Greater Anglia | Migration

The Opportunity

Greater Anglia had been using a shared mailbox as part of its process for storing information. While this approach had served its purpose, upcoming changes to Microsoft 365 compliance and retention policies meant that mailboxes would not longer be a suitable solution for record-keeping.

IT advised that new retention policies would soon apply to all mailboxes, potentially leading to the automatic deletion of important information if it was not relocated to a more appropriate and secure environment. To safeguard this data and ensure compliance, Greater Anglia recognised the need to migrate the contents of the shared mailbox to a more structured platform.

The team at Greater Anglia engaged Perspicuity with the initial objective of moving this information into SharePoint Online. However, through collaboration with the Perspicuity Team, they also explored ways to improve how their data was organised, access, and retained to better support their internal processes.

How was that problem affecting Greater Anglia's workplace?

Previously, Greater Anglia hadn't realised just how inefficient their processes were or how they were limiting their ability to leverage newer technologies. The shared mailbox had evolved into a bottleneck within workflows, with data stored in a unstructured manner that made it difficult for teams to quickly locate the information they needed. As the volume of data increased, managing it became more challenging, and the looming risk of data loss due to retention policies became a growing concern.

The lack of structure resulted in confusion, delays, and unnecessary manual effort. Staff were spending excessive time searching through emails instead of focusing on higher-value tasks. At the same time, uncertainty around how retention policies would affect the stored data - particularly with regard to regulatory compliance - added further pressure.

It was clear to Greater Anglia that a new solution was needed - one that would not only support compliance but also improve data management, accessibility, and security. Ultimately, these challenges were preventing Greater Anglia from operating efficiently and were holding back efforts to adopt advanced technologies that could support innovation across the organisation.

The Perspicuity Solution

In 2016, Greater Anglia engaged with Perspicuity and launched an updated, more user-friendly, intranet solution known as ‘SharePoint Intranet FastStart’, built on SharePoint Online. It was an enormous step forward and provided the framework in which to build a wider plan on digitising the entire workspace across Greater Anglia. Fast forward to now, Greater Anglia upgraded to Percy Intranet - launched in January 2021 - which has now become the central, modern workspace in which to get work done.

Like every Percy Intranet project, Perspicuity and Greater Anglia scoped out the purpose and goals of the intranet to ensure that they aligned with the overall business strategy. From there, we engaged with the wider team to confirm Greater Anglia’s branding was incorporated into the intranet as a part of deployment of the framework. We then trained the Greater Anglia team on how to edit, operate and grow their intranet.

Today, Greater Anglia engage in monthly success calls with their account manager to review previous goals and feedback on Percy. These sessions provide the platform in which to measure the success of the intranet and review the latest developments within Percy.

The Outcomes

"Following the successful upgrade to Percy Intranet, engagement from across the business - including frontline workers - has significantly improved and introduced new ways of employee interaction. By introducing a colleague recognition tool, peers have been able to celebrate one another's everyday achievements, boosting the visibility of team members across the business. Percy Intranet has become the central tool within the organisation to access news, collaborate on documents, access rosters, capture organisation-wide feedback, and - thanks to being built on a modern framework - the core platform on which to build upon."

Karen McCann | Internal Comms Senior Manager, Greater Anglia

The Tech We Used