1. New Zealand Management Academy (NZMA) (April – September 2014)
Project Manager – SharePoint 2013 installation, design, build and migration
NZMA had an underutilised SharePoint 2007 platform. They wanted to develop this tool to
become the central repository for shared knowledge and information, while also being the
central portal to connect to other IT platforms (CRM, HRSS, IT helpdesk etc.). The decision
was made to upgrade to SP2013 using a greenfields approach.
I gathered and analysed their business requirements and provided them with a SharePoint
solution. Within 6 months I delivered the following:
 Prepared and managed project costs
 Established best practice at NZMA in the approach taken to the solution and
implementation
 A new structured filing systemto easily find and store information (including a
function based navigation)
 Useful homepage – company newsletter/blog, quick links (forms and templates),
FAQs, Calendars, Events, Staff phone lists and Staff noticeboard)
 Department/Team sites
 Training Centre – I created many useful user guides for both IT and end users,
encouraging the company to add to this to enable staff to help themselves.
 Search Centre – with useful refinements
 Trained staff – not only how to get the best out of SharePoint but also an
understanding of how to get the best out of an IT department.
 Established governance rules
 Liaison role. While working on these deliverables I was communicating with the
project sponsor, facilitating the steering group (content owners) and establishing a
quarterly review programme. Covering off both the PM and BA type functions made
me the complete solution for NZMA.
In addition to this there were several business process improvements made along the way.
Notably recordkeeping practices around naming conventions, establishing content owners
and their expected responsibilities with shared information (which became part of the
governance policy). Reducing storage on both Exchange and file servers by getting users to
send links to content rather than attaching it in emails to internal users (this also avoids
version control issues).