Background

This year, we partnered with Single Homeless Project (SHP), a London-wide charity working to prevent homelessness, help vulnerable and socially excluded people to transform their lives. We participated in many activities to fundraise on behalf of SHP, such as the Gung-Ho 5K inflatable run, the Royal Parks Half Marathon, as well as hosted a Christmas Charity Quiz Night.

When partnering charities, r10 are really passionate about extending our support beyond fundraising.  We also look to provide some of our day to day expertise where required. When we heard about a transformation project being undertaken at SHP, we were quick to offer our services and assist in any way possible.

What was the challenge?

SHP had a hard deadline to migrate Microsoft applications and files to Office 365 as well as moving to SharePoint as their sole repository for all documentation. This meant quickly getting to grips with their IT estate and then understanding the impact of this migration to their over 400 strong staff team. While SHP had spun up the project, they asked for some support from r10 over their file migration challenges. These challenges included:

• Only using file explorer to store files for over 10 years, meaning that the number of archived documents that needed to be sorted through was hugely time consuming for SHP. There was also no naming convention so there was no easy way to understand the contents of each document short of reviewing each one
• The number of documents would mean expensive storage costs if all documents were migrated over to SharePoint
• Data regulation and GDPR – while confidential documents were tightly controlled in an SHP application, certain documents had to be kept for certain regulatory reasons while others should be deleted under the General Data Protection Regulations
• The mass amount of storage using file explorer had almost exceeded SHP’s allowance
• The focus of the project was on the migration and the time pressure and most staff were unaware of the changes and how it would impact them

How did r10 help?

Since the SHP project was on the technical migration, r10’s main area of support was on the business change and communication area

r10’s focused on providing clear and precise communication for SHP which addressed any anticipated questions and concerns staff may have. This included the date of the migration itself, which departments would be affected, any tangible changes employees would see to their Office 365 accounts and applications and what they would need to do to prepare for the migration without causing interruption to business continuity. In addition to this, r10 offered to train the SHP staff to understand the benefits of SharePoint and maximize the capabilities of the new technology they’d have at their disposal.

We also shared relevant material to help SHP adapt to the technology change. We created and shared a list of FAQs that would have been a useful foundation for SHP’s ‘Super Users’, who were assigned to aid others wherever possible. r10 also provided a ‘How-To’ guide that provided step-by-step instructions on the various ways SHP would be able to get the most effective use when moving over their repository.

Furthermore, r10 provided training documentation around other ‘soft skill’ Microsoft Office functionality, such as helping employees adding an email signature, establishing shortcuts and hyperlinks, granting access to certain restricted documents. Also, how to enable the collaborative settings on documents to avoid miscommunication and incorrect version control.

What was the outcome?

As SHP continued to go through this process, r10 remains available to assist where required. SHP’s employees adapted the new repository solution to their ways of working successfully. Now, SHP has a cloud-based solution that is safer for their data and user-friendly for their staff.