SharePoint adoption at Health Education England
Health Education England (HEE) exists for one reason only: to support the delivery of excellent healthcare and health improvement to the patients and public of England by ensuring that the workforce of today and tomorrow has the right numbers, skills, values and behaviours, at the right time and in the right place.
HEE provide national leadership and the coordination of education and training within the health and public health workforce within England.
In Summer 2017 HEE commenced the roll out of SharePoint across the organisation. This new online platform allows HEE the ability to easily collaborate across the business and with its partners; with ease and precision, as it worked towards all its offices moving to a single national network.
The Challenge
Working in such a demanding environment, it was important for HEE to invest in an intuitive platform, which had the ability to be customised to their specific needs and ways of working.
However, when the roll out commenced, the Head of IT (North) noticed that adoption was not as successful as initially planned within the region. This resulted in a large increase in emails from their administrative teams on how to navigate the platform and employees still using network drives and sharing things by email. Diminishing the return on investment laid out for the platform and increasing the risk in terms of information governance.
The SharePoint adoption and bespoke training QA provided us has completely transformed how our team works. Collaboration, efficiency and confidence have grown beyond expectation. We look forward to continued improvement as we roll out across the organisation.Head of IT (North)
The Solution
Following a detailed conversation with their QA Relationship Manager, QA arranged a consultation with HEE to better understand the customisation put into place on their SharePoint portal.
Our subject matter expert spent time understanding the customised platform and the outputs which HEE wanted to see from the training delivery. Here, it was identified that our standard courses in this area didn’t align as closely as we’d like to see for this training plan.
This was important, as due to the customisation element of the platform, SharePoint in nature can be different each time. Taking the time to understand how HEE use it and and the current challenges were critical to success.
Therefore, the subject matter expert redesigned our beginner SharePoint programme to include language that would be most suited to the audience. The course involved the inclusion of a new, bespoke to HEE, take-away 27 page workbook, which provided a ‘how-to’ guide for navigating the platform more easily. Providing the building blocks for users to become more confident in the use of the platform.
Before commencing the roll out of the training, QA ran a short pilot of 12 delegates in November 2018 and noticed a few areas of improvement on the course. This included ensuring the ‘MS Teams’ function was covered clearly within the most appropriate setting for HEE SharePoint.
Following this change, QA have delivered almost 30 training sessions of training to cohort sizes of 10-14 learners, to increase understanding and adoption of SharePoint. These are delivered onsite and in total, we look to deliver this to around 420 delegates.
The Outcome
The benefits of this project are simple in nature. An administrative team which feels confident in their use of SharePoint.
An organisation which is able to collaborate easily and share important documentation in a secure environment. The final benefit, which has been a wonderful value add for the Head of IT (North)’s team, is a massive decrease in service desk requests asking for navigation support of the software!