Our client is a leading global strategy consulting firm that provides a range of expert advice to organisations and institutions around the world. It employs around 2,500 staff across three global regions – Americas, Asia Pacific and Europe.

Previously this company had three different intranets – one for each region – each on-premises and based on older versions of SharePoint.

Our client wanted to create one new global intranet that improved communication across the regions, supported busy consultants in delivering the very best advice to clients, and leveraged all the advanced features of SharePoint Online.

An extensive discovery exercise involving all regions

The consulting company's team engaged Content Formula and the Lightspeed team with a brief to design and develop a brand new, single cloud-based intranet that covered all of regions.

We undertook an extensive discovery exercise, interviewing users and carrying out workshops across each of the regions. We also spoke to key business stakeholders, including CEO and the leader of each region.

Leveraging Lightspeed365 features to meet requirements

Our research discovery revealed the different information and communication across the whole organisation, including the specific needs of each region, showing that a “one size fits all” approach would not work on the new intranet.

Armed with this information and following discussion with the project team, we proceeded to design and build and a new intranet based on SharePoint Online that also incorporates Lightspeed365 features, significantly extending the capabilities and flexibility of SharePoint in order to meet all of client's requirements.

A personalised intranet with a consistent user experience

The new intranet creates an attractive, professional and consistent global experience for the whole company that also meets cleint’s brand requirements.

Personalisation and content targeting is used so that employees see a blend of global and regional content that is relevant to each individual. The navigation is also audience-targeted to support strong findability.

An attractive, engaging and useful homepage with several Lightspeed365 features

The new homepage is a critical entry point into the intranet. Lightspeed365’s News feed feature provides more options than SharePoint alone, presenting news in a more attractive and engaging way. Employees view global news items in an eye-catching hero area with an extensive use of images, with a feed of targeted news below it.

Lightspeed365’s App launcher feature presents a list of targeted links to everyday enterprise apps and tools right on the homepage, ensuring the intranet is a convenient entry point into the wider digital workplace.

The Lightspeed365 External social feeds web part is also used to embed client’s external Instagram feed on the homepage, providing useful information to consultants how the company is going to market.

A new, custom platform for sharing knowledge

The new intranet is also the place to access a new customised “Solution Center” that houses all of internal knowledge, research and case files, supporting the delivery of world-class advice to clients across multiple projects.

Content Formula was engaged to create the Solution Center from the ground up, providing an effective knowledge-sharing platform with greatly improved findability.

A powerful people search to find colleagues and locate experts

A key requirement for the consulting compnay was an advanced and highly flexible people search that allowed employees to locate experts and also support team selection, for example for new client tenders.

We took client’s requirements as an opportunity to extend the flexibility and power of Lightspeed365’s People directory module, reflecting our commitment to continually invest and improve Lightspeed365 modules based on client input and feedback.

As a result, all employees can search across all people directory attributes via an intelligent search box that also incorporates type-ahead to suggest tags based on the profile attribute that employees want to filter on, such as location, job title and area of expertise.

One source of truth to access global and regional policies

We used Lightspeed365’s Handbook feature to deliver a convenient policy and procedure library providing one source of truth for global and regional-level policies.

Personalisation and targeting means that employees see only the policies that are relevant to them; these can be accessed either through an intuitive central policy library with browse and search options, or through the relevant regional and service-level page.

Policy owners are also provided with links to the policies they own, to encourage these to be kept up to date.

Accessing information from support functions to get things done

The Lightspeed365 Handbook web part is also used to deliver a similar approach to a wide range of global and regional “How Do I” pages which provide an essential reference guide to completing everyday tasks and getting things done. These can be accessed via a central library.

Each business function also has its own landing page which houses critical support information, where relevant policy and How Do I pages and documents can be found.

Supporting users across the digital workplace

The client also wanted the intranet to be a place that can support users in improving communication and collaboration throughout the company and increase adoption of Microsoft 365 tools.

We used Lightspeed365’s highly flexible Card links web part to build the Hub Resource Center, an easy-to-use and welcoming collection of self-serve resources that guide users on key topics such publishing news and sharing documents. Each topic is presented as a card with links to the relevant resources.

The new intranet is already having a positive impact

So far the intranet is proving popular with the Consulting company’s busy global workforce who are now able to access both global and regional communications and resources, supporting them in their daily work, while also keeping them informed and engaged.

Improvements are on the roadmap and we look forward to working with the Consulting company team to making the intranet even better.