AVANADE® CASE STUDY
RR Donnelley and Avanade Integrate IT-Services Request System with
Robust Collaboration Capabilities
Premier Printing-Services Provider Uses Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to Enhance Efficiency
and Reporting in Project-Request Processes
One of the largest providers of print and related services in the world,
RR Donnelley is truly a global enterprise, with operations on four
continents. The company’s internal IT team used two separate
systems to help manage requests for IT services. RR Donnelley
wanted to integrate the two systems into a single workflow to provide
business and IT users with a single front end, enhance compliance
with corporate standards, and align with planned changes to the
company’s solution development life cycle (SDLC). RR Donnelley
selected Avanade to develop a single request system based on
Windows® SharePoint® Services, Microsoft® Office SharePoint
Server 2007, and Microsoft® Office InfoPath® 2007. The new system
automates the request process, streamlines the SDLC, and enables
users to collaborate on project activities.
OVERVIEW
Industry
Printing Services
Geography
United States/Global
Solution Summary
RR Donnelley selected Avanade to
help integrate a project-request
system based on Microsoft®
technologies that would enhance
request and reporting processes.
Technology
Windows SharePoint Services
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
2007
Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
Benefits
Enhanced collaboration capabilities
provide teams with central location
to find the information and tools to
move projects forward.
Streamlined solution development
life cycle transfers control to project
teams, ensures better compliance
with standards.
Simplified access to information
improves reporting, enables better
insight into project performance.
Access to Avanade offshore
development resources reduced
costs while preserving deployment
efficiency and effectiveness.
Flexibility to customize projectspecific workflows empowers
project teams, accelerates project
approval and implementation.
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CUSTOMER BACKGROUND
RR Donnelley
Founded almost 145 years ago, RR Donnelley is one of the world's largest
providers of print and related services. The company provides solutions in
commercial printing, direct mail, financial printing, digital photography, color
services, content and database management, business process outsourcing, and
other services. The largest companies in the world, including 90 percent of Fortune
500 companies, rely on RR Donnelley's scale, scope, and insight to deliver variable
printing services and market-specific solutions.
Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, RR Donnelley maintains manufacturing
operations in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the United Arab
Emirates. With more than 60,000 employees worldwide, RR Donnelley had sales in
2007 totaling more than U.S. $11 billion.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
“The new system is perfectly aligned
with our SDLC parameters, making it
easier to govern and account for the
entire request, approval, and
implementation process. As a result,
IT Services is being better served
and better operated.”
Paula Giovanetti
Vice President of IT Global Resource
Management, RR Donnelley
With operations throughout North America and around the world, RR Donnelley
relies on its internal IT team to help manage technology needs. To manage IT
service requests from business users, the company used two separate systems.
When users needed new computer hardware, software, or application access, they
submit requests through the Infrastructure Service Request (ISR) system, which
ran on Request Center by newScale®. To initiate a project that requires internal IT
resources, for instance designing a new application to process orders or a new
page on an internal Web intranet, users submitted requests through the Initiation
Project Request (IPR) system, which the company operated using Lotus Notes®.
Once business users submitted a request through the legacy IPR system, IT teams
would use the system to manage the request for submittal to governance teams for
approval. IT project leads then used the system to manage status reports on the
requests.
RR Donnelley recognized an opportunity to improve efficiency and effectiveness
within the IT services department by integrating the ISR and IPR systems into a
single workflow. “There were several drivers behind integrating the ISR and IPR
into a single system,” says Laura Ranieri-Bell, Project Process Manager at RR
Donnelley. “One major driver was giving business users one front end so that they
wouldn’t have to go one place to request a service and another place to initiate a
project. We want to give them the opportunity to go into a single system and
request whatever they need.”
The existing system also made status reporting cumbersome, making it harder to
manage request projects. RR Donnelley sets project reporting standards as
controls relative to its internal methodologies and its internal solution development
life cycle (SDLC). Project managers were required to develop milestones for
projects and then manually update the milestones every week. While governance
teams could access status reports in the existing systems, reports from project
managers were not always as accurate or timely as they could be. The company
wanted to streamline the process and make it easier for managers to report the
status of their projects.
“We wanted a simpler view of project status for reviewers, and an easier way for
project managers to report where a project is and demonstrate that it is progressing
© 2009 Avanade Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Avanade name and logo are registered trademarks in the US and other countries.
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within our methodologies,” says Ranieri-Bell.
