Briefly describe the initiative/ project/service; please include your aims and objectives

The aims of the SharePoint Migration project are simple but hugely complex – move the organisation from inconsistent shared drives and siloed file storage to a modern, secure, well?structured cloud?based environment, which is aligned to how we actually work.

This project wasn’t intended to be a lift and shift. We wanted to fix the long?standing issues that frustrated teams – duplication, multiple versions of the same document (and sharing these on emails), poor searchability and inconsistent access permissions. At the same time, we needed a solution that helped us satisfy IG requirements, supported new ways of working and reduced risks associated with the above issues the council was seeing.

The project focuses on three core objectives:

– Creating a cleaner, more fit for purpose structure that staff could actually use with confidence

– Improving information governance and reducing the risk of outdated or duplicated data

– Enabling better collaboration and productivity by making documents easier to find, share and manage

This project touches every part of the council, including Senior Leadership Team, Adult Care, Children’s Services, Finance, Revenues & Benefits and other services. Each area had its own challenges and part of the project involved supporting them through the difficult change and adopting a new mindset as well as implementing the technology.

Overall, the project is about transforming the day?to?day experience of staff by making documents, files and collaboration work better and feel easier. That’s why this aligns strongly to the Transforming & Innovating Public Services Award as it’s a cross?council improvement that changes how services operate at their foundations, not just a technology implementation.

What are the key achievements?

The biggest achievement is that we’ve delivered an impactful council?wide shift in how people work with digital information. This project has benefited thousands of users and terabytes of data, and has required careful sequencing and engagement with multiple services simultaneously to keep everything moving.

Some of the key achievements include:

– Complex scheduling since the project started in August 2024 has been successful. The project has remained on track for progress, schedule and cost despite facing challenges such as non?attendance to critical file mapping meetings, extreme resistance (occasional non?engagement) and a migration (technology) failure, which caused some scheduled migrations to fail.

– Successful migration of large, complex services including Adults, Children’s, Finance, Revs & Bens, RDA, Property, and Transport — each with its own technical and cultural challenges and diverse requirements.

– Improved compliance and information governance, reducing duplicated content and giving services clearer ownership and structure of their data.

– Better service readiness, particularly for regulated areas – for example, Adults Care’s migrations were scheduled in alignment with CQC expectations.

– Increase in trust and confidence in digital tools, especially through positive experiences in services that were initially hesitant (e.g., some services showed early scepticism and resistance, which eventually turned into strong engagement and positive feedback).

– Reduced technical issues and downtime, with the migration tool configured early and utilised well throughout the project to avoid delays.

– A more resilient and future?proof platform, which is ready for integration with Teams, OneDrive and other M365 apps we use.

Staff report spending less time looking for documents, more time on meaningful work and have more confidence that they’re using the right version of information. For services that depend heavily on shared documents — like Finance, Adult Care and Children’s Services — SharePoint Online is a huge improvement. While we’re still collecting quantified time?saving data, early feedback shows increased productivity, improved collaboration between teams and fewer IG?related risks.

All of this was done with a small project team – 1 Project Manager and 1 Project Support Officer supported by a colleague from ICT, IG and OD teams. This team worked relentlessly on this project for the last 18 months and it’s such an achievement that they have kept it on schedule, under budget and are on track to deliver the committed change to all areas of the council.

How Innovative is your initiative?

SharePoint migrations aren’t new but the way we approached this project was. We treated this as a transformation project, not just a technical activity and that required careful stakeholder management and creativity and problem?solving at every stage.

A few examples of where we took an innovative approach:

– A tailored engagement model, adapting the approach to each service and recognising that one size wouldn’t fit all.

– Governance that’s actually usable, co?designed with services so it supports behaviour change rather than policing it.

– A human?centred approach with clear, honest conversations about concerns, established ways of working (finding out people’s habits) and frustrations people had developed over years of using the network drives.

– Practical risk?mitigation during migration, including managing duplication between the intranet and SharePoint, which required specific handling.

– The biggest innovation – we’ve managed to deliver a corporate?wide project to over 3000 users over 18 months, which was tailored to fit every service but incorporated a common standard for folder structures and how we now work with SharePoint Online. The organisation has been brought through a made?to?fit project, which has also shifted the corporate culture towards more digital and collaborative ways of working.

What are the key learning points?

The learning from this project has been significant, and we’re already capturing it to support future projects and other councils who may be on the same journey.

Some of our major learning points include:

– Change management is as important as the technical work. Early engagement, honest conversations and co?creating solutions (combined with patience) made a difference.

– Services need support to redesign their structure, not just migrate it — otherwise they simply replicate the mess in a new system.

– Governance must be pragmatic. Over?complicated rules create resistance – simple, clear standards encourage adoption.

– Technical sequencing matters. Dependencies between Adult Care, Finance and other services meant we had to stay flexible and constantly re?prioritise.

– Positive service champions accelerate success. In every service we migrated, having a few committed leaders and using our Digital Stars network made a real difference.

In terms of replicability, this project is highly transferable. The approach we’ve used (structured discovery sessions, service?led design, governance workshops, controlled migration schedule and effective post?migration support) can be adopted by any local authority. We’ve also captured lessons learned, which means future projects can be smoother and other councils could easily reuse our framework, templates, sequencing logic and engagement model.

Additional Comments

The SharePoint Migration Project has quietly but fundamentally modernised the way our staff work. It’s the kind of transformation that often goes unnoticed because projects like these are often deemed ICT?enforced so aren’t recognised as true transformation projects. The new way of working does, however, becomes “the new normal” quite quickly with productivity, collaboration and governance improvements continuing to deliver value after the project ends.