Accent Housing Group

Accent Group are a housing association, managing homes for several local authorities across England and Wales. Accent Group manage over 20,000 homes spread over the North, East and South of England. They required a comprehensive Intranet solution to maintain open communication channels and collaboration, from any device. Konsolute worked with Accent Group to refresh their outdated Intranet which was built on a legacy SharePoint platform. Accent Group’s previous investments in Microsoft 365 licenses were used to deliver a modern Intranet solution.

Accent Group has a large mobile workforce, with over sixty percent of their employees working in the field. They therefore required an adaptive platform to support frontline workers, enabling them to access information securely and easily from wherever they are. They key requirements of the solution were enabling a disparate workforce on the move to find, harvest, and upload information easily from a range of devices. Accent Group also required a platform through which employees could easily communicate and connect with other employees breaking down the hierarchical barriers of communication. The organisation also required a platform on which all members of their workforce, regardless of location, could be kept updated with important company news and information. This was important to company branding, maintaining a cohesive brand and company culture for all workers.

Konsolute began with a series of requirement gathering and discovery workshops involving a variety of users and key stakeholders. Workshops were conducted to capture key personas, the key areas in which the business can improve and better utilise its Microsoft 365 capabilities. As a result of this process, a series of User Stories were identified, and their Acceptance Criteria agreed on. Key personas were also identified against the client’s requirements to gain a cross-sectional representation of the organisation. This enabled Konsolute to provide an accurate estimation of cost and effort for the project.

The project, informed by the above key personas and user stories, was then conducted using an agile methodology known as SCRUM. Konsolute designed wireframes, to establish the layout and structure of the new Intranet’s components. Then completed the requirement specification design, to document and agree on the functionality of the components supporting the Intranet solution. Konsolute then further consulted stakeholders in order to define “Sprint cycles”, ensuring that each stage of the process is implemented and immediately reviewed. This strategy also doubled as a roll-out strategy for the solution.

The initial Sprint Cycle focused on implementing the core Intranet components as well as its homepage. Subsequent sprints then involved the roll out of departmental sites.

We then conducted business change and readiness training sessions, in which we demonstrated key functionalities to each department and introduced training materials for further learning. We also established and maintained continued support throughout the extended roll-out and provided help for the organisation’s transition to Microsoft 365.

Utilising their modern Intranet solution, Accent Group colleagues were able to maintain a cohesive working environment through maintaining regular communication. The Intranet solution bridged the gap between frontline workers and the rest of the organisation, enabling workers in the field to access the relevant information from wherever they are, via the native SharePoint mobile app.

The easy-to-use search tool enabled employees to find corporate internal applications quickly for their immediate use. The Intranet service also opened communication channels between members of the workforce in disparate locations, streamlining communication and maintaining the open flow of information across the organisation.

The up-to-date, custom designed Intranet solution provided a new fresh environment which enabled Access Group to demonstrate their corporate brand and values to their organisation and workforce, reinforcing brand culture and cohesiveness.