Additionally, RR Donnelley wanted to align its IT request systems with changes it
was making to its SDLC methodology. To ensure more accuracy in status updates
and compliance with corporate standards, the company implemented changes to
the SDLC that would transfer more responsibility for the process to the groups
actually working on specific projects. To redefine its compliance standards and the
methods used to validate those controls, RR Donnelley needed a request and
reporting system that would give project teams more authorization and control of
the SDLC process. “We wanted to give more ownership of the SDLC to project
stakeholders rather than the centralized group of governance,” says Paula
Giovanetti, Vice President of IT Global Resource Management at RR Donnelley.
Finally, the company wanted to add functionalities to an integrated IPR system that
could save time and improve efficiencies by automating and improving flexibility in
workflows and providing project-specific collaborative capabilities for IT teams. RR
Donnelley wanted to develop centralized document repositories that could expose
meeting minutes, project status, and calendars to project teams, reviewers, and
business users.
THE SOLUTION
“We turned to Avanade having
relatively limited knowledge and
usage experience with SharePoint.
The responsiveness of their teams
was particularly helpful in getting us
through the learning curve.”
Laura Ranieri-Bell
Project Process Manager, RR
Donnelley
RR Donnelley selected Avanade to design a solution that would integrate the IPR
and ISR systems into a single request system based on Windows® SharePoint®
Services, Microsoft® Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft® Office
InfoPath®. Working with teams from Avanade and Microsoft, RR Donnelley built a
system that automates the request process, streamlines the SDLC, and enables
users to collaborate on project activities.
RR Donnelley selected Avanade to integrate its new solution because of Avanade’s
close relationship with Microsoft and its deep experience and technical expertise
with SharePoint technologies.
Throughout its enterprise, RR Donnelley already had significant investments in
Microsoft technologies, and within its governance group, the company had previous
exposure to SharePoint collaboration tools. “We had some exposure to the
technology and we liked it,” says Giovanetti. “We needed to revise our existing
system to accommodate changes in the SDLC, and felt that SharePoint would be a
good choice for replacing what we had. We also saw this project as a door to other
opportunities.”
In September 2007, RR Donnelley developed and launched a pilot program with
collaborative support from Avanade. To help ensure a smooth transition and easy
user adoption, the company held sessions with stakeholders to introduce the
changes to the SDLC and the request system before the project started. The threemonth pilot project involved three separate IT groups within the company’s North
American operations that each ran IT projects through the new request system.
Using a combination of local teams and offshore resources at its Philippines
Development Center, Avanade helped RR Donnelley successfully complete the
pilot and deploy the new IT request system throughout its North American
production environment in January 2008. With the new system, business users
submit project requests through Request Center, and the request data is forwarded
to an InfoPath estimate form via a Web service to Windows SharePoint Services, to
automatically route the estimate through an approval workflow. Upon estimate
© 2009 Avanade Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Avanade name and logo are registered trademarks in the US and other countries.
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approval, a SharePoint project site is created. IT teams use the SharePoint project
sites to share information, monitor project status, and collaborate to create, edit,
and approve documents.
The project-specific team sites contain the templates needed to support the SDLC
methodology, and project teams use the sites as centralized workspaces.
Authorized users can access the SharePoint project sites and InfoPath document
libraries to manage documents and generate audit trails that facilitate compliance
with the company’s standardized methodologies. Using the project sites, team
members can access calendars, tasks, announcements, and Web parts that they
can design, bringing the entire workflow into a single centralized location.
Importantly, business users are not confronted with unfamiliar processes in the new
system; they simply fill out a request as they always have. However, the new
request system has streamlined, simplified, and improved the weekly project-status
reporting process. At the launch of a project, project managers use a simple screen
to enter several dates of anticipated project milestones. Each week, if those dates
do not change, the project lead can simply click a check box to move the status
report forward. The reports are fed into a view within Office SharePoint Server 2007
and used by managers when they review requests for change.
AVANADE VALUE
According to RR Donnelley, the most significant value that Avanade brought to both
the pilot and the deployment was its deep expertise with SharePoint technologies
and its ability to understand and meet RR Donnelley’s business needs. “We turned
to Avanade having relatively limited knowledge and usage experience with
SharePoint. The responsiveness of their teams was particularly helpful in getting us
through the learning curve,” says Ranieri-Bell. “But just as important was their
ability to take what we discussed in meetings and bring it back to us in identifiable
business requirements. From the very start, they really did understand where we
were trying to go.”
“With the new system, we can
automatically create a discrete site
devoted to each specific project,
where team members can all go to
find the information and collaboration
tools they need to move that project
forward. I use it on my projects all
the time.”
