Goodman Group is an Australian integrated commercial and industrial property group that owns, develops, and manages real estate. This includes warehouses, large scale logistics facilities, business, and office parks globally.
Client
Goodman Group
Industry
Property Management, Logistics and Infrastructure
Organisation Size
Medium
Country
Australia
Technologies
SharePoint Online, Viva Engage
Context
Enhancing the employee experience and engagement at a global and regional level was a key objective for Goodman Group but their intranet known as ‘Greenroom’ was letting them down. Built on SharePoint Online Classic, Greenroom was hampering their ability to create engaging content to connect, inform and inspire staff as it became time consuming to use and unappealing to visit. With employees enjoying flexible and hybrid working, having a contemporary digital experience that connected them to the wider organisation was crucial.
Having recently gone through a beautiful brand refresh, their vision was for their branding to be reflected across all platforms, including their intranet.
To achieve their goals, a move to SharePoint Online was the next step. Our digital workplace was excited to create Goodman Group’s vision while adhering to Microsoft’s best practices and recommendations.
The challenge
Goodman Group wanted to enhance their employee experience and engagement at a global and regional level, leveraging services that existed within M365, such as SharePoint Online. Our digital workplace practice was aware of Goodman Group’s vision and wanted to see how far they could push a SharePoint Online modern intranet to support a highly customised design to match their brand refresh.
With Goodman Group providing a highly developed design brief, the vision was clear, and the specifications needed to match. This filtered down to every detail, including custom font elements, and the spacing and positioning of elements. Implementing custom CSS and custom font throughout the intranet design meant an innovative way of thinking so we could fulfil Goodman Group’s expectations, while also striking a balance with the intranet’s sustainability and maintainability.
Our approach
Designing a customised experience was a challenge our digital workplace had solved before; however, it was paramount that Goodman Group was aware of the implications of introducing customisations into SharePoint Online.
Fortunately, the Goodman Group project team included IT team members with extensive Microsoft experience, making technical conversations straight forward. We worked closely with the project team to communicate the potential ramifications and discussed the measures we would take to reduce any risk, and ensure systems continue to operate when Microsoft make changes that affect customisation.
These included:
- Graceful degradation: where possible, we would implement solutions that would degrade gracefully if they were affected by a platform change (for example a feature reverting to an OOTB option rather than disappearing completely).
- Settings not coded: where possible, we added settings in configuration lists that could be quickly updated by intranet administrators without having to change/redeploy code, meaning we could resolve issues faster without making code changes.
- Heightened support: we recommended our higher tier support packages for solutions with more bespoke code, meaning we could respond faster and resolve issues more quickly.
Discovery and design phase
A thorough discovery and design phase was then required to come to an agreed understanding of the detailed functionality requirements, beyond the aesthetics. We worked with the Goodman Group to define what success looked like and began defining and validating intranet requirements. Specifically, we needed to further define and understand the specifications of the proposed design in detail.
This phase was designed to bring everyone together to a shared understanding of success, start and build solid communication and consultation processes, discuss, and manage expectations and bring Goodman Group’s stakeholders along the intranet development journey. The strength of this phase ensured we were able to move into development and build with clarity and confidence.
Agile approach
We took an agile approach in the development of the Greenroom intranet custom components to continue clear communication, show progress early and often and make decisions.
These included:
- Regular stand-ups with the project lead, our developers and supporting consultants kept us on track. A structured agenda was also in place for each stand-up outlining progress, blockers and requesting direction from Goodman Group where needed. These activities all improved the project’s efficiency and ability to keep moving forward at pace.
- With a deep understanding of their design needs, we leveraged and modified existing assets, including modifying assets that they brought to the project to save them time and money.
- Importantly, we came together to undertake a rigorous UAT testing with around 150 bugs (mostly styling issues) logged and quickly remedied.
Our solution
A reimagined Greenroom built on SharePoint Online brought together the custom developed features, which built upon the out of the box web parts. All features have custom fonts, graphics and colours to support Goodman Group’s design.
These included:
- Featured News
- Latest News
- Custom Events
- Carousel
- Tools Dashboard
- Goodflix
- Time Zones
- Security Price
- Highlights
- Modified or hidden OOTB components
We also worked with the Goodman Group to deliver a centralised Policy Hub. We developed two web parts to support the Goodman brand and experience. One web part for entering search queries and the second web part to return results.
The Goodman Group News Hub also took on a unique flavour, with custom developed fonts, colours and display. We were delighted to create a web part for vertical type display which further matched their brand identity.
The result
Goodman Group were thrilled with the result of Greenroom and were very happy with how closely the final product matched their brand, vision and early designs. We were able to deliver an incredibly visually engaging SharePoint Online intranet, which pushed the boundaries of what we normally see.
The key impact of Greenroom included:
- An enhanced employee experience and engagement at a global and regional level. By moving SharePoint Online modern, Greenroom is vastly more accessible encouraging interaction from both office and frontline workers.
- A contemporary digital experience that connects employees to the wider organisation.
- A centralised policy hub for easy access to important policies and standard operating procedures regardless of the user’s location.
- A modernised and future proofed digital front door. The customisations developed for Greenroom were built using best practice and are designed to be as configurable as possible, ensuring the Goodman Group team can manage updates and changes without the need to code updates.
- A visually engaging SharePoint Online intranet that closely matches the company’s brand and vision.
