another third
party that was doing that.
They knew exactly what they
needed to do and they weren't
just sort of
copying from A to B,
they were respecting sort of
the pre provision work that had
been done by Fresh,
so that was almost
flawless apart from a flaw that
we knew about that people did
have to fix post GoLife,
but that's nothing
to do with Fresh.
It was just something that
we'd identified was gonna be
something we needed to fix.
So no, I think from,
of all the solutions that
had to move over of the,
I think that was something like a
hundred different IT components,
the internet was low down on
the things that registered for
people has been an issue,
which is where you want to be.
Good to hear, good to hear.
Well, I'm pleased because we asked that
question dynamically that that wasn't.
One question.
So you mentioned the SharePoint
agent as something you would use.
So is this something you would
do differently next time,
or do you have something
else you would like to Yeah.
So we are a form of change.
At the moment, we're just
launching Workday as a
solution to replace
what we currently
have for our sort of
employee sort of platform
and this is the first time that
we're going to be using sort
of a SharePoint agent around a
comps campaign that is multi
year because different parts of
the business are gonna move to
Workday over a two year period,
so there's gonna be a
lot of content that is,
for most people, won't
be relevant to them,
but they may have a question
about a component of Workday,
so we're going to create a
SharePoint agent that looks at
all the collateral that we're
putting together for that,
and you can then just ask
it questions and say, you know,
how's Workday going to affect how I
do my end of year review, for example,
and it will come back with the answer
and it's that that's on this page,
but then this is the golden
paragraph you actually need,
so you don't even need to
go and look at that page.
So I think for big
informational campaigns
like that, it's going to be an
absolute game changer for us.
One hundred percent.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's great when the data is
well maintained in SharePoint
because then you did a lot of
work through the migration,
through the reviews.
That data's of good quality
and you had also your own
governance aspect going on there
where you were monitoring everything.
Yeah, we're so well set
up actually, I would say,
for AI that we don't have any
internal document swap, so
particularly if you ring fence
what your agent's using and you
know that material's
good in there,
they're gonna get great
answers back, your end users,
so I think that's a real
benefit of the fact that we've
been through these sort of
hops of different changes in a
relatively short period of time,
that the information's
always been kept up to date.
We just launched a new campaign
recently around sort of our
templates for winning new work
and pulling those all together
for different service lines
and having a single place that
people can go to
for that, and again,
we're looking to sort of dip
our toe into the water using
SharePoint Agents so that
people can say what type of
work that they're bidding on
and it will pull back sort of
relevant CVs, the relevant
template that they need.
We're also working with a third
party to look at whether we
could actually do something
around using Copilot to sort of
help maybe populate some of
those early sort of stage
documentations as we're
winning work as well.
Nice.
I was gonna say, what would be
your key piece of advice for
internet managers in future?
And I feel like maybe you've
answered that already,
so I'm gonna add on anyone
that is about to go through
acquisition or these kind of
major organisational changes?
What's your the kind of one thing
that you'd wanna say to people?
I'd say just make sure
you've kept on top of the
governance because it
is a boring subject and
it's not a sexy subject,
but if you can keep
on top of that,
it really helps set you up for
any organizational change you
need to make, any technology
changes that you're going to
make, so with the advent
of AI within the business,
I think if you have a really
good stack of data that you can
point your AI at, it's
gonna give you much better results
and I think as well for
just surety for your own
sanity, knowing
exactly what your
intranet estate looks like and
how it's structured and having
trust in your content editors
that they're following a
guidance framework,
then when change
invariably happens,
you're in a good position to
sort of adapt to that change.
Yeah, yeah, keeping your
content agile is good too.
Yeah, Yeah,
and I'm not saying that from a
point of view of being really
sort of prescriptive about it.
I think you can be
quite loose with it.
We have over two
fifty content editors,
so some things don't always
follow the guidance exactly,
but there is a nice broad
brush framework that people can
follow and they do.
Yeah.
I think having something
that is kind of lightweight,
governable, achievable,
believable, all those words,
it's more likely to be adopted
than something that makes a
noise if you print it out
and pop it on the table.
I like that.
Andy, thank you so much for
joining us I really appreciate it.
Absolutely enjoyed
it. Thanks so much.