Building a Modern Workplace

Argent LLP is the developer behind some of Britain’s most successful mixed-use places, including King’s Cross Estate in Central London and the development of Brent Cross Town in North London.

“We have worked with FSP for many years managing and customising our on-premise SharePoint platform.  When the time came to move to the cloud and embrace the modern workplace, FSP’s guidance, experience and technical knowledge was invaluable.  The team at FSP helped us to engage with our users, design and implement a user friendly, secure, and innovative Teams-First approach.  The wealth of expertise shown by each member of the team enabled us to deliver our very successful project on time and under budget and we continue to work with FSP on the wider Microsoft platform going forward.”

Beverley Cunningham, Business Systems Manager

The Challenge

Argent was using a collaboration solution within Microsoft SharePoint 2013, which offered exceptional information management capabilities, but which lacked flexibility, user experience and now fell short when compared to the excellence of the rest of their modern workplace offering.

Owing to MS Team’s popularity within their organisation as a chat and meeting tool, Argent decided to adopt a ‘Teams First’ approach to streamline and facilitate collaboration. To ensure a smooth transition they enlisted FSP to provide the design, technical, and change management expertise needed to carry out their vision.

The Solution

Argent recognised the importance of adapting the technology to the users’ needs, rather than expecting them to conform to a “one size fits all” approach. FSP gathered representative feedback to assess how users actually work, rather than how they are expected to work. Personas for each key role were produced from this, and the tagline ‘Your information, your way’ became the central design principle. The result ensured that users could customise their experience and work in a way that best suited their needs, all while maintaining a unified platform for collaboration.

Key Outcomes

• A well governed Teams-based collaboration platform complete with automatically provisioned channels, naming conventions, and retention policies.
• A bespoke app for empowering teams creation while maintaining governance, quality standards, and avoiding duplicates. Roles and responsibilities for users, owners and admins were clearly defined, and an executive strategy put in place. Automated content governance workflow that scheduled a 6-monthly review between the compliance officer and the team owner.
• Development of short video to upskill owners, and self-service adoption material.
• Automatic migration of the desired data from Knowledge into MS Teams  enabled a seamless transition to the new system at the start of a new working week.

The Benefits

Increased efficiency: The project’s “Your information, your way” design principle allowed users to customize their experience and work in a way that best suits their needs. This enabled them to complete tasks more efficiently and effectively.

One version of the truth: Having intuitive places to store & share documents, and by making use of the version control & co-authoring capabilities, increased user confidence in the completeness and relevance of data. It unlocked the ability for users to meaningfully work on the same document at the same time. This led to better teamwork, reduced admin burden and faster decision-making.

Greater user adoption and satisfaction: By tailoring the project to meet the specific needs of Argent’s diverse workforce, the project will achieve greater user adoption and satisfaction. This led to increased productivity and higher quality output, as well as improved employee morale and retention.

Greater governance & oversight: Having clearly defined responsibilities for all participants in the process meant that controls could be developed to ensure these responsibilities are met. Using automation allows Argent to remain compliant whilst empowering users to focus on what they do best.

Supporting growth: The benefits outlined above will ultimately support improved business growth, as the organization becomes more efficient, productive, and scalable. This will enable Argent to take on larger and more complex projects with reduced administrative overhead, expand their customer base, and stay ahead of competitors in their industry.