Greenlight

Lack of communication up and down the business, the culture of engagement and ownership amongst staff.

In 2016, the company was inspired to hold a ‘hackathon’ to generate new ideas for the business. Nothing was off-limits. Apple Watches were offered as prizes. Pizza and sleeping bags were laid on, and over 36 hours, dozens of staff members brainstormed new ideas in teams.

The winning project was the beginnings of a company intranet designed to help share ideas, build teamwork and improve communication. In just 36 hours, the team built a prototype with SharePoint Online and named it ‘Greenhouse’. They were building a cutting-edge intranet.

“We committed to everyone who took part to develop the idea, so I started looking around for a partner that could deliver a fully-featured intranet.”

Matt Whiteway, Client Services Director, Greenlight Digital

Since the company was already running Office 365, building the site in SharePoint Online – as the hackathon winners had done – it made perfect sense.

Corporate Project Solutions (CPS), a long-established Microsoft Cloud Productivity Partner, seemed like the perfect fit to develop it.

“The partner choice was vital for us. We’re very demanding; we know design, and we have SharePoint skills in-house. We needed a partner who could add significant value, who understood the platform, the user experience, and how we could assure adoption. They grasped our business and what we were looking for.”

Matt Whiteway, Client Services Director, Greenlight Digital

Part of the attraction was the power of CPS’ edison365 technology. It is built on top of SharePoint and gives companies a clever way of crowd-sourcing new ideas and harnessing staff’s creativity to solve company problems.

Managers can set challenges – like mini-hackathons – and people can contribute ideas, share feedback and vote on projects. Employees can also raise their ideas and challenges.

It’s one thing to build an intranet, but another thing to get people to use it. Developing the new Greenhouse intranet as a tool for positive, ongoing change was the top priority for CPS and Greenlight.

Using their change management methodology, CPS helped Greenlight drive user adoption. Of course, there was a launch party, but the firm sustains engagement with a user council to ensure that content stays fresh. Everybody knew that the new site had to look great and work smoothly, so CPS paid extra attention to design and user acceptance testing.