Overview
Access to timely, accurate and reliable information is critical to all Harvesters employees. Various Harvesters departments – Fund Development, Community Outreach, Agency Services, Warehouse, Administration – have a large amount of documents and forms to exchange.
Providing tools to manage this information is essential to improving efficient office and employee communication. A quick and easy ability to share these documents has been difficult. Typically, Harvesters teams rely on the shared network drive to store documents, which made information difficult to find and organize.
Many non-profit organizations have deployed intranet web sites for employee collaboration, vastly improving access to information. Microsoft Sharepoint offers a solution to enable both publishers and consumers of information to easily disseminate and find information using web-based search capability. Sharepoint enables an organization to create an intranet web site that allows teams to work together more effectively, collaborating on and publishing documents.
Sharepoint technology was selected because it integrates with Microsoft Office and provides a web-based interface for browsing and searching for information.
Situation
Difficulty in accessing and maintaining an authoritative source of information. This problem is caused by a poorly organized shared network drive.
Collaboration and Communication. Harvesters and Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma have documented the types of information they would like to publish and share. This information includes procedures, manuals, training guides, forms, organization directories, department reports, project status reports, calendars, lists, FAQs, and announcements. Replacing a shared drive is an important goal of both organizations. Communication with Harvesters’ board of directors would be improved by hosting information on a Sharepoint system. Publishing key business metrics, like food weight acquired and distributed, is an important goal of both organizations.
Process Improvement. Both organizations seek to improve business functions and processes through improved access to information. Processes can be improved by using Sharepoint features such as document approval and workflow. Service requests can be defined in Sharepoint, enabling departments to manage work in a more transparent, organized mode.
Cost Savings. Documents and forms stored in Sharepoint could reduce paper costs and storage costs.
Solution
Key Success Factors
There were several factors identified that were crucial to ensure the project was successful and the new Sharepoint site was adopted by employees. The key success factors were:
- Building a project team of food bank employees from both locations was key to a successful effort. This team should be involved in the full lifecycle of the Sharepoint development effort – from discovery to design, development, testing, migration, and training.
- Branding the site with Harvesters colors and logo enhanced the attractiveness of the site, thus improved the adoption of the new website. Sharepoint's built-in site structure tools allowed for quick design implementation. The new site included several site components in the design, including CORE "portal" home page, forms library, department and staff directories, as well as a space for shared department calendars.
- Develop a simple workflow to gain experience with how to model a business process into Sharepoint.
- Develop a Reports Center site to display key food assistance performance metrics, such as amount of food acquired and distributed by month.
Harvesters shared development costs with Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma since both food banks want to develop an employee website. This cooperation will reduce costs and improve design, thus providing a more refined Sharepoint environment for both organizations.
Harvesters also engaged a local Sharepoint software development organization to streamline the discovery phase of the project. Discovery is a short, intensive needs assessment effort, resulting in a vision document, preliminary requirements, and a statement of work.
The project contract outlined a clear, familiar cycle of software development: discovery, design, develop, test, then deploy and train. The steps were clearly defined with deliverables and labor estimates.
The project statement of work identified preliminary requirements in the following areas.
- Site layout and branding - wireframe and mockup
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- Site Structure and Content Map
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- Permissions and Roles
- Content management
- Data connections for reporting with financial data and donor information
- Workflow to model business processes
The successful deployment of an employee website Sharepoint provided the following benefits.
- Improved access to and sharing of information – documents, calendars, lists, etc. This was accomplished by deploying Sharepoint to publish this information, thus improve efficient office and employee communication. Intranet websites were deployed for each food bank department for employee collaboration, vastly improving access to information.
- Identify Sharepoint website as the essential source of information.
- Simple, clear site design through branding.
