Overview

Customer Profile Birmingham Women’s NHS Foundation Trust (BWFT) look after 50,000 patients per year, carrying out over 3,000 operations.

Business Situation BWFT needed to implement a new intranet to provide a platform to keep its 1,500 employees updated on everything that’s going on inside the trust. The trust ultimately needed a single tool for collaboration, as well as a central communications and content platform; all combined with improved reporting and governance. The end solution needed to be flexible, supportable by existing staff and create a positive legacy for the future shape and direction of the organisation.

Solution An intranet solution based on Hadron 8020 from Cloud2 was implemented, to enable easy tracking of KPIs, monitor summary dashboards and automate the management of evidence and assessments.

Benefits The Hadron approach enabled ’eve’, the trust’s new intranet to be put in place in just ten weeks, delivering a robust framework and powerful capabilities needed without months of design and discussion common to typical SharePoint solutions that can take more than 24 weeks to go live. The strong Hadron Information Architecture greatly improved search, governance and content management, leading to a number of business benefits.

Birmingham Women’s NHS

Foundation Trust

Background The Birmingham Women's Hospital (Birmingham Women's NHS Foundation Trust) is an NHS hospital and Centre of Excellence for specialist health care to women and their families in Birmingham and the West Midlands. Established in 1994, it is one of only two trusts in the UK specialising in women's health care. They provide a focused range of health care services, primarily, though not exclusively, to women and their families. The intranet in use in the organisation previously was developed several years ago and in that time had become increasingly challenging to develop, update and support due to the now outdated technology. The intranet suffered with ineffective document and people search facility, poor navigation, design and user experience. The Needs The new intranet was required to rationalise infrastructure, content, licensing and management, while providing better, faster and broader tools. In addition, BWFT needed to greatly improve its Business Intelligence (BI) reporting both internally and to internal and external stakeholders. Budget constraints had to be adhered to and short timescales were involved. Further requirements were:

An organisation-wide document management and information publication system

Case Study

Intranet and Rapid Business Intelligence

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Tools for team, department and project-based collaboration

An efficient and secure way to share documents and data with external partners and stakeholders

Fully supported and updated as new tools and needs emerged

Robust and resilient, with excellent availability

There were a number of shortcomings in their existing system, including poorly conceived information architecture and

functionality.

The Solution

Birmingham Women’s NHS Foundation Trust reviewed a number of different options before deciding on the Hadron 8020 platform.

Cloud2 implemented their proven Hadron 8020 intranet accelerator, which has been developed with over 3 man years of development. The end result is a SharePoint intranet that is 80% pre-configured that includes many of the common requirements, e.g. policies & procedures, people and document search enhancements, and 20% customised for the Trust’s specific requirements. This enabled the fastest possible implementation, whilst ensuring a feature rich business tool that exceeds the Trust’s expectations. eve is going to change the way the organisation communicates internally.

Hadron

A new server 4 server farm was built for the solution, following which implementation

“Cloud2 is a great partner. Their Hadron solution and experience in

developing intranets have been instrumental in the success of this

project. eve is a valuable resource that will help drive change within the Trust

as it continues to grow.”

was fast; hand over to staff occurred just ten weeks after the project commenced.

At launch the feature set included:

Document publication and management, including a strong Policies and Procedures management tool.

Team, Department and Directorates areas, with associated content and collaboration tools, based on a 2-level architecture for each directorate: an 'upper' publishing area and a restricted 'lower' authoring area for members of the directorate.

A range of knowledge management features, staff directory and profiles.

Areas for Programme management.

Enhanced enterprise-level search.

Rapid BI

The trust has urgent and changeable reporting needs, both internally and to support the GP community. Difficult to manage spreadsheets were in use for data analysis, with much of the reporting needs being met with a traditional “Excel + Email” approach. Rapid BI was included as part of the roll out, which added a BI portal and dashboards for presenting insights alongside tables and charts pulled from enhanced Excel files stored and managed in the intranet. This will later be extended to use PowerPivot embedded in the same dashboards.

Our Rapid BI approach for BWFT ensures important data can be found, navigated, edited, manipulated and used in helpful ways. The solution delivered to BWFT took less time than other approaches, saved the organisation money and time by using tools staff understand and helps present complex information in simple ways, through a browser, with the interactivity users expect but without the complexity.

Challenges

1. Any project of this type requires changes in the ways of working and this inevitably meets resistance. Good intranet practices require a little more

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Successful SharePoint Delivered Fast

effort up-front to obtain the large downstream benefits. In this context adoption remains a challenge and demonstrating value can be equally difficult - users soon forget about how bad things were before. SharePoint also has a reputation for being difficult, which lingers despite the recent progress made with the technology. The Trust has made some robust decisions, such as removal of shared and personal drives. Migration of content is on-going.

2. SharePoint in general has a conservative look and feel as standard, with enhancements mostly restricted to a range of icons, simple page designs, page headers and signposting components intended to provide consistency rather than impact. SharePoint Designer was used to enhance the look and feel of the intranet to provide a more engaging home page and other features within the site.

3. The previous intranet had weak information architecture. While Hadron 8020 addressed this there remains the need to balance inputting metadata with not making this process too burdensome for staff.

Conclusion

Birmingham Women’s NHS Foundation Trust has achieved the flexible platform they sought and are actively extending it. Policies and Procedures are available to all

staff on demand, ensuring access to only the latest version. This instant access extends to other processes and workflows and these are tracked and audited.

Staff are able to store and find documents easily and collaborate efficiently despite the size and complexity of the organisation.

The intranet team can provision new, fully structured sites to teams and projects quickly and consistently; they note with satisfaction that these are delivered in a quarter of the time of similar offers by support services in other Trusts.

Birmingham Women’s NHS Foundation Trust intranet

‘eve’ intranet keeps BWFT employees informed & provides support for

patient care. eve was delivered in less than ten weeks, compared with the

typical 24+ weeks to go live.