Quick reaction, proper response and escalation of serious incidents to the appropriate level of management is a vital feature of safety governance.  Recognising SharePoint’s capacity to develop their incident management process, a client in the North of England asked us for technical assistance.

Our role in this project was to work with the non-technical owners of the safety and environment team to guide their internal development of the system.  The purpose of the engagement was to provide consultation, training and skills transfer.

We continued this process over several years as the team developed the forms, data and processes to cover the whole country.  Once they had created a reactive incident management process, they re-used their technical skills to cover programmed work such as safety inspections and environmental audits.

Throughout this process, guidance from Aeon Services consultants prevented the team from falling for gotchas and eased the technical discovery process for them by providing timely advice, training and troubleshooting workshops.

The end result was that a “non-technical” team developed a suite of business applications using the SharePoint platform and were able to manage and maintain it fully independently.  Hats off to a really determined team who truly owned their business process.

It is often tempting to smirk at claims by IT system providers that their product can be used by “non-technical” staff.  But in this case we really succeeded in achieving it, and would be keen to promote this approach as a model for future work.