Powering Change through M365 Design and Governance

Our utilities customer, an iconic South Australian organisation employing more than 2,000 people had identified that their Microsoft Teams usage was rapidly growing, resulting in an increasingly unstructured and un-managed platform. This resulted in many duplicated Teams and significant overlap with functionality available in other systems, causing significant confusion around the communications matrix. Furthermore, due to the clients evolving needs for Teams sites and the ad hoc ability for the technology to be deployed, there was not enough information available to adequately administer them. This meant that when individual Teams fell into disuse there was no way to ‘clean them up’, resulting in a perpetually growing number of Teams and channels without governance.

As part of a larger project, Chamonix was responsible for integrating with an existing Service Now instance to manage requests, perform checks and balances to ensure none of the previous problems were being perpetuated, as well as auditing and managing the metadata for the newly created Team, their creation and an audit of all existing Teams. This provided immediate visibility across Microsoft Teams, resulting in a manageable, supportable lifecycle for collaborative spaces.

The organisation had previously been administering a complex document management process for highly confidential policies, procedures, and other documents. This system included the use of a third-party product that the client was in the process of decommissioning. Chamonix assisted in analysing the process, redesigning the solution to match the modern client and best-practice policies and implementation of the new process with a far simpler management process. This was achieved while using tooling that our client already had access to and planned to continue using, without changing the method of access for all non-administrative users. Because the solution delivered was able to be done in-place without affecting the existing access methodologies, minimal change management was required.

A subsidiary company of the organisation is in the process of reimagining their project planning and execution framework from the ground up. While this involved investment in many specific solutions to solve specific problems, a top-down management system was required to coordinate all the moving parts, track progress of works through their lifecycle, and provide a platform on which ad-hoc collaboration and communication could be performed. To deliver this, Chamonix helped develop a significant number of automation components that managed the creation of project assets, assignment of security roles, creation of collaborative spaces, tracking of different assets, and other works lifecycle components. These solutions were rapidly deployed during a time of intense change throughout the length of the project. Despite this, an agile approach to development meant that the final product was met with positivity and enhancements and modifications have been planned for the next several years.