A large construction firm hired Netrix to move their legacy corporate intranet to Office 365. Instead of implementing a standard “lift and shift” migration, Netrix’s architects and Microsoft MVPs consulted with key stakeholders to map desired requirements to features in Office 365 and build a roadmap to the cloud that aligned with Microsoft’s Office 365 roadmap.
Even as Microsoft released new functionality to its Office 365 platform, Netrix’s close communication with stakeholders and the use of an agile project management approach positioned Netrix to maximize the client’s budget and deliver more business value in shorter release cycles.
The Netrix client is a large construction firm with operations nationwide. Like many firms in the industry, the client sought to gain a competitive edge by eliminating bottlenecks in business processes touching field operations and back-office staff, including:
With key business processes relying on email, internal file shares and a VPN-only corporate intranet, the organization struggled to modernize business processes to meet the demands of a mobile workforce with an increasing percentage of millennial employees.
During the roadmap engagement, Netrix also uncovered critical business data living in paper and PDF forms on file shares that prevented the client’s analytics team from effectively identifying trends in safety incident reporting.
The client’s existing solutions to these business problems combined a mix of legacy on-premises applications including file shares, email and IBM Notes databases that lacked single sign-on capabilities and relied on VPN access when users were outside of the corporate network.
Enhancing existing applications required long development cycles on aged platforms and training an increasingly-youthful user base presented challenges due to the legacy platforms’ lack of a mobile-first, modern user interface.
Even after choosing to centralize on Office 365 as the primary platform for the solution, the client struggled to map their unique requirements to the appropriate Office 365 features. Architectural decisions were often delayed due to apprehensions about product roadmaps, development of new applications stalled when Microsoft released new functionality, and adoption of Office 365 was slow.
Netrix met with 80+ stakeholders across 17 departments in the corporate office and across the country to understand the business needs and build a backlog of features and user stories.
Netrix adopted a two-pronged approach to building a roadmap to implementation, in which:
Netrix then graphed these features by business value and level of effort to highlight “low-hanging fruit” solutions with high business impact potential that can be implemented with the least amount of effort.
Beginning with the low-hanging fruit, Netrix began implementation of the complete roadmap starting with small chunks of work in two-week development sprints, remaining flexible enough to re-prioritize or even re-architect components of the larger solution as new Office 365 functionality was released.
The Netrix delivery team continues to work closely with stakeholders and the client’s IT department to continuously deliver Office 365 cloud-based solutions to:
At the start of each development sprint, the client has the opportunity to re-prioritize the backlog of features as priorities shift. Similarly, Netrix can quickly implement new technology as it is released from Microsoft to augment, or even replace, functionality being built in-flight. It’s a great way to ensure Office 365 enables success in the business.
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