Fred Hollows Intranet Image

Project Timeline

June 2022 – Current

Project Type

SharePoint & Teams Implementation

Education & Training

Continual Improvement

Technology Used

Microsoft Teams

SharePoint Intranet – News & Events

Custom Lists & Views

Managed 365

About Fred Hollows Foundation NZ

Fred Hollows Foundation NZ are an amazing team, with an aim to end avoidable blindness in the Pacific. 

For over 30 years, working across Fiji, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Vanuatu and with their Head Office here in Auckland, NZ their teams remote access, communications and collaboration is critical.

And Intranet had been a project long on their agenda, with several attempts to launch.  They were really looking for a partner to drive the adoption and success of this project – that’s where we come in.

Partnering with Tier 4

We partnered with Tier 4 (now Premium IT), their IT Service Provider.

The wider goal of bringing the Pacific Island sites into the same O365 tenant was required, but beforehand we wanted to have an Intranet in place, so the new users would have a central space to learn, work and stay up to date.  So this project became the priority.

The Challenges

With such a geographically distributed workforce, keeping staff informed and up to speed was a challenge.

01

Typically email communications was the normal method, but staff missed messages and new staff were out of the loop.

02

Staff were copying and using old versions of forms, which meant the admin team had a lot of rework trying to follow processes.

03

Looking to improve onboarding experience for new staff, showing history, leadership, news and events.

The Solution

A SharePoint Intranet was the obvious choice, out of box had most of the functionality they needed.  Some staff previously had tried Google as an Intranet, but this didn’t get any traction.

Our approach was very different to the past approaches.  We followed the Champion method, where we heavily invested time in bringing the in house team up to speed, with training sessions, design workshops and building a strategy for their rollout.  Armed with the know-how, they were in the best position to drive value, function as well as form, from their intranet.  They named it Fred’s Fale.

This approach works well, using Custom365 for support and guidance, their Intranet will continue to grow.

With our Managed 365 support plan in place, they can rest assured that we will always be with them for their journey.

The Result

Since going live, Fred Hollows have deployed 149 functional site pages, all thoughtfully collated into one workspace, offering them seamless communications across the regions.

Their leadership team are utilising the Custom365 Risk Management Dashboard to have oversight of their work environment, security and revoke and access to suspicious users or guests.

An Intranet is never finished, but the function they already have is incredible and really awesome to see – keep it up team.