Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Global Human Capital Solutions Firm Leads the Way to Successful Career Transitions
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Human Resources
Customer Profile
Lee Hecht Harrison (LHH) delivers human capital solutions to maximize organizational and individual performance through successful career transitions and leadership consulting.
Business Situation
LHH sought a solution to update its Career Resource Networkportal. The company wanted to offer its clients a distinctive, personalized online resource to help drive productive career transitions.
Solution
Using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, LHH built a unique portalthat offers personalized resources to guide its clientsthrough a successful career transition process. The company was able to build the site rapidly by using existing technology and familiar tools.
Benefits
Distinct competitive advantage
Personalized content engages clients
Fast, cost-effective deployment
Easy to maintain in-house
Puts administrative power in the hands of staff / “We are always looking for new, better ways to serve our customers. This solution really helps differentiate the quality and efficiency of the services we offer.”
David Estrada, Senior Vice President of Technology Integration, Lee Hecht Harrison
As a leading global provider of human capital solutions, Lee Hecht Harrison (LHH)is a company that excels in helping organizations and individuals to maximize performance.As a part of its ongoing commitment to innovation and technology, LHHsought a solution to update its Career Resource Network—a Web site introduced in 1996 to help individuals achieve successful career transitions. Using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, LHHdevelopeda powerful new portal that offers personalized career guidance to its individual clients. Implementation of the new online resource was swift, and the solution’s user-friendly administration tools have empowered the company’s staff to maintain and modify the site in-house. Ultimately, the newCareer Resource Network is another example ofLHH’sdedication to quality service and its position as an innovative market leader.
Situation
For more than 30 years, Lee Hecht Harrison (LHH) has been at the forefront of human capital solutions—working with organizations and individuals to maximize performance. Headquartered in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, LHH is a subsidiary of Adecco S.A., the world's largest human resources (HR) solutions company with 6,600 offices in more than 75 countries. LHH serves organizations, recruiters, and individuals by providing solutions and services in a number of areas, including career transition and outplacement, career management, and leadership consulting.
As a service to individuals in career transition, LHH launched the Career Resource Network (CRN) in 1996. The innovative Web portal provides useful online tools, information, and guidance to help individuals complete successful career transitions. The site was a great success, and the company has continued to update and expand the resource to maintain a quality service for its individual clients.
In 2004, LHH decided to perform a major site update. Thecompanywanted to reinvent its CRN portal to one that would offer clients more personalized guidance through the career transition process. With a trend in the industry toward a less personal approach to human services, LHH wanted to use technology to more efficiently offer the same personalized service its clients have come to appreciate. The existing site, which was developed using Cold Fusion, was also time consuming to maintain, and the custom-developed content update tool was limited in functionality and cumbersome to use.
“We wanted to be able to easily present content specific to different individuals,” says David Estrada, Senior Vice President of Technology Integration at LHH. “We also wanted to engage participants in a collaborative working environment—one that is consistent with the way we do things at Lee Hecht Harrison. We take the approach that a career transition is a project, and the more it is viewed that way, the more productive and successful people will be at developing a job and career they are happy with.”
LHH considered building upon the existing site, but quickly found that it didn’t offer the flexibility needed to adapt swiftly to business needs. “At first, we started to bring in third party tools to add to our current site,” Estrada says. “We went down that path for a while, but we were in a constant state of development. By the time we would launch a new change, we realized that we had already outgrown it. We needed a way to make development faster and it needed to be easier to update the site to match our needs.”
Solution
Using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, LHHworked with Microsoft Certified Partner nConcert Solutions to implementits new CRN portal. The result is a powerful new portal that offers personalized tools and resources to guide participants through successful career transitions. With user-friendly tools that extend LHH’s existing technology infrastructure, the company was able to design and build the site rapidly, and itsstaff is empowered to change and maintain the site in-house.
The content of the CRN portal is modelled after Lee Hecht Harrison's proprietary business process, AIM® (Assess, Implement, and Manage) and follows the company’s project management approach to career transitions. “Each individual can break the process into discrete manageable tasks and track their progress in completing them one at a time,” explains Estrada.
According to Estrada, in addition to providing a career transition process, another important goal for the new portal was that it could cater to individual needs within that process. “When searching for a new position, no two people have the same needs,” says Estrada. “So our portal starts by presenting a mix of content, including LHH proprietary tools and information, third-party research, and dynamic news feeds.”
