Case Study Windows SharePoint Services

The Client

Estyn is the office of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education and Training in Wales based in Cardiff. It is a Crown body, originally established under the Education Act 1992, which is independent of the National Assembly for Wales but is funded by it. The Estyn mission is to achieve excellence for all learners in Wales through raising the standards and quality in education and training. Almost all education and training providers throughout Wales are subject to inspection by Estyn at least once within a six-year period. Estyn employs around 100 members of staff, of which 50+ are HMI. It has currently almost completed an 18 month “Transforming Estyn” programme which has renewed its organisation and all its IT Systems.

The Challenge

An in-house workshop involving various Estyn functional team/area representatives was run to identify initial SharePoint functional requirements - the workshop was facilitated by an external consultant from a company involved in a large scale public sector implementation of SharePoint. A set of draft requirements (specification) was produced and consideration given to developing the requirements into a formal specification. However, a number of concerns (risks) had been identified with the above approach:

• The requirements had been identified with a fairly limited understanding within Estyn of how SharePoint actually worked and of what functionality came OOTB (out-of-the box) and what would need customising (i.e. code written specific for Estyn)
• The requirements initially identified may have included elements of a ‘wish list’ and further work might have be needed to rationalise the requirements in terms of priority and cost-benefit – there is the added risk of having to amend/revisit the specification, at additional cost, as new business processes are developed
• In 2009 the latest version of SharePoint was MOSS 2007, however, a new version of SharePoint was due for release in the first half of 2010 – early decisions might prove sub-optimal in terms of the version Estyn should opt for and/or any migration path/compatibility requirements (e.g. upgrade from its existing MS Office 2003)
• The modest level of maturity of Estyn’s current electronic document management systems and processes as well as the extensive change the whole business was undergoing as it transformed through the Estyn 2010 transformation programme, meant that a large scale, enterprise wide, long term, SharePoint IT project could create unnecessary risks and strain staff resources at a time when other new system implementations (with supporting changes in business processes) might be occurring.

Analysis of Estyns “As Is” position highlighted that Estyn operated with four main information stores: 1. Paper files, 2. Email for unstructured information like Microsoft Exchange / Outlook based Emails, 3. A shared “O” Drive for electronic documents and 4. line-of-business Software Database applications holding structured data. Large numbers of paper files existed on site and in archive storage. Exchange based Email consisted of 80gb stored on servers and back up tape.

With Estyn going though a process of fundamental business transformation driven by changes in the way future inspections were to be carried out and data collected Estyn was changing from top to bottom and in the way it interacted with all its stakeholders. This was forcing major changes in strategy, planning, organisation, IT systems (which Westgate were assisting with) and staffing.
 
Estyn was also undertaking an accommodation review with the likelihood of more staff being based at home, and inspection staff being able to work remotely wherever they are in the field. With increasing use of digital channels and messaging and new electronic business processes it was clear that the right supporting IT infrastructure is critical. In particular Estyn needed to move rapidly to put in place the new systems that would enable the replacement of paper based processes and communication channels with electronic ones.

Analysis showed that document management and messaging within Estyn was fragmented with both manual paper based and network based systems in use. Staff operated to a large degree in their own operational and technical silos, leading to issues with information governance such as finding information and documents and collaborating with other parties. The shared network “O” drive was seen by many as a concern - with users finding it the opposite of a good collaborative environment with documents frequently difficult to locate due to complex and obtuse folder taxonomies.

Additionally, existing Information Governance (Frameworks) required modification in order to be fit-for-purpose for the business in 2010 and forwards  and needed a refresh with new policies & business rules created to provide the overarching strategic direction and rules needed. New policies & business rules were required in order to enable the implementation of new IT systems handling information as they would determine how the IT systems were architected technically & configured by Westgate IT working with the Estyn IT Project Manager and SharePoint Migration consultant.

Business Solution

The proposal accepted by Estyn was based on implementing a small scale, low-risk, low-cost, proof of concept pilot (to start with) which would be used to validate its main assumptions on SharePoint (and Estyn’s need for electronic document management) and demonstrate that many operational benefits can be obtained with low technical and financial risk. The solution proposed used Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) v3.0 rather than the full MOSS 2007 software suite. Westgate IT would provide the technical IT support and SharePoint Implementation consultancy.

Westgate IT would comment here that this approach and solution takes account of the fact that the next version of MS Office (Office 14) and SharePoint (SharePoint 2010) was going to be released in the middle of 2010. So this approach minimised risks and costs around any migration path to SharePoint 2010 subsequently should the decision be taken by Estyn to skip implementation of the soon to be superseded MOSS 2007 platform, and move on to SharePoint 2010 later on. It was also clear to Westgate IT that an issue existed on the potential need for Estyn users to migrate to MS Office 2007 from Office 2003, but for the Pilot those issues were initially deferred.

Westgate IT was initially scaling the pilot for round 10 users. The pilot project had the following elements:

• Technical Infrastructure. SharePoint would be installed on an existing unallocated Windows 2003 Server that Westgate assessed as specified and sized adequately to run the pilot. No other hardware needed purchasing. Any document scanning requirements following cut-over to SharePoint was going to be met through existing post room resources
• Software Licenses. Estyn already had the necessary Microsoft licenses to use Windows SharePoint Service so no extra spend was needed for the pilot
• Consultancy. The IT Project Manager was going to project manage and provide some consultancy input for the SharePoint pilot. Change management and document migration needs were not regarded as significant.
• Westgate IT was contracted to provide up to 8 days of consultancy, including 2 days to install/configure SharePoint on the server and 6 days to design/build & configure the system working onsite at Estyns HQ. Contingency of two further days of Westgate SharePoint Technical consultancy were also included.
• Timings. Westgates view was that the pilot, technically, was easy to set up and, operationally, was going to be low impact initially at a user level so would take days rather than weeks to implement.
• Milestones. Based on a start date of mid October, go-live after some user acceptance testing (UAT) by the Estyn project team was planned to be only two weeks later. Estyn then had a pilot evaluation stage which would run for 4 weeks, finishing in early December, to inform future decisions/options and subsequent projects/implementation phases.

Functional & Non-Functional Requirements. Estyn provided Westgate IT with a high level software Requirements Specification as set out in the table below. The requirements specification was for SharePoint system based on Windows SharePoint Service v3.0 that would provide basic and robust electronic document management (EDM). This required Westgate to configure for Estyn SharePoint functionality such as alerts, integration with email, versioning, check-in, check-out, search, security and audit functionality with it implemented “OOTB”. Westgate ensured when setting up SharePoint that other standard functionality to facilitate collaboration and effective information & document management was also made available to the project team and users for possible subsequent use. As the project was a Pilot Estyn were clear that at this stage for the proof of concept pilot it was not necessary to go beyond what is specified in the table below. In specifying the requirements Estyn was also sensibly not mandating that each of the requirements would actually be implemented in the pilot as time was tight and it was necessary to minimise the change management issues created by too much business process change.  

Outcome

The project was a success. Westgate IT met all the project timings and milestones and the pilot met its business case objectives. As a result the system went immediately to a Phase II and full rollout across all of Estyns 100+ staff with upgraded technical network infrastructure. In Westgate IT view both a good result for all and a very sensible one as the best possible use was made of SharePoint.