Sector
Housing Association
Users
1,000
Solutions
Microsoft SharePoint Online
Optivo (now a part of Southern Housing) was one of the largest affordable housing providers in the UK, with over 45,000 homes and 90,000 tenants across London. Optivo invested heavily in neighbourhood community programmes, helping its residents with training, careers advice, financial and digital inclusion so they could develop their potential and live their best lives.
Silversands, now part of the Chess Group, worked with Optivo for many years and continues to work with Southern Housing on Microsoft 365, SharePoint and Power Platform solutions.
The Challenge
Like most organisations, Optivo uses an intranet to communicate with its staff. Known as Connect, the original Optivo intranet was built on SharePoint 2013.
In 2017, following an organisational merger, SharePoint Online services began to be integrated into the intranet. This hybrid SharePoint on-premises/online intranet continued to be used for many years but there were several issues.
Essentially, the intranet was not suited to Optivo’s requirements, so in 2020, and as part of a wider strategic vision for collaboration and comms across the organisation, the comms team decided to re-think the entire solution. They looked at several options, including some non-Microsoft solutions, but ultimately decided that SharePoint Online would be the most appropriate path.
However, since the comms team did not have a wide experience in intranet design, they determined that external assistance would be desirable. Optivo already had a relationship with Silversands and so we were asked for our advice.
The Solution
To support Optivo’s requirement and based on their existing skills and knowledge, we suggested our Modern SharePoint Intranet Envisioning accelerator would be the best option.
This is a self-contained offering, designed to provide organisations like Optivo with knowledge, advice and guidance, which can feed into a solution development using internal resources. It is an archetypal example of the ‘teach them to fish’ principle.
The accelerator process primarily encompasses several workshops, covering the various topics that are relevant to an intranet design.
In each workshop, the Silversands consultant helped to uncover the key requirements, provided advice based on their years of SharePoint experience, and demonstrated configuration and solution development practices to illustrate and reinforce the topics.
After each workshop, the Optivo team would go away to develop their new intranet, based on the discussions and information provided by the Silversands consultant. If they needed further help with the development, they would make use of a support contract to speak to a consultant or developer.
At the end of the process, the team had gained enough knowledge to successfully develop and deliver the new Optivo intranet, OptiNet.
The Outcome
Before the project started, the Optivo comms team had limited knowledge and experience of intranet design and the envisioning process was invaluable in helping them to understand how to design and build an effective intranet on SharePoint Online.
The comms team surveyed the users both before and after the project, and the results clearly show a significant improvement has been achieved.
Since the most important aspect of any intranet is how the users engage with it, the OptiNet project can clearly be counted as a success. Furthermore, the comms team has gained valuable knowledge and experience to support ongoing development and improvements.
Optivo promotional video
View the internal promotional video created by Optivo.
