Overview

Background

University of Edinburgh has the third largest estate in the UK university sector with a portfolio of 550 buildings and over 200 land assets spread across five campuses.  A rolling 10 year capital programme in the region of £1.4bn will further enhance and add to the estate. 

The Estates Department employs around 950 staff who are responsible for managing, administering and maintaining this vast estate.

In the course of their day-to-day operations, the various Estates business functions generate large amounts of documents in both electronic and paper form. The electronic documents are mainly created in Microsoft Office applications but digital images, PDF and CAD drawings are also generated.

Currently, the vast majority of documents are stored in a network drive (‘K’) although there are other locations such as personal drives and email folders, various applications with document repositories and additional network drives.

Over time, the various document repositories have grown substantially leading to a number of problems:

• Lack of structure and organisation making it difficult to find things
• Difficulty in fulfilling FOI requests
• Confusion over where the master copy of a document should reside
• Poor governance with the potential for privacy and security issues
• Key documents stored in locations not available to those who need them
• Duplication of documents which take up space unnecessarily and create confusion
• Lack of version control making it difficult to identify the current version of a document

In addition to the issues with the management of documents, there is also a lack of a central departmental communications hub where staff can go to access policy documents, guidance notes, training material and announcements.

A number of years ago a decision was made by the University to adopt Microsoft Office 365 as a cloud based service for staff. As well as the typical applications such as Word and Excel, Office 365 also provides SharePoint which can be used as a solution for document and content management. This has subsequently been rolled out to some areas of the University including HR, Legal Services, and the Building Services section of Estates and is viewed by senior management as an ideal solution for the department as a whole.

Strategic Alignment

• The project aligns with UoE technical principles as incorporated UoE Service Excellence, Digital Transformation and Core Systems programs;
• The project aligns with Estates IS Strategy defined in Estates Business Vision May ’18 v1.3.
• The project aligns with ITIL methodology and aims to deliver business transformation, with a new operating model that supports the new business processes and tools, to ensure “whole-life” solution stability, and a continuous improvement management cycle.
• The project contributes to defining and adopting a reusable approach to be applied to all projects in the Estates IS Portfolio.

Scope

The project scope covers the areas listed below which are based on a requirements exercise carried out by the SharePoint Solutions Team and the Estates Records Manager.

Prioritisation of requirements will need to be decided by the Estates Department soon after this document has been signed off.

• Working with the business areas to understand the current landscape regarding the nature, creation and processing of documents
• Capturing the business needs in order to inform the requirements of the SharePoint solution for each of the Estates business areas
• Implementing Records Management to manage the lifecycle of Estates key documents and records
• Designing a SharePoint document management solution that meets the document management needs of each Estates business area
• A review of the SharePoint infrastructure to determine if it can handle the additional load of the Estates Department
• Configuring SharePoint to support existing document workflows
• Designing an integrated SharePoint Intranet that will be the communications hub for the Estates Department
• Creation of information governance policies to ensure the adoption of agreed working practices regarding data and documents
• Creation of an Estates taxonomy in order to consistently tag and index documents based on standardised metadata
• Creation of a permissions matrix in order to ensure users can carry out functions necessary for their job
• Migration of documents and content from current locations into SharePoint repositories using the existing tool (ShareGate)
• Migration of the existing Building Services SharePoint sites into the new solution
• Training of staff in the use of the SharePoint solution
• User acceptance testing necessary to demonstrate correct functioning of the solution
• Creation of support arrangements including service level agreements and procedures for post go live
• Educating and training staff in the use of new policies and procedures for information management
• Assessing the compatibility of in-house multi-function devices and SharePoint for efficient scanning
• Assessing options for third party tools and utilities to support email management, CAD integration and digital signatures
• Investigating integration options with the MyProject system in relation to template access, views of documents and reporting outputs
• Integration options for handling the record outputs from the Committee Management system

• Cleansing of data or documents prior to migration into SharePoint repositories
• A high level assessment of processes, document, data and information included in the Services Excellence Programme (HR and Finance Transformation)
• Recruitment- there will be recruitment of a SharePoint developer. 

Out of Scope

• Digitisation of paper documents (covered by a separate project)

Objectives

The primary high-level objective of the project is to implement a SharePoint solution that acts as a central location for the storage and management of documents and a communications hub for the Estates Department. This includes:

1. Eliminating use of the ‘K’ drive through implementation of the SharePoint solution and migration of existing documents, where appropriate
2. Improving the efficiency of document search and retrieval for all users through the use of metadata and staff training
3. Improving the efficiency of document processes through the implementation of automated SharePoint workflows
4. Eliminating confusion over current versions of documents through version control functionality in the solution
5. Establishing clarity over the locations of master copies of documents through new procedures and governance
6. Improving the efficiency of the filing of emails through staff education and the potential use of third party tools
7. Improving quality control of document management through information governance and staff education
8. Reducing the risk of non-compliance with GDPR and other legislation through information governance and appropriate security permissions
9. Improving document management and storage through the Introduction of document retention policies (Records Management)
10. Enhancing access security through improved and agreed security permissions
11. Improving document sharing for internal staff through solution design and agreed security permissions
12. Enhancing team collaboration through solution design
13. Enhancing efficiency and consistency through the introduction of templates
14. Allowing access to specific areas of the document management solution to external parties through solution design and agreed security permissions
15. Improving department communications through the implementation of an Estates Intranet
16. Allowing access to specific areas of the Intranet for external parties

These objectives will be delivered in workpackages. EST110 will concentrate on the following workpackages

Deliverables (Outputs)

Deliverables

Benefits

The top level benefits are outlined below

Success Criteria

Success Criteria

Project Milestones

Note there is no decommissioning as we are not replacing any existing system as part of this project.