English football club scored a new Intranet and increased employee engagement
Solution Summary
Our client, one of England’s oldest football clubs, has a rich heritage and a large community of fans. The club prides itself on its community focus and family appeal, both inside and outside the organisation. Intelogy worked collaboratively with their team to build a new Intranet site, allowing the club to distribute key information in a more seamless and efficient way.
In the past, company information, news and updates on the Intranet were static and only certain individuals had access and training to upload new content to the site. Intelogy was challenged to deliver a new visually appealing SharePoint site with custom branding and an engaging “family feel” environment for both employees and suppliers. Together, the club and our team completely reimagined the look and feel of the previous Intranet platform and created a more engaging and compelling user experience. As part of a broader engagement, Intelogy created two Power Apps to replicate their Capital Expenditure form and Match Briefing Checklists and an application to book meeting rooms.
The CAPEX requests Power App and Approval flow reduced the time required for sign off to 1 hour, in comparison to the previous lengthy period of 1 week!
Challenge
For a number of years the organisation has been using Sitecore as its main Intranet platform, however this infrastructure has limited the club’s ability to distribute news and key information efficiently. Some departments found difficulty uploading content to the current platform. Furthermore, lots of the information available to employees was “static”, resulting in information being out of date or no longer relevant. Due to the nature of the club’s employee demographic, a high percentage of staff accessed information on mobile devices only, resulting in a poor employee experience. For these reasons, the Intranet hadn’t experienced the level of take-up that the club required to keep staff updated and engaged. Intelogy was tasked with using their current investment in Microsoft, to tailor a solution that could be maintained and embraced by the club beyond the project completion.
Solution Strategy
After evaluating the organisation’s pain points, Intelogy recommended building a Modern SharePoint Intranet. Our experts hosted a discovery workshop with the stakeholders to identify and review the content that needed to be migrated along with any customisations or potential third-party solutions currently implemented across the Intranet platform. The objective was to design a suitable Information Architecture (IA), and perform a high-level analysis to assess the impact and rate the complexity of migrating any customised features to SharePoint. The requirements for forms and checklists were thoroughly analysed to identify the best possible solution for re-building them in the new environment.
Having agreed the target IA and the Proof of Concept based on this discovery workshop, Intelogy proceeded to build a holistic solution that included the following parts:
1. SharePoint Intranet Hub with a Yammer feed and three integrated custom SPFx webparts
2. CAPEX Request and Match Briefing Checklists rebuilt in Power Apps and integrated with the SharePoint Intranet
3. Meeting Room Booking App
SharePoint Intranet Hub
Intelogy proposed an Intranet hosted in Microsoft 365, accessible by all users. This included configuring the associated SharePoint sites with the necessary elements such as lists, libraries, and custom security models. This ensured the target environment was prepared and ready to receive data during the migration. The Intranet would serve as a central hub to share company news and updates, and would be easily accessible from any device, from any place, at any time and provide a modern and engaging user experience. As the club was already an existing M365 user, it seemed obvious to include an incorporated Yammer feed to breakdown any barriers to communication between different departments even further.
Intelogy also created three custom webparts, intended to emulate functionality present within the external website within this solution. The purpose of these webparts, as well as the original solutions on the website, were to display their last match result, details about the next match, and their current position in the league table, the information for which is dynamic and delivered via a pre-existing API data connection.
CAPEX Request form Power App
Intelogy used a Power App to replicate the club’s Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) request form, which used to be an Excel spreadsheet that needed to be emailed to the correct people for approval. Our experts decided to replicate this form with a Power App, and Power Automate was used to automatically route the request to the relevant people and manage the approval process. Notifications will now automatically be sent out if everybody approves the request and in case a request gets rejected, the original requester will get notified and get the option to resubmit the form. The user interface is modern and intuitive, and provides all the functionality the staff require. All the forms are saved in one place, so all the information is easy to find.
Match Briefing Checklists Power App
Another Power App was built to optimise the pre-match and post-match briefings. Previously, prior to each match, every department would submit several briefings to give an overview of ongoing activities to the Head of Safety. Intelogy created a Power App that improved this process by ensuring that only the appropriate people could submit a briefing on behalf of their department. The Power App provides a simple overview of all the briefings and everything is consolidated into one place. The Head of Safety can now easily find all the necessary information, create top-level reports based on the information available in the application and export it. Now it’s a lot easier to review the briefings, and it is clearly visible which activities require immediate attention.
Meeting Room Booking App
Based on a request from the staff, Intelogy also created a booking application to enable staff to book physical meeting rooms in the building for a particular time slot. At any time, everybody can see which rooms are booked and which ones are still available. Staff using a MAC device who could not access Microsoft Outlook Calendar on their machines, can now also book meeting rooms without any issues.
Our team of experts has set up a training plan for the business champions (advocates) managing the system to ensure they are fully aware of all the new functionality available and are empowered to drive change forward within the organisation and improve adoption success rates.
Results
The club and Intelogy successfully upgraded the previous Intranet platform to a new modern Intranet with a much better user experience that will boost employee and stakeholder engagement. This new Intranet is multi-faceted and provides up-to-date corporate information, such as HR policies and procedures, along with social engagement tools to encourage collaboration across all employee demographics. All the information is easily accessible from anywhere and from any device. From now on, company-wide notifications will be easily and quickly distributed ensuring safety and compliance across the business.
