We support a collaborative project between a group of major UK utilities, hosting a shared document management system for them in the Cloud.
Normally the group members are market competitors, however the field of safety is non-competitive and is an area where all the members are keen to collaborate on data gathering, sharing funding for studies and developing good practice guidance.
We provide a common platform for the members, with neutral ownership. The platform is organised around the various special interest groups and also a range of different document types and processes.
A key feature, familiar to many of us, is the need to obtain feedback on documents prior to approval and publishing. Our most recent work in this area was a small task to replace the out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 workflows with a Power Automate process, when the legacy workflows were withdrawn by Microsoft. While doing this, we also improved on some of the weaknesses of the out-of-the-box solution – for example, we:
- Enriched the information provided to respondents when being “chased” for feedback,
- Ensured that long-running feedback processes would not be cut off by time limitations imposed by the latest out-of-the-box solutions,
- Provided a more accessible audit record of feedback and
- Created weekly and monthly reports on active and recently-completed processes.
The group was delighted in response to these changes, with unsolicited praise stating that the replacement was “much better than what we had before”.