5th Method Consulting

BACKGROUND

Can you please provide a brief description of your company?

I work for a large and well-known teen retail company.

What is your role and responsibilities?

My official title is Manager of Application Architecture. My team also supports enterprise applications. One of our enterprise applications is SharePoint, so my group basically handles SharePoint administration and development within SharePoint. We also have forms that we support using K2 Blackpearl.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What were your company’s business goals for the project with 5th Method?

We had two different projects that we needed 5th Method for. We needed K2.net 2003 for our forms and we asked for their help to migrate from 2003 to K2 Blackpearl integrated with SharePoint 2010. The other business goal was to revamp our current SharePoint internet.

Our current internet was developed in 2006,  it was a classic ASB but we wanted to be more dynamic from an internal communication perspective. We decided to revamp our internet using SharePoint 2013 as a platform. 5th Method is currently engaged in helping us rebrand our internet and also provides development for custom web parts and custom solutions.

SOLUTION

What was your process for selecting 5th Method to work with?

We actually worked with a couple of local companies before. We felt that from a knowledge perspective and from an expertise on branding, they were the best fit in the Pittsburgh area. 5th Method worked with another major retailer to rebrand their internet. That company referred them to us. 5th Method had the most experience from a project management and delivery perspective.

How did you select SharePoint?

We’ve been a SharePoint shop for a couple of years. We started with SharePoint 2003 for our original forms, we used the 2007 version, and then we used the 2010 version. Microsoft is making a concerted effort to increase functionality, especially from a social aspect.

Our HR leadership wants social interactions and collaboration within enterprise users. 2013 gives us more of a Facebook or Twitter-type features and functionalities. Therefore, we chose to put our internet on the SharePoint 2013 platform rather than another. We have the features and functionalities we need and the ability to customize it to fit our organization.

Were any other technologies used besides K2 Blackpearl and SharePoint?

No, currently just those two are being used. We have some business processes that we use SharePoint for and most of that is using the client object model within SharePoint. It’s main use for us is integrating lists and libraries within SharePoint and basically giving SharePoint the frontend for our users. Most of the projects that we work with are custom workflows, integration with SharePoint, and regular SharePoint functionalities in our team and project sites.

Can you give us a sense of the size of the initiative in dollar terms or personnel hours?

The internet project requires four people from our side. 5th Method sent us a Project Manager so the team now has five members. Our team also utilizes a junior and senior developer to manage the project. It’s about a $250,000 in overall costs.

When was the first project completed?

The K2 Blackpearl project was completed in October, 2012. The SharePoint project is still ongoing for us. We’re going to go live on August 26, 2013.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the results of the first project?

We didn’t put in any real metrics around it. We’ve had a lot of issues from a user-perspective. Usability is an issue since we use K2 2003, which is heavily reliant on 5th Method. They provide a business analyst, an architect, and a developer.

My organization is moving into web-based forms that helped increase usage of the forms because it’s all web-enabled. We have a lot of Mac users that are now able to use the form system without doing it parallel into the Windows environment. From a usability perspective and an ease of use perspective, the project was definitely successful.

How did 5th Method Perform?

I think they performed very well. I like how they manage projects. Getting burned down results from them weekly is great, so my company will know right away if we’re tracking within budget or if we’re over budget. They have very good technical expertise, so they were able to deliver. From a management perspective, I think they’ve worked in enterprises before, so they know exactly what type of business users that we deal with and the nuances of that. 5th Method was able to take that into account whenever they did project management. Their group made sure that we were on top of things before we even got started.

What is unique or special about 5th Method compared to other vendors?

The reason we picked them is their expertise level. From an architecture perspective, it helps us design for a scalable solution. Putting in a foundation that would be able to make it extensible in the future as well is necessary for us.

5th Method is very active within the local SharePoint user group and they do a lot of presentations, road shows, and conferences. They definitely test out what they’re teaching to implement improvements they find. 5th Method is fairly leading edge from a development perspective.

Looking back on the project, is there any area that you think 5th Method could improve upon or you would do differently?

In the beginning, I wasn’t receiving burn down reports as often as I would like. They improved later in the project but they should often send status reports to track budgeting. This will help everyone have realistic expectations and track uses of funds better.

BACKGROUND

Can you please provide some background on your company?

We are a large manufacturing and coating company. We have over 40,000 employees globally, we are headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

What is your role?

I’m a senior IT manager and responsible for SharePoint.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What were your company business goals for this particular project?

Our main goal was to install an advanced search tool on our intranet and we chose Microsoft Fast search platform for SharePoint 2010. We didn’t have much experience in-house so we were looking for a third-party vendor at that time to help us implement and configure. We wanted them to be part of our project team.

SOLUTION

Why did you select SharePoint?

We’ve had SharePoint for our intranet for about eight years and we’re a Microsoft shop at PPG. We only use Microsoft.  We were looking for a more robust search engine for our intranet to help people find their documents and improve end-user productivity. We did a pilot test where we tested out-of-the-box SharePoint search against Fast search and Google search for the enterprise. We chose Fast based on our testing and our requirements.

What was your process for selecting 5th Method?

I belong to the local Pittsburgh area SharePoint users group and 5th Method is a very active partner in that organization.  They present a lot of material and they’re active in getting other companies to present. Other companies I interact with have used their services. Based on that information and the relationship that I had with them at the user group, I chose their company.

Can you tell me about the scope of the project?

It was probably a six-month project from start to finish. From the very start, it involved infrastructure. 5th Method ensured we had the correct servers set up to support the Fast platform. 5th Method came to our location with a project team and project manager. Their team included a technical resource employee who had direct experience with Fast and they became part of our virtual team. 

They also sat with us in person. 5th Method usually worked externally through remote connection to help us conduct business analysis. Their project team helped us conduct business interviews with our business units and corporate functions to gather requirements. They helped us turn these requirements into fast configuration for the search and then saw us through implementation over one weekend. We started around August, 2012 and we implemented at the end of January, 2013. They were heavily involved.

Were any other technologies used besides SharePoint?

It was just SharePoint and Fast.

Can you please provide a sense of the initiative in dollar terms or personnel hours?

I don’t have these numbers readily available but it was a sizeable effort. It was an investment that required IT management approval from our Vice President of IT. I needed a large budget for this project but it was one of our top objectives for the year. We had the stakeholders on board and everyone was backing the implementation.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Do you have any stats or metrics to track improvement from the project?

We do. We have monthly queries that we generate from the tool to track how many people are accessing the search to see if they’re finding results in their first try. All of the reports have been very positive in that respect.

Have employees given positive feedback about the usability?

Yes, definitely.

How did 5th Method perform during the project?

They were excellent.  They were very timely, very responsive, and very well experienced with SharePoint and Fast.  It was very good to work with them because 5th Method felt like they were part of our team even though they were an external company.

When working with them, was there anything unique or special that stood out about 5th Method compared to other vendors?

They have a very strong SharePoint knowledge base and their work ethic from their director, to project manager, to business analyst, to the technical person is consistent.  They are always available, even on weekends.  I felt like 5th Method would not let this project fail.  They had a very good stake in the project getting completed.

Is there any area that 5th Method could improve upon or you would do differently?

After two months of work, they had two staff members that were part of the main project leave the company.  That made me a little anxious and nervous but I was told they hired and trained new people very quickly. The new staff members were there in less than one week and didn’t miss a beat.  I was really surprised by the turn-around time and was happy that the turnover didn’t impact the project.  I was a little bit worried but they did a great job in on-boarding two new resources on the project team and we kept working.