Springfield City Group

Springfield City Group (SCG) (“The Group”) are the developers of the master-planned city of Greater Springfield, in Southeast Queensland. SCG recently engaged Brennan to replace their existing document management and collaboration technology, which wasn’t integrated with the business’ broader IT ecosystem, and lacked scalability. Brennan migrated SCG to Microsoft Teams, which has delivered productivity gains and significantly enhanced visibility, collaboration, security and flexibility.

The summary

Industry:

Property

Country:

Australia

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Business Challenge

A document management and collaboration solution which wasn’t connected with the rest of the business’ IT infrastructure – limiting business productivity, visibility, and ability to scale.

Solution:

A seamless new solution that maximised the business’ existing investment in Microsoft 365, with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, all supported by Brennan’s Managed Services.

Results

Enhanced productivity, security and reliability.

“I’m really pleased with the outcome. There were a few unforeseeable challenges, but Brennan met each of them head-on, and overcame them, every time.”

Ashlee Waldorff, ICT Systems and Reporting Specialist

The Challenge

As a busy real estate development company, it’s essential that Springfield City Group’s employees have a reliable, secure, and user-friendly way of sharing files and working on them together. The Group found that with its existing document management platform, staff were finding it hard to retrieve and update documents, among other challenges.

As a result, many staff were finding their own workarounds to usability problems, or simply not using the software at all. Shadow IT was becoming a problem and posed a security risk. The existing solution was also quite costly, and simply not providing the business with the return on investment it needed.

SCG turned to Brennan – with whom they had an existing partnership – for help as well as to ensure any potential issues could be detected and resolved before the full migration.

The Solution

Brennan worked closely with SCG to understand their business requirements, and recommended migrating to Microsoft Teams, as a natural extension to SCG’s existing Microsoft technology investments.

“We wanted to make a deliberate move towards more Microsoft-based products so we could achieve greater integration across our business. It was definitely a high-level decision to restructure our system architecture in line with this,” says Ashlee Waldorff, SCG’s ICT Systems and Reporting Specialist.

Moving to Microsoft Teams would provide a unified communication and collaboration platform that combines workplace chat, video meetings, file storage in SharePoint Online, and integration with their other workplace applications.

Microsoft Teams and SharePoint were rolled-out gradually to minimise disruption to the business, aid change management and maximise adoption, as well as to ensure any potential issues could be detected and resolved before the full migration.

The Result

With a new solution in place, SCG’s employees can now collaborate more easily and effectively as they have a reliable, one-stop-shop for content and knowledge sharing. Employees can also work effectively from anywhere, and from any device – with the collaboration tools they need at their fingertips.

According to Waldorff, one of the biggest benefits has been the enhanced visibility, transparency and insight provided by the new solution. “Out of the box, SharePoint offers a great admin portal where you can get fantastic insights on data storage, file sharing and access permissions. I get email notifications if something significant is deleted or changed. From an IT management perspective, this has been a real game changer,” she says.

Another key benefit is the level of flexibility afforded by the new solution. “SharePoint has been great in terms of being able to create guest accounts and access. This simply wasn’t an option with our previous solution,” she adds. “It’s also far easier for our people to now work remotely if they need to.”

“Teams has also encouraged people to communicate more frequently and effectively. Rather than drafting a long email, they can now just flick through a quick message. This makes sharing information and collaborating much easier,” she adds.

Overall, SGC’s file management is now more secure and easy to manage. Uptake amongst employees has been high, and anecdotal feedback is very positive.

“Most employees are now happily using Teams and SharePoint, and we’ve been able to say goodbye to shadow IT, which has been really important,” says Ashlee.

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