Laura Ranieri-Bell
Project Process Manager, RR
Donnelley
By taking advantage of Avanade’s offshore assets at its Philippines Development
Center, RR Donnelley estimates that it realized significant savings in direct costs
associated with the pilot and deployment of its new solution. At the same time, the
flexibility and expertise in Avanade’s offshore teams kept the project running
efficiently and on schedule. “Obviously, there is an economic benefit from working
with offshore developers,” says Giovanetti. “But there can be potential difficulties
collaborating across significantly different time zones. However, Avanade was very
flexible. We could have a meeting during our evening, then they would work on it
during our night and we could see results by the time we got back the next
morning.”
RR Donnelley has continued to work with Avanade to explore opportunities to
expand Office SharePoint Server 2007 into other areas of the enterprise.
Subsequent projects have included the development and deployment of an IT
contract management system.
RESULTS
By partnering with Avanade to develop an integrated project and service request
system, RR Donnelley has enhanced the efficiency and effectiveness of its internal
IT services department. Benefits to the enterprise include time-saving workflow
consolidation and automation, project-specific collaborative capabilities, a
© 2009 Avanade Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Avanade name and logo are registered trademarks in the US and other countries.
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streamlined SDLC, and standardized processes to improve compliance with
corporate guidelines.
Enhanced collaboration capabilities move projects forward
Using SharePoint technologies to create collaboration sites devoted to specific
requests, RR Donnelley provides project teams with a single location where they
can find the information and tools they need to complete projects efficiently. The
company uses the new system to bring the entire project workflow into a centralized
location, where team members can find and share documents, calendars, tasks,
and announcements.
“With the new system, we can automatically create a discrete site devoted to each
specific project, where team members can all go to find the information and
collaboration tools they need to move that project forward,” says Ranieri-Bell. “I use
it on my projects all the time.”
Streamlined SDLC ensures better compliance with corporate standards
By streamlining its SDLC while using Web Service integration to leave the legacy
request system in place, RR Donnelley has effectively transferred project control
and authorization from governance teams to the project teams, improving efficiency
and ensuring better compliance with the company’s standardized methodologies.
The enhanced solution allows the IT services department to capture and view the
critical information it needs to control and audit project processes. “The new system
is perfectly aligned with our SDLC parameters, making it easier to govern and
account for the entire request, approval, and implementation process,” says
Giovanetti. “As a result, IT Services is being better served and better operated.”
“Now, teams can use the request
system to set up calendars,
announcements, and status
meetings, and easily display that
information to the project’s
community.”
Laura Ranieri-Bell
Project Process Manager, RR
Donnelley
Simplified access to information improves insight into performance
RR Donnelley has enhanced project reporting and enabled better insight into
project performance by simplifying access to information for business users, project
teams, and project reviewers. “We used to have a difficult time gathering some of
the information we needed,” says Ranieri-Bell. “Now, teams can use the request
system to set up calendars, announcements, and status meetings, and easily
display that information to the project’s community.”
Avanade offshore resources reduced costs while preserving efficiency
Because it developed and deployed the new request system with help from
Avanade’s offshore development resources, RR Donnelley estimates significant
savings in development costs without any major scheduling delays. “Using a
balance of offshore and onshore development and business resources made the
project more economic, and having development being done in the opposite hours
of our working day was often a big advantage in scheduling,” says Giovanetti. “The
professionalism and flexibility of Avanade’s Philippines team made them very
positive to work with and helped the deployment proceed efficiently.”
Flexibility to customize workflows empowers teams to accelerate projects
With its new request system based on SharePoint technologies, RR Donnelley now
has the flexibility to customize project-specific workflows, empowering project
teams to accelerate project approval and implementation. Tasks like adding or
changing a view for a compliance review can be accomplished in minutes, avoiding
development effort and project delays.
“By being able to change workflows on the fly, we can be a little more pliable, retain
control of the process, and get things done quicker,” says Giovanetti.
© 2009 Avanade Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Avanade name and logo are registered trademarks in the US and other countries.
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About Avanade
Avanade is a global IT consultancy dedicated to using the Microsoft environment to
help enterprises achieve profitable growth. Through proven solutions that extend
Microsoft technologies, Avanade helps enterprises increase revenue, reduce costs
and reinvest in innovation to gain competitive advantage. Avanade consultants
deliver value according to each customer's requirements, timeline and budget by
combining insight, innovation and the talent of our global workforce. Avanade,
which is majority owned by Accenture, was founded in 2000 by Accenture and
Microsoft Corp. Avanade has more than 9,000 professionals serving customers in
22 countries worldwide. Additional information can be found at www.avanade.com.
© 2009 Avanade Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Avanade name and logo are registered trademarks in the US and other countries.
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