How Nordisk Fjellsikring Consolidated And Streamlined Project Management With Workpoint 365
Challenge
Nordisk Fjellsikring needed a centralised way to manage multiple projects and documents across all its locations
Technology
SharePoint, WorkPoint 365.
Result
A WorkPoint 365 solution has brought consistency standardisation to project management across the entire organisation.
The mountain protection specialists implemented a WorkPoint solution to standardise and streamline project management across multiple offices.
Nordisk Fjellsikring is a rock and mountain protection specialist that has between 50 and 60 projects running at any one time, across Norway and the rest of Scandinavia. More than 215 employees operate from different locations across Norway, including Larvik, Oslo, Trondheim, Bergen, and Bjerkvik. Projects range from large-scale mountain protection to rock protection for domestic customers.
The merger of Visinor Fjell and Gjerden Fjellsikring to form Nordisk Fjellsikring in 2023, created the need to consolidate technology and workflows. The goal was to ensure transparency over all projects without making multiple phone calls or trawling complex folder structures. Both companies were running a Microsoft-based solution, including Teams and SharePoint.
Nordisk Fjellsikring’s Project Director, Ole André Holt Utheim, said, “For every tender we put out, there is always a lot of documentation. Rather than using hundreds of systems, we needed as few as possible.”
Image by Mikael Bones
Seeing everything through one window
Nordisk Fjellsikring depends on specialist systems, but it needed the ability to bring all its documents and data together. When iteam – a WorkPoint Partner – was selected as their IT service provider, WorkPoint 365 became a major part of the solution.
WorkPoint 365 is used to organise documents and emails, tagging them to specific companies and projects. It also connects with data from Power BI. This helps Nordisk Fjellsikring solve its biggest challenges around document and project management – maintaining oversight and finding information fast.
Project information is shared both internally and externally, so it’s important to keep documents and data secure by maintaining the access levels (they have defined three) from SharePoint. At the same time, Nordisk Fjellsikring’s clients range from individuals to municipalities. For that reason, their project and document management system needs to be totally flexible in terms of scalability.
WorkPoint is the place where everything is organised. It gathers documents and data from different sources and snaps them together nicely. Since the merger, we’ve already accumulated around 45,000 documents inside WorkPoint.
Finding information fast
The ability to easily search across, and within, documents and emails is one of the major value adds of WorkPoint 365. Locating relevant information is much easier; it’s been a huge time-saver, compared with a project management environment without WorkPoint.
Serving some of the largest organisations in Scandinavia, and adhering to relevant regulations on data – such as the EU’s GDPR – means there are strict security protocols for sharing documents and data. With so many documents generated within each project, Nordisk Fjellsikring keeps everything in-house to maintain control over access and security.
Each company and project has its own WorkPoint site. Within the project folder, there are designated areas where documents can be shared with external suppliers or clients. However, Nordisk Fjellsikring maintains control over access.
This setup ensures that each company can only view their own project space, while Nordisk Fjellsikring has a complete overview of all the projects. Additionally, the project folder allows for seamless collaboration and secure document sharing, ensuring that everyone have the necessary access to relevant information.
Using WorkPoint 365, their approach to project and document management is easy to scale depending on the size of the project. Every project gets its own WorkPoint site with the same fundamental structure. Depending on the size and complexity of the project, this can be dialed up or down as needed. This is important. They don’t want small projects to be unnecessarily complicated, and larger projects need the flexibility to scale up as needed.
We handle a lot of projects and tenders. This year, we’re set to pass more than 1300 unique offers. To support that, we set up a minimum page for every WorkPoint site. Each project starts at the same level, but we can easily scale down for smaller projects, or scale up for bigger projects, or ones that last for many years.
Bringing consistency to every project
The implementation of WorkPoint 365 is company-wide, bringing a layer of consistency to the way Nordisk Fjellsikring handles projects. iteam has configured a WorkPoint 365 solution that’s brought standardisation to the entire organisation. Now every project has the same look and feel, and the same starting structure, no matter which office has ownership.
Built on top of the familiar Microsoft 365 environment, WorkPoint 365 is easy for employees to pick up and use with minimal training. Generally speaking, if people know SharePoint, they know WorkPoint; both are built on the same principles.
As some aspects of project management are repetitive and easily repeatable, Nordisk Fjellsikring has already started to introduce automations into its workflows. In time, they plan to take this much further. Having well-governed documents and data inside WorkPoint 365 means that the company is much better prepared for the future implementation of AI tools.
WorkPoint 365 provides a layer of structure and organisation, so everything needed to manage a particular project is available to those who need it, including (further down the line) an AI assistant like Microsoft Copilot.
To discover more about Nordisk Fjellsikring visit their website: https://nordisk-fjellsikring.no/
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