Case Studies In Three Weeks, Concurrency Builds a High-Visibility SharePoint Online Portal for Financial Services Firm

In Three Weeks, Concurrency Builds a High-Visibility SharePoint Online Portal for Financial Services Firm

Overview

Our client, a large financial services firm, is undergoing a major corporate transformation. Communicating about the transformation with staff—across both home and field offices—is a major challenge that must be met for the transformation to succeed.

In the past, the client has struggled to communicate with both home and field offices. Both technically and culturally the two parts of the company have been divided. But an Office 365 initiative now underway opened up a way to communicate effectively with both parts of the business.

Recognizing an urgent need, the company’s executives and corporate communications team asked if Concurrency could build a brand new, customized SharePoint Online site in just three weeks. The site would house a library of materials relating to the transformation and provide a context for company-wide news updates, including company media mentions.

This was a high-visibility opportunity for Concurrency, with executives closely involved—all the way to the very top of the organization. That visibility created a chance for Concurrency to prove its value to business leaders well beyond the IT department, underscoring to all involved the value Concurrency is bringing to other, larger projects at the company, including a full SharePoint migration project from on-premises to the cloud.

Solution

The “transformation site” was the first-ever SharePoint Online site built for the company. Therefore, its construction and deployment brought an array of technical challenges to ensure compliance with organizational security standards and practices. Working mostly onsite, Concurrency’s project team multi-tracked—addressing these and other technical issues while also moving forward quickly on many other aspects including site design, user experience, content loading and more.

Everything had to move quickly to meet the requested deadline. That meant interfacing not only with executives but also with corporate communications team members, IT staff and even an external marketing and design firm that had developed the resource materials to be featured on the site.

Concurrency’s project team included a business analyst, project manager, SharePoint architect and SharePoint developer. The team was able to move quickly because company leadership was so solidly behind achieving a strong result quickly. The team would lay out a couple of options for stakeholders to choose between, identifying which represent best practices. Then the client would make a decision.

Concurrency was ready to push the button and go live at the requested three-week mark. Although for business reasons the client chose to delay launch of the site beyond that date, Concurrency’s team met the goal—and expectations of executives all the way to the top.

With assistance from Concurrency, the company’s IT team set up a vanity URL for convenient access to the site by employees throughout the company. The client’s first-ever SharePoint Online site is now serving its role as the communications center for a critical business transition. They expect its life-cycle to be approximately two years as that business transformation continues.

During that time, Concurrency will be at work on other projects at the company, including the large-scale SharePoint migration.