Case Studies

Corporate Portal Boosts Efficiency, Improves Communication

Project at a Glance
RDA worked closely with our client to define the vision for and ultimately develop an employee portal that provides efficient access to important HR documents, electronic paychecks, new job postings and company announcements.

About Our Client

RDA's client is a leading online seller of wireless services and devices. The company sells wireless services and devices through private labeled websites that they create and manage for online businesses, affinity organizations and national retailers, as well as through their own branded websites. The company developed a proprietary e-commerce platform that integrates merchandising, provisioning, procurement, customer care and billing operations into a single state-of-the-art system for activating wireless services and devices.

Background

To better communicate with a rapidly growing company, RDA's client recognized the need to replace their legacy FrontPage-based intranet with a richer, content driven employee portal.

Responsible for this initiative, the company's Human Resource (HR) department sought an experienced consultant to assist with gathering requirements and to subsequently lead a team of offshore resources in the development of a corporate intranet.

Solution Detail

RDA provided a consultant to work with HR and IT stakeholders to capture key requirements for the new corporate portal.

Employing a proven, iterative process, RDA's consultant worked closely with our client's HR team to define a vision, develop key use case scenarios, and produce mock-ups for the corporate portal. In parallel, RDA was asked by our client's IT management to help evaluate Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 as a possible platform for the new portal. As a result of this evaluation, MOSS 2007 was selected as the platform of choice.

Impressed with RDA's execution of the requirements gathering and technology selection processes, the company decided to retain RDA to complete the remaining construction and transition phases of the project.

As part of the engagement, RDA provided guidance related to the build out, configuration, and deployment of a MOSS 2007 platform to the company's production environment.

Over the course of three months, RDA was able to provide our client with an end-to-end implementation of their new corporate intranet which included sites for Human Resources consisting of separate areas for Recruiting, Benefits, Compensation, Payroll, Compliance, Policies, Training and Facilities.

Challenges

Members of the HR team were most comfortable in leveraging Excel spreadsheets to communicate the page design and navigational flow within the portal.

In order to reduce the overhead of preparing these artifacts, RDA encouraged the use of frequent JAD sessions, where designs were completed in near real-time in a non-production SharePoint environment.

Demonstrations were given weekly to HR management to review the project's progress and to elicit feedback about the portal's content and features.

Benefits

The client's HR staff constantly found themselves emailing various documents to employees. A lack of version control made the management of policy documents difficult. The new SharePoint intranet portal provides:

• A central location where all employees could access these documents. The HR staff could update the new documents whenever a revision was needed without worrying about version control.
• The ability for Recruiting to post jobs with the new site seamlessly integrated with the existing job posting tool.
• A way for employees to navigate to the IPAY (electronic paycheck) site from within the intranet site.
• A vehicle for posting company-wide announcements.

Technically Speaking

Following is the hierarchy of the sites created:

All of these sites were created using publishing sites in MOSS 2007. Each site consists of a home page with a welcome page and links to the most frequently used documents within that department.