Case Study: BBV Software Services
About BBV Software Services
bbv Software Services AG is a Swiss IT consultancy and software engineering company, headquartered in Lucerne. Established in 1995, the company employs over 300 IT experts across Switzerland, Germany, Greece, and Vietnam. It delivers bespoke IT projects to drive digital transformation success, ranging from software modernisation and development to Internet of Things and blockchain projects. In 2021, bbv was named the best ICT employer in Switzerland.
Key Business Drivers
Explains Rafael Wicki, IT Manager at bbv: “The IT team was using Microsoft PowerShell to create the SharePoint Sites to manage our customer projects, and users were heavily dependent on IT in order to set up a Site. With over 500 customers running multiple projects, with a variety of bids, quotes, and other important files, it was a complex and lengthy process, often untidy and the functionality was pretty basic. With limited resources, there was also a lot of pressure on our internal IT team every time a user put in a request to set up a new SharePoint Site. This delay was creating frustration for users across the organisation and the risk of users seeking alternative solutions was high.”
bbv recognised the need to implement a tool to not only speed up the creation of customer projects and reduce the dependency on IT, but also to deliver a modern, easy to use, yet compliant cloud solution to drive self-service, empower users and create a well governed structure that worked for everyone.
Rafael continues: “As a software development company, we could have effectively built our own Microsoft 365 governance solution for Microsoft Teams and SharePoint in-house. However, taking into account the considerable number of man days to develop this kind of application, combined with on-going maintenance as well as keeping on top of the regular Microsoft updates – this represented a major project that we simply did not have the internal resource to manage.”
The ProvisionPoint Solution
After a workshop with SharePoint experts, bbv was introduced to ProvisionPoint Workspaces. Continues Rafael: “ProvisionPoint Workspaces is an off-the-shelf Microsoft 365 governance solution – that we could still customise to meet our specific needs. Userscan create their own SharePoint Site for each one of their customers, and then associate Teams, Sites, bids and any other customer work to each dedicated customer Site – without having to raise a ticket with our IT team.”
With ProvisionPoint Workspaces, users are even able to associate one or more Site for each customer project. Customer, Bid and Project Sites can be created from pre-defined templates in ProvisionPoint Workspaces, where each template includes important project details such as key resources, folder structures for documents and Planners for task management. This maintains project compliance and keeps the Microsoft 365 environment controlled, reducing the potential for IT sprawl.
Why ProvisionPoint?
“ProvisionPoint Workspaces works with modern SharePoint Sites and easily integrates with all Microsoft Teams APIs – which is exactly what we were looking for,” explains Rafael. “No additional development is required – in fact we have complete programming independence – so we can customise it to meet our own requirements as and when we need to.”
ProvisionPoint Workspaces has given users greater independence and reduced the IT workload while delivering a well-structured, well-governed Microsoft 365 environment
Rafael concludes: “With the ability to rapidly create their own SharePoint Sites for projects and customers from a set of predefined templates, users can confidently create projects in a consistent fashion and manage their own customers so much better. This self-service option gives users greater responsibility and has significantly reduced the number of issues for the IT team to manage. ProvisionPoint Workspaces has also improved visibility of all our customer Sites – it simply works, first time.”
Adds Peter Baddeley, Director of Microsoft Delivery at ProvisionPoint: “When a site request is made, ProvisionPoint Workspaces automatically checks if one already exists to avoid creating a similar site, subsequently avoiding sprawl and site duplication. The new approval process has significantly minimised the backlog of site approvals for the IT Team. With pre-defined templates, ProvisionPoint Workspaces makes it quick and easy for users to create their own modern SharePoint sites with a consistent look and feel. This ensures all bbv users can confidently create compliant and secure SharePoint sites – yet IT remains in control.”
ProvisionPoint also continues to add new features and capabilities to support its customers, delivering a flexible and agile solution that’s easy to use.