Homeground Services

In recent months, two of Melbourne’s largest and highly respected Not For Profit (NFP) organisations, HomeGround and Hanover Welfare Services, joined forces to boost their capacity and ability to execute on their vision; to end homelessness.

The amalgamation of HomeGround and Hanover sparked a need to consolidate their information management approach to provide a common platform for their respective teams to meet, share and work together. HomeGround’s previous intranet and document management was provided by an on-premise installation of SharePoint 2013. Although Hanover did not have an intranet as such, it did have a structured document repository that would also need to be migrated over to the newly chosen platform.

To complicate matters further, it was recognised that the information architecture would need to support dual branded documents for an extended period, while the business was given an opportunity to re-visit, and in some cases, re-author various forms, policies and procedures necessary to provide statutory compliance imposed upon NFPs. Consolidating documents necessary to support the business processes of over 350 employees, without compromising on service quality, was a key success criteria for the project.

The board of directors selected SharePoint and Office 365 as the most appropriate new platform for the new organisation and set about to make the merger a reality. FiveP Australia, a Microsoft Gold Partner in Collaboration and the Cloud, and long-term services supplier for HomeGround, was a natural choice to facilitate the merger of HomeGround and Hanover’s information management needs. With so much historic content to migrate FiveP facilitated a ROT analysis – Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial – on all of the organisations data so effort could be focused upon bringing over relevant and high-quality content necessary to establish confidence and trust in the new platform. Provision of a “single source of truth” for the large number of geographically dispersed teams is also proving to be of immense benefit for the entire organisation.

As with most NFPs, they are continually asked to do more with less. Following the successful implementation of the new intranet and merger of their information assets, their new organisation is now well positioned to operate more efficiently in tackling the very real problem of homelessness in our community.

“An important part of our services to clients is the provision of information on a timely basis delivered in an efficient and courteous manner. The solution implemented by FiveP Australia improves the collaboration and communication of our geographically-dispersed workforce, enabling our employees to quickly access the information they need, at the time that they need it, on any device.

Throughout the process, FiveP demonstrated leadership and provided timely advice, helping us to understand how the merger of our information assets could be best achieved in a manner which supported our ongoing operations and community commitments. FiveP’s team was accessible, flexible and a pleasure to work with throughout the project, always providing support and guidance to our teams as they came up to speed and embraced the changes.”

Sudharma Hireman

Manager Corporate Services – Homeground Services