Immigrant Services Society of British Columbia (ISSofBC), has been leveraging Microsoft tools in our work supporting newcomers to Canada. Many of the teams in our organization are located in different departments and occasionally on different campuses. For instance, our settlement team worked in a different location than the Language and Career College (LCC). Very often one team was unaware of what the other team was doing. Often there were a lot of paper files in cabinets or files located on computers in their respective departments that were not accessible to the organization as a whole, creating data silos. Emails and phone calls made retrieving information time consuming.
Some of our senior leaders realized that as a midsize nonprofit organization that was growing fast and as we approached our 50th anniversary, we needed to think ahead and plan for the next 50 years. The goal of centralized collaboration across different departments and teams in our organization was recognized through communication via high level meetings and surveys. Three objectives were identified:
- A centralized location to access client information available across departments
- Increase transparency at a management level for data analytics and reporting
- Gain data security inherent to the Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 for our client populations
ISSofBC using Microsoft Dynamics and Power Apps, a new transformative application was built called Newtrack. Transformative because of its ability to customize the user experience for our different communities. This has proven to be immensely powerful for our organization. Newtrack allows us to enhance our service by storing and sharing data in a centralized way, allowing staff to create 360-degree profiles of our clients/students that would have once required hours to collect.
The organization as a whole has benefited. Although the creation of Newtrack started just before the pandemic and was delayed, this year it has slowly rolled out to some parts of the organization. It has benefited clients and staff in some of the departments but not yet to all. Working in my role I do not have access to the project plan but I have understood some of the barriers we have encountered after rollout such as understanding the scope of the project due to the size of the organization and the volume of past and present clients. With so much happening on so many teams in the many departments of our organization for instance managing donations, implementing different programs and organizing volunteers driving collaboration across these communities once they begin to scale is the greatest challenge. As our organization grows digital technology will be overriding.
March 9, 2022
Thanks for sharing Sam. Glad to hear the project has been mostly positive! When discussing scale, do you think it was underestimated initially or is scope creep happening as there is a want to expand on the success so far? I feel like these large projects are always a challenge for an organization to grasp how these type of replacement projects can balloon in unpredictable ways. Also I’m wondering, did they implemented any types of feedback loop for internal users and clients? Thanks again, Zac
March 15, 2022
Thank you Zac,
I agree that it has been mostly successful. I do think that everyone was surprised how big the project got. I think that the organization knew that it was a big project and tried to manage planning and rollout in smaller manageable steps. This said I still think there were some surprises. I do not know for sure if there was a feedback loop and that is a great question. I will look into that this week. We are still rolling it out. From our general meeting there were discussions of how fortunate the timing was as so much more has gone digital in these last two years. It was excellent insight on the part of our board of directors.
Sam
March 10, 2022
Hi Sam,
This sounds like a large and complex project – and though you are not part of the roll-out it sounds like it has gone fairly well. As an end-user would there have been aspects of planning that might have been helpful – such as training or ways to gather stakeholder feedback? As you consider your final project, are there insights that you can take into your own planning practice?
March 15, 2022
Hello Michelle,
I think that one thing that could be helpful would be to consider some training regarding what the roles of each department are and how we all are related. Very often on our SharePoint site, there are many capabilities but as employees we are not trained how to use them all. For many there is no access to Newtrack yet. There is room for improvement on how to fully use these tools and make them more accessible to all in our different silos.
I think one of the insights that I could take into my own planning practice is to think a little bigger. I tend to plan only for the people immediately surrounding me. I think that I could reach out to others in the organization that are not in my department. We have a great new CEO who has worked with some large nonprofits such as the Canadian Cancer Society and he has been reaching out and is curious before he implements any changes. I can see he is using some of the concepts we have studied. He is trying to be a leader for change. This course, although particularly challenging for me, could not have come at a better time.
Sam