ISO9001 compliant Product documentation
A strategic decision had been made to eradicate a legacy system from the company. There was a massive cost saving to be made but first we needed to configure a system that could do the job of the old one and ensure legal compliance.
The backdrop
The customer had decided to get rid of Lotus Notes. It was a bold move as many a company has tried and failed. The system that had been custom built complied to strict guidelines set out by ISO9001 certification. We needed to make sure the system we built also complied or the company could lose the ability to self certify their products.
Our role
We joined the project as Solution Developers. It was our job to work with the SharePoint technical team to develop a solution based on the business requirements. We would then test the solution with the business and once approved role it out for deployment.
Key challenges
End users really liked their legacy tool. It had served them well and been developed for their needs. There was nothing out of the box that did the same thing with SharePoint so we needed to configure something that was a viable replacement. Product documentation needed to be kept for 20 years so there was a lot of data that had to be accessable. If we managed to find a solution we needed to train it to over 5000 end users spread throughout the globe.
Success factors
First and foremost the team that was put together was highly competent. It comprised of SharePoint experts, migration specialists and people who had an in-depth understanding of the business needs. We were able to develop a solution that the business liked. We envolved an influential group of key users from the beginning. Their buy-in and support helped us promote the solution. The communications for the project was done very well and people were keen to take the new process and tool into use.
Our migration team very skillfully migrated the active data and an easy to use archiving solution was found for the non active data. Training was done with a combination of face to face training and support and online training. End users were happy to get support. As we closed out the project we created an easy to use wiki so users find the help they needed and referred them to key users for further support.
Conclusion
This project demonstrated the effectiveness of a small and highly skilled team. In a very short amount of time we were able to build a solution that met the business needs and deploy it rapidly across a large number of geographies. Key to the success was also the early engagement with key users and enlisting their help to build the optomal solution.
