About Hanover
Hanover is one of EMEA’s leading strategic communications and public affairs consultancies, with offices in London, Brussels, Dublin, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Hanover Group also includes creative communications agency, The Playbook. With over 180 employees across Europe, the consultancy recorded revenues of over £20m in 2019. Hanover provides a full suite of communications services to clients in healthcare, financial services, technology, energy, FMCG, industrial, sport, and education. Its blue-chip client list includes Goldman Sachs, Apple, Airbus, Microsoft, Warner Media, Sky, Lilly, Tata Steel and Novartis.
Key Business Drivers
Staff were already using SharePoint as part of their day-to-day client management
activities. However, every time they wanted to create a new SharePoint site to manage a
new client or project, users has to submit an IT support ticket. It would then take around 4
to 5 days for the IT team to create the new SharePoint area along with the accompanying
template, graphics, manual and code.
Explains Alec Beckett, IT Director at Hanover: “Setting up a SharePoint site was a lengthy
and intensive process for the IT team. With five to ten new SharePoint site requests
coming in each day, the IT team was simply overwhelmed, spending a lot of their time
creating these sites. At the same time, users were becoming frustrated how long it was
taking to get their site up and running and IT were unable to address other IT projects
across the business.”
With staff needing their SharePoint sites available as quickly as possible to support new
clients and projects, something needed to be done. Fast.
Alec continues: “We wanted to introduce a way for users to be able to set up their own
SharePoint sites, without losing control, that would speed up the overall process while
reducing the pressure on IT.”
The ProvisionPoint Solution
After seeing a demo of ProvisionPoint Enterprise – a powerful governance, provisioning and compliance solution from ProvisionPoint – Alec immediately recognized that this was the tool to automate Hannover’s SharePoint provisioning tasks and drive user self-service. With some initial configuration to meet some of Hanover’s specific business requirements, along with standardized templates, delegated permissions, and bespoke approval processes built within ProvisionPoint Enterprise, users can now swiftly create their own SharePoint sites – yet IT remains in overall control.
Why ProvisionPoint?
“An off-the-shelf solution wouldn’t work for us. We needed to customize a provisioning tool to fit our exact needs,” adds Alec. “And ProvisionPoint could do this. The engineering team listened, to really understand our specific requirements and delivered some bespoke features within ProvisionPoint Enterprise just for us.
“ProvisionPoint Enterprise is really easy to use, and it has been well received by all users. In fact, since roll out, we have seen an increase in SharePoint adoption across the company. One of our key goals with the new provisioning solution was to promote user self-service, and effectively, with ProvisionPoint Enterprise, users no longer have a lengthy wait to for their latest SharePoint site – they can simply create their own. We saw over 750 sites created last year – requiring very little input from the IT Team – it all just works!”
ProvisionPoint Enterprise has boosted user self-service in line with our goals while significantly reducing pressure on the IT Team.
Future Plans
“The impact of COVID-19 has seen an increase in Hanover staff working from home, and in turn, we have experienced many more Teams sites being created which is getting slightly out of control,” Alec concludes. “We’ve also received some Teams requests asking to provide external players with access to specific Teams.
“Based on the success with ProvisionPoint Enterprise and SharePoint, we are looking to roll out ProvisionPoint Enterprise to automate Microsoft Teams governance and lifecycle management to help us regain control. And we know ProvisionPoint will be able to help us introduce a new approval process for IT to manage the introduction of external contacts, too.”
