Case Study: A Catalyst for HR Transformation

Mvine’s consultancy and advisory services, supported by its collaborative portal technology, brings HR user journeys to life for managers and employees and shapes BT’s HR roadmap.

“It rapidly become clear that Mvine was far more capable of delivering a fully featured platform than any of the other solutions providers we considered.”
Neil Shorter, Senior Project Manager, BT

Features and benefits

- High-quality consultancy and advisory services – helped kick-start the prototype stage of the HR portal for BT and gain stakeholder buy-in.

- Pointed the way forward - Mvine enabled BT to visualise the challenge and scope out ways employees can better engage with HR and achieve enhanced HR services delivery.

- Expertise – Mvine provided BT with enhanced insight into what approaches would work for portal development and which would not.

- Flexible portal demonstrator – quickly mobilised the solution and demonstrated agility in testing, building engagement and adjusting the approach when necessary. The insight gained helped formulate the future commercial blueprint.

When BT launched a £60 million project to transform the way it delivered HR services, it needed a partner it could trust to help both shape its vision for a future HR Portal and to define a new approach to employee engagement. Mvine fitted the bill perfectly. BT valued Mvine as a ‘safe pair of hands’ both in terms of its ability to deliver secure HR portal solutions and its previous work with BT, including the successful implementation of a secure HR portal for BT People Networks, bringing together different user groups in support of BT’s HR diversity agenda.

Here, we look at the challenges BT faced that led to the development of its broader HR transformation project and why it turned to Mvine for expertise in customer portals and the crucial role Mvine played in engaging with BT stakeholders and in driving the project forward.

Rising to the HR Challenge

BT was looking to streamline and enhance the way HR services were delivered across its organisation. The existing model was overly reliant on individual HR business partners, working in each of BT’s lines of business, and service delivery was therefore inconsistent and inefficient.

The vision was to replace this with a new employee and contractor centric operating model, and key to the success of this was the provision of an intuitive online portal. This would provide the primary window for employees to quickly search for HR information and, either self-serve via access to new HR systems, or contact an HR advisor for assistance.

For the HR portal to be successful, BT needed to ensure that user journeys through it would be streamlined and intuitive to achieve more successful user experiences. Equally important, once it had settled on a new approach, was to present a portal demonstrator to the project stakeholders, which would encapsulate all of the key capabilities and design principles of the final solution. This was necessary in order to build confidence across BT that the project would achieve its aims.

Delivering a Disruptive Capability

To achieve all of this, BT knew it needed a business partner capable of acting as an expert adviser and consultant in shaping the future roadmap for the portal and that was also able to develop a demonstrator product as a precursor for the full implementation.

According to Neil Shorter, BT’s senior project manager:

“I was looking for a solution that was flexible, disruptive and cutting-edge. Mvine fitted the bill on all three counts. Added to that, it rapidly became clear that Mvine was far more capable of delivering a fully- featured platform than any of the other solutions providers we considered.”

“We knew we could rely on Mvine. It had prior experience working with BT, in that it had recently delivered a highly successful project for BT People Networks and BT Better Future. This for us was a validation of Mvine’s process-driven methodology, its agility and its whole business approach. Moreover, Mvine was the only company we looked at, capable of meeting our tight timescales for the production of a functional demonstrator.”

The Mvine solution was implemented off-premise, meaning that it was built on Mvine’s own platform rather than as part of the BT architecture. This provided flexibility to create the demonstrator at the required pace. However, it was vital to meet BT’s requirement for the core content to be hosted by BT on its strategic knowledge management platform - Microsoft SharePoint 2013.

Ultimately, Mvine was able to deliver everything that BT was looking for from the demonstrator. This included:

- Integration to SharePoint 2013 for content and also into BT’s backend systems, including its cloud contact capability for e-chat and voice function with the HR advisors team;

- A configurable landing page with carousel, tools, intuitive menus for navigation and personalisation based on user profiles, location, line of business and language;

- Easy-to-use interactive demonstrations of how to navigate through the portal using menu structures, visual tours of the portal functions and templates for content pages;

- Navigation and security rights and privileges in terms of allowing access;

- A mobile app, delivering a working mobile view of the portal demonstrator.

Benefits Delivered

Not only did Mvine deliver to time and to budget on the project, it was also flexible in what it provided within that budget.

Drawing on its expertise in the delivery of collaborative, secure HR portals, Mvine helped to bridge the gap between the initial design documents and development of the final solution. It initiated a process of rapid engagement with all key stakeholders from senior management to individual system users to ‘paint a picture’ of how employee engagement with HR services works today and pinpoint ways of improving it in the future. The portal demonstrator was very effective in bringing the desired employee journeys to life and improving the businesses confidence that the stated benefits in the business case could be achieved.

As Neil Shorter explains:

“We found Mvine to be a valuable partner throughout the project. They gave us practical, honest advice at all times through all of our preliminary phases. They were flexible both in terms of the commercial construct and the operational side of the project, giving us the benefit of their expertise and experience throughout. This included providing an insight into what would and would not be viable for the full deployment. Ultimately, the work Mvine did for us on this project formed a blueprint for how to deliver customer portals in an agile and customer centric way.”

About Mvine

Mvine is a leading provider of Portals and Portal Solutions, providing secure and easy-to-use workspaces in the cloud for organisations across a wide range of public and private sectors. Our combination of Software-as-a-Service technology and professional services allow some of the best known brands to work safely outside the firewall with partners, clients and suppliers.

Mvine’s home page is www.mvine.com


About BT

BT is one of the world’s leading communications services companies, serving the needs of customers in the UK and in more than 170 countries worldwide. Our main activities are the provision of fixed- line services, broadband, mobile and TV products and services as well as networked IT services. In the UK we are a leading communications services provider, selling products and services to consumers, small and medium sized enterprises and the public sector.

BT's home page is www.bt.com