DATA MANAGEMENT – SHAREPOINT EXPANSION & INTEGRATION
General Overview
SEIU Healthcare is the fastest-growing union of healthcare, child care, home care, and nursing home workers in the Midwest. With more than 91,000 members, and over a 100 full time employees Healthcare needed to incorporate a centralized collaboration platform, to increase efficiency in document management, communication, and workflow management. Initially Healthcare brought in RSM McGladery to conduct analysis on potentially organizational inefficiencies and provide consultation for improvement. RSM’s conclusion found that across the 25 departments within Healthcare, only a few were taking advantage of SharePoint, which is a web-based collaboration platform powered by Microsoft.
After reaching this conclusion Healthcare began to implement a team consisting of, RSM Consultants, Healthcare’s Data Management Team, and Finally to provide SharePoint specific programmers and analysts. was tasked with conducting analysis over the current use of SharePoint, provide input on the SharePoint Version that fits Healthcare’s unique needs, Customize the user environment to fit each department’s workflow, and then finally rolling out the final product and facilitating the implementation. is uniquely qualified for this project due to our familiarity with Healthcare as we provide all its managed IT Services, as well as our experience in SQL and .net programming especially within the Microsoft environment.
Role
was brought into this project to design the SharePoint environment based on information gathering across all SEIU Healthcare departments. Our goal is to increase cross departmental efficiency, by creating a centralized, document information sharing platform, to allow collaboration across the organization. Before this project each department and even within each department there was no standard operating procedure set for data sharing. By sitting with each department individually and learning the day to day tasks, and how they currently collaborate, aimed to create a very user-friendly environment where employees could quickly and easily share data so that it can be accessed across the organization.
Another goal of the SharePoint implementation was to provide more organizational visibility for HealthCare’s Department heads. By using SharePoint also as a way to manage Workflows, tasks can be clearly distributed among team members while also providing visibility into a team’s work habits for effective department management.
Challenges
was tasked with the goal of designing, creating, and rolling out a new centralized collaboration platform for SEIU Healthcare. Each of these 3 phases of the project has their own unique challenges that required a combination of technical skills, and soft skills.
In the Design phase, began by sitting in with each department to get an understanding of how they do they conduct there day to day tasks. Using the notes gathered from these sit ins, was able to create a general framework for the workflows for each department’s Page within SharePoint. Each individual Department page was unique to the department’s needs (Calendars, Document Sharing, Task Assignment, Team Messaging/ Collaboration, Member information Tables, etc.)
After reaching consensus on the general framework, began working on integrating SharePoint with
Finally, the implementation Phase. Implementation of the new SharePoint application involved mostly Soft Skills to help explain facilitate adoption of the new Standard Operating Procedures for SharePoint moving forward.