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CASE STUDY

SHAREPOINT CONSULTANCY PROJECT FOR A LEADING POLICY

MANAGEMENT ORGANISATION

Case study on how MindPoint helped a leading policy management organisation with their SharePoint 2010 server and overhauled their entire bid management process

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LEADING POLICY MANAGEMENT ORGANISATION

The client has a head office in the UK with offices and consultants spread globally. Consultants are involved in producing policy documents for large government departments, international aid agencies and global bodies such as the UN. Consultants usually have to gather huge amounts of information, analyse it, and then produce reports based on that information. Most work is obtained via tenders which are bid for by similar policy management organisations. The company already had a SharePoint implementation in use by a small number of staff but, due to reliability issues with the single server installation and lack of strategic governance, they had not yet rolled it out to their larger user base.

With more than thirty years of combined SharePoint and business knowledge (much of it in the education and public sectors) MindPoint was in a unique position to provide a solution that would fit the clients exacting requirements. Building upon their deep knowledge of SharePoint 2010; MindPoint proposed a solution based around SharePoint sites which were automatically provisioned once approved from a bid opportunities explorer. Bid opportunities are either added by admin staff or consultants and can be quickly advanced through a series of stages (with accompanying documentation) through to the successful award of contract. This has dramatically reduced the time needed to act on opportunities and has significantly reduced the burden on admin staff supported the consultants. Using the new system devised by MindPoint, a bid can now be

managed by the consultants themselves. With no input requird from admin, bids can now be applied for within a greatly compressed time scale.

MindPoint were originally brought on board to help create a stable platform that would

The Solution

“Delivering a scalable & manageable solution”The Situation

A leading UK based policy management organisation approached MindPoint for initial help with stabilising an existing SharePoint 2010 server. It quickly became apparent that they were keen to use SharePoint to overhaul their entire bid management process. MindPoint were central in producing a solution that was both scalable and manageable and reduced the time needed to produce bids for contracts.

Overview

enable a further rollout to users. This was achieved fairly quickly, adding extra servers for redundancy and reliability.

However, it qiuckly became clear that the increasing amount of tenders being chased were consequently generating large amounts of bids. In turn, this was placing a significant administrative burden on their support staff. The strategic

group within the company then turned to MindPoint to help them to ease the flow of bids and also help with the wider transformation of the company.

“Showing business value & rapid ROI”

It was essential that any solution developed was done using the built-in tools available and not by using custom development. This was to ensure that the client could build on their investment and not be locked into a particular development route or set of technologies. This forward thinking was further emphasised by the series of workshops and training sessions delivered to the client by MindPoint towards the end of the engagement.

“We wanted the customer to have ownership of the solutions we created. Knowledge transfer is very important to MindPoint since we feel building black-box solutions doesn’t help the client longer term (and can actually be a liability when it comes to upgrading). We see ourselves helping the client longer term so the more that we can do to leverage the out of the box product the better”

Jason Firth, MindPoint

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Sites were created and managed using a series of SharePoint Designer workflows which managed the documentation and information through all the stages from initiation to final sign off. This also allowed the admin team within the organisation

to gain much more control over the design of the solution. Reporting was achieved using a series of views.

The reporting mechanism alone was a revelation for the

staff, because for the first time they had an overview of ‘what was going on, and when, and by whom’. Despite a change in working practice, this helped minimise disruption for users.

The fact that the system was in use before its official “go-live” date was an indication that business benefit was felt right from the start.

“Although it was a culture change for the client, our approach and guidance - along with innovative training and support sessions - allowed them to reduce the bid cycle from months down to just weeks”

Jason Firth, MindPoint

“This was a great client for us because we were really able to show them the business value that we can deliver and they saw a rapid ROI.”

Pete Gilbert, MindPoint

The organisation now has a stable Sharepoint collaboration platform which enables growth and supercharges the future development of applications to support business processes. They were delighted with the professional service provided to them by MindPoint which had quickly and economically delivered a number of tangible benefits to the business.

The Benefits“A stable Sharepoint collaboration platform”

The platform has been stabilised & can now support larger numbers of users reliably

Client users can now rely on the platform to be accessible no matter where in the world they are. This has massively reduced their global teams reliance on an outdated VPN to access the necessary files when their consultants are out in the field.

The time to apply for bids & assemble tenders has been substantially compressed

The time needed to assemble a bid for a tender has now been reduced from several weeks right down to a few days. In some cases, it’s as little as hours. This has enabled opportunities to be won with velocity and greatly increased conversion.

Supporting documentation for bids can be tailored for each stage of the process

Documentation sets can now be produced and templated to allow consultants to assemble bids with minimal input from admin staff. This has been very useful for bids that have to be quickly compiled out-of-hours, over weekends and overnight. Time and waste have been reduced and mistakes have been virtually eliminated entirely.

The bid process has been streamlined & made much more efficient

Following MindPoint’s end-to-end analysis of their bid process, some of the steps and procedures were found to no longer be relevant and were dropped. This further streamlined the ability of the company to quickly respond to tenders with agility and increased conversion.

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MindPoint not only saved us time and money rolling out our

Client Opinion

“SharePoint implementation across our international workforce but they provided us with an innovative solution to genuine challenges that

we faced within our business. This enabled us to generate more revenue and ROI practically immediately. The business value we received as a direct result of engaging the SharePoint experts at MindPoint was highly visible not just to management and to our bottom-line but to our end-users and customers.

Chief Executive, Leading Policy Management Organisation

The solution is easy to extend & scale as the organisation changes

”

As the solution was based on no-code out of the box components (such as sites and workflows), MindPoint has made it easy for the company to extend these solutions to other business processes and manage them in-house. Future-proofing has been strategically built into the solution from the ground up.

“The business value we received as a direct result of engaging the SharePoint experts at MindPoint was highly visible”

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