Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service

Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service (BFRS) is the fire and rescue service for the county of Bedfordshire. Within its values of serving the community and protecting citizens from fires and other emergencies, one of the key aims of BFRS is to utilise assets effectively and to maximise the use of data analytics and digital solutions to drive improvements. Konsolute worked with BFRS to help them achieve this aim, provisioning a comprehensive intranet as part of a wider SharePoint Online solution.

BFRS has fourteen strategically positioned fire stations around the county of Bedfordshire, with headquarters located in Kempston alongside an emergency communication centre, training centre, fire station, and equipment maintenance workshop. There are also two offices located in the north and south of the county housing the Community Engagement Team. The authority employs over 560 members of staff spread across these disparate locations, demanding a comprehensive online solution to maintain open communication channels and collaborative working amongst all members of the organisation. The authority also operated its fire stations 24/7, 365 days a year, either with permanent staff or using an RDS system, meaning all online systems must be reliable and available at all times.

Konsolute first outlined and undertook an implementation period consisting of three phases: a Discovery phase, a system design and configuration phase, and a reporting collaboration and mobile working phase. This period enabled us to determine the specific requirements of BFRS in detail before implementing the solution steadily through test and review stages, ensuring that it delivered the required results to the client.

Konsolute delivered the Discovery phase by firstly engaging with stakeholders to capture requirements through workshop sessions. We encouraged all aspects of the organisation to participate in these workshops in order to gain a cross-sectional representation of the business. As part of the workshops, we endeavoured to demonstrate some of the products and features of Office 365 that would be applicable to the workshop’s attendees. Through these workshops, we made the requirement gathering process interactive, asking attendees to discuss their issues and concerns relating to processes undertaken on existing platforms as well as discussing future requirements. These issues, concerns, and requirements were grouped together to form the basis of user stories.

The user stories were then mapped into a technical roadmap and prioritised in order to design a SharePoint Online solution capable of delivering BFRS’s business requirements. As a part of Sprint planning, we invited all stakeholders and product owners to define the “Sprint”. Each Sprint endeavoured to deliver complete User Stories, and typically ran for approximately two weeks. The overall outcomes of the Discovery phase formed an MVP (minimum viable product) which provided detailed information on the proposed solution, resulting in the key design principles of: enabling all information sources, boosting the employee experience, fostering open collaboration, enabling flexible and smarter working, ensuring security and compliance, and successful governance. The resulting solution was assessed against the defined design principles and remediated based on user feedback as part of the pilot stage.

The results of the Discovery phase were also used as a basis on which to design a training plan. In-person user training was implemented alongside a learning portal, allowing users to navigate and view the training materials most applicable to them.

The intranet system implemented by Konsolute enabled staff across the various offices of the Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service to remain connected and collaborative regardless of location, offering all members of the workforce effortless access to central information and open communication channels to key team members across the organisation. Hosted on SharePoint Online, the Intranet integrated seamlessly with the existing and new elements of the BFRS Microsoft 365 system. The SharePoint Online capabilities, including “audience targeting”, enabled the users of the BFRS intranet to view information intelligently based upon their membership of certain sites or teams, removing search time from the workday and making daily tasks more efficient. Overall, working with Konsolute left BFRS with a far more connected and efficient working style, with all members of the organisation able to communicate and view information in one convenient and easy-to-use central location.