Devon Local Medical Committee

Overview:

Devon LMC had recently made an investment in Office 365 and its core components. Document storage was handled using on-premises file shares. Communication was primarily conducted via email, especially relating to the sharing of documentation externally.

To address increasing regulatory and compliance requirements a revision of this platform was desired, with an interest in maximising pre-existing investment in Office 365 as a currently underutilised platform. OfficeLabs was selected to help Devon LMC’s cloud transformation, primarily addressing; data integrity, information storage and security, collaboration, reporting, and workflow improvement.

Description:

Following a number of discovery sessions with Devon LMC stakeholders, OfficeLabs produced a series of recommendations in a statement of work and project plan. The projects were broken into two distinct phases:

• FastTrack SharePoint Intranet deployment for the whole organisation
  • Subsites for private groups
• Pastoral Support Services
  • SharePoint lists
  • PowerApp for Pastoral Support Case
  • Power BI for Case and Expense reporting

FastTrack SharePoint

The following project deliverables were completed:

• The pre-existing root SharePoint site collection was converted from the “classic” to the “modern” experience.
• The root site collection was established as a “hub” site which enables child sites to be associated, enabling centralised content searching, child site content promotion to the hub level, and globally constant navigation.
• Private group sites were associated with “Teams” and provisioned using a consistent template:
  • Finance
  • Operations
  • Media
  • Pastoral Support
  • Leadership Support
• Page web parts were configured Including News, Events, Twitter feed, primary links to Delve for organisation chart, policy documentation, external website, and other external resources.
• Application of custom theme and branding

Pastoral Support Service

Background

Devon LMC’s Pastoral Support Service provides advice, information and support to individuals working within GP practices using the following vision statement – “The DLMC Pastoral Support Service is a confidential and trusted agency with an excellent reputation for sensitive, discrete and timely delivery of first-class pastoral support which enables positive and dignified outcomes”. The provision of this service relied on file shares for document storage and communication and document sharing via email. The current solution requires working documents to be stored on the personal devices of PSOs which, along with transmission via email attachment had potential confidentiality and data interception concerns. Reporting was handled manually in Excel by recording each case and attributing extra contextual data to provide commonality and trend tracking related to causes, originating factors, outcomes, workplace position and geographic factors.

Objectives

OfficeLabs aimed to restructure this solution by using existing organisational resources. These resources were part of the Office 365 environment; SharePoint, Teams, PowerApps, and Power BI. Data was centralised into permission-controlled SharePoint lists and data interaction was secured by enforcing data interaction in an application context through PowerApps. This ensured that there is only ever a singular record of a case and changes are made to the record without external document transfer via email. Power BI was used to provide automatically updating, live, interactive metric reporting, which dynamically filters based upon user selection allowing a greater level of insight into case activity.

Deliverables

• SharePoint List: Pastoral support case – Included all fields from the existing PSS case form and additional reporting fields including closure reason and explanation.
• SharePoint List: Pastoral support expenses – To include all fields from existing expense form, Reference URL to case, corresponding PO number, Paid/Outstanding, Calculated mileage cost, calculated Hourly expense. PowerApps list form included for the use of the finance team to allow the addition of payment references, details, paid/outstanding status etc.
• PowerApps: Pastoral Support Case – Connecting to the Pastoral Support Case list and the Pastoral Support expenses list, this PowerApp allows users to interact with centralised records for case and expenses data. The app included the following key features:
  • New item and edit item forms for Pastoral Support cases.
  • Form fields shown in an intuitive tabbed layout for Initial Review, PSO Review, Chronology and Serious Incident reporting.
  • Embedded guidance documentation.
  • Gallery for searching and filtering cases.
  • Embedded Power BI reporting.
  • Expense form to allow users to submit singular or multiple expenses to the case using automatic calculations based upon hours worked and mileage.
• Microsoft Teams: Provided as a collaboration area for shared communication between the admin team and PSOs.
• Power BI: Case and Expense reporting – Metric visualisations were created to mirror current reports. Introduction of date-based reporting and expense tracking.
• Microsoft Flow: Utilised as a component of the PowerApp to achieve the following:
  • Upon case creation, break permission inheritance for Pastoral Support Cases removing item level permissions for all users other than the core admin team.
  • Grant edit permissions to PSO when assigned to the case.
  • Remove PSO permission upon case closure.
  • Email notifications were configured for when a PSO was assigned to a case, notify PSO that an update is required on a 28-day basis from case assignment date, notify finance team when an expense claim is raised. Notification to admin team if a case is raised as a SIRI.
• Microsoft Forms – Forms provided a method of collecting feedback responses from clients with the integrated ability to analyse responses.

Comments:

“The project for Devon LMC has been a great success. Our consultants worked closely with the stakeholders at Devon LMC to determine exactly what the organisation needed. Once we had this information, we determined a solution that would utilise their existing investment in Office 365 by developing a new intranet in SharePoint with new workflows, reports and an app to streamline their administration.”
Graham Bidwell – Managing Director – OfficeLabs

“Office Labs have been an engaging and adaptive partner during phase 1 of a 2 phase project to modernise and streamline the organisations use of available IT and software. In the long term this will generate savings for the company and introduce contemporary and efficient ways of working. Phase 1 has been delivered on time and under budget and has has an immediate and positive impact on team work and our provision of service to our members. we’re really looking forward to Phase 2.”
Robert Fancy – Director of Operations – Devon LMC 

Further Information:

OfficeLabs focuses on offering the best information management, automation, governance and compliance tools in the industry. If you need a portal, intranet, workflow solution or any other mechanism to communicate, collaborate and share information, please get in touch today.