Situation

In 2013 the London Fire Brigade gathered together a team of experts from within the fire brigade to create the National Operational Guidance Programme (NOGP), a national project developed by experts from across UK fire and rescue services and beyond, to produce best practice operational guidance.

LFB was looking for a solution that would allow its 120+ users to collaborate on projects in real time from different locations across the UK, and then be able to publish the results of those projects to their public facing site quickly and easily. Their public facing site needed to be responsive to allow emergency services personnel to access vital information on the go, and designed in accordance with the branding and guidelines of each individual service.

What We Did

Business Cloud Integration Ltd was brought in by Microsoft to demonstrate the capabilities of Office 365 as a project portal, and conduct a discovery exercise to understand London Fire Brigade’s key issues and identify the best solution to address their needs.

We set up project sites to enable London Fire Brigade to run collaborative projects across nationally dispersed teams, and implemented SharePoint workflows to publish relevant information live to the shared project portal, and share their project results and commissioned research with the public through a public facing website. To simplify the navigation of large, complex documents, we used JavaScript and jQuery to enhance the display and “findability” of information.

Benefits

Quick and effective collaborative working

• Nationally dispersed teams are able to work collaboratively on the same documents at the same time without creating conflicting versions – no need to take turns
• Skype for Business offers instant availability of project teams members and the ability to live chat with colleagues while collaborating

Increased productivity

• The ability to work on documents simultaneously means that projects can be completed in half the time, saving LFB vital time, money and resources
• Can bring teams together virtually through Skype for Business and collaborative working, saving time, money and effort required to physically bring teams together

Easy mobile working

• The responsiveness of the public facing site means that it can be clearly displayed on a range of mobile devices, and allows emergency services personnel to access relevant information quickly and easily while en route to situations

Streamlined processes

• Workflow automation means that documents can be created, worked on collaboratively, approved, and published into the public domain as quickly as necessary

Effective version control

• The ability to have working draft and public version of the same document simultaneously removes the confusion of multiple versions and the need to collate conflicting versions
• Can roll back to previous versions at any time for auditing purposes

Leveraging internal resources

• The internal site was used internally to recruit programme members from across the dispersed national teams and enable collaboration between teams within the national service

London’s fire and rescue service is the busiest in the country and one of the largest firefighting and rescue organisations in the world.

About

Software

• SharePoint Online
• Microsoft Office 365

Services

• SharePoint Consulting
• SharePoint and Office 365 Implementation
• SharePoint Infrastructure Planning
• SharePoint Training
• SharePoint Support
• Office 365 Training
• Office 365 Support
• JavaScript/jQuery

Added Value

Ongoing Support

We now operate an ongoing support contract with London Fire Brigade to offer advice and troubleshooting as and when needed.

Training

Because the look and feel of Microsoft solutions are so familiar to teams, we were able to leverage the existing knowledge within the team to facilitate a smooth and simple transition with minimum training required. The simplicity and user friendliness of Office 365 allows the teams to focus on saving lives with technology that supports their efforts.

Fun Fact

This project included uploading legacy guidance to the portal that dated all the way back to the 1940’s, and facilitating easy and efficient searchability of these documents. These documents included old letters from the Commissioner, and we designed the system so effectively, that even though the letter had been scanned in and PDF’d, it would still show up in phrase matched search.