The new portal also presents milestones to guide the participant through the sometimes daunting career transition process. “However, the steps are not ordered stringently,” adds Estrada. “Every individual has their own best progression for a successful job search, and the portal is designed to support that.”
The ability to offer content that is personalized to each participant is one of the most unique and powerful components of the CRN portal. The portal guides LHH’s clientsthrough the process, following their progress on a calendar and offering a personal checklist of action items for the current phase of the job search process.
To build a portal that recognizes individual users and delivers content specific to their needs, LHH used SharePoint Portal Server 2003 in conjunction with other Microsoft products and technologies.
Dan Kao, Senior Developer at nConcert Solutions, explains: “WithSharePoint Portal Server 2003, we were able to develop a very flexible, easily customizable solution that offers a personalized experience for Lee Hecht Harrison’s clients. One major issue with the company’s existing site was that it wasn’t able to recognize individual users. With this solution, we used[the] Active Directory®directory service and Windows® SharePoint Services user profiles so that the site was aware of each user and their preferences. Then we could deliver them personalized content to cater to their individual needs.”
Solution Implementation
The complete implementation of the solution took about six months from planning through deployment, according to Estrada. “In October 2004, we worked with Microsoftand nConcert Solutions to evaluate possible solutions for our new portal,” says Estrada. “We attended sessions at the Microsoft Technology Center in Waltham, Massachusetts. The sessions were pretty detailed and very helpful. They really helped us with problem solving and looking at how to address real world scenarios using Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003.”
“When Lee Hecht Harrison first approached us about their plans for its Career Resource Network, we knew they wanted to redefine it and take it in a direction that would establish a new standard in their industry,” says James Bowman, President and CEO of nConcert Solutions.
Once LHH decided to develop a solution using SharePoint Portal Server 2003, the implementation went quickly. “The project timeline was very short,” Estrada says. “Using the SharePoint development environment, we found that we could get things done very quickly. This would have taken a lot longer to accomplish if we had tried to integrate third party tools. And the work nConcert Solutions provided was invaluable.”
Kao describes the development process: “Development took about three months, and the process went very smoothly,” says Kao. “This portal would have taken a long time to build withoutSharePoint Portal Server 2003. This was my first time building such a large-scale SharePoint site, and I was not 100 percent familiar with the technology going into it, particularly since LHH wanted a customized logon form that used the client’s e-mail address as the user name. Relying on the Software Development Kit (SDK) I was able to create all the customized features LHH wanted, while using few resources and completing the project on time.“
Content Migration
One of the important issues with the implementation of the solution was how to efficiently and accurately port the existing content to the new portal. To tackle this task, LHH used Metalogix Migration Manager 3.0 for SharePoint, a solution designed to manage the migration process from content discovery through completion.
Julien Sellgren, Chief Technology Officer for Metalogix describes the process: “With the short project timeline for this solution, a manual migration process really wasn’t an option. With Metalogix Migration Manager, we were able to perform an analysis and provide a complete content inventory very quickly. From there, we were able to make recommendations on how to reorganize the content for the new site. In this case, we decided to move all of the data into a flat list, and use metadata to create taxonomies. This provided a lot of flexibility. LHHcan easily take advantage of the rich list management features thatSharePoint Portal Server 2003 offers, and it is simple for content owners to create and modify lists.”
The use of Migration Manager 3.0 also provided the company with a high level of control during the development process. “One of the great things about working with SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Migration Manager 3.0 is that we can test the content migration throughout the development process,” says Sellgren. “LHH set up a development server with the look and feel of the new portal, so at a moment’s notice they could press a button and extract content from old system and publish it to the new system.”
“Metalogix proved to be a very valuable and cost-effective resource in helping us analyze, and then migrate the entire CRN portal to Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003," says Estrada. With the help of Metalogix, the content migration took two weeks, and the development team had the data in the new system before they started building the functionality. With the data in place, the team was able to model the new system using actual content.
Adoption
Once development was complete, says Kao, the rollout and adoption went rapidly: “SharePoint Portal Server 2003 made it simple for LHH’s content owners to manage the pages and modify page content on their own. There was minimal training to get them up to speed on the new solution, and they were up and running without too much effort.”
Benefits
LHH has realized significant business value from its new portal. The new Career Resource Network is another way the company continues its position as a market leader by offering its organizational customers and individual clients uniquely effective solutions and services. Furthermore, LHH was able to build the site quickly and efficiently—and the company’s employees now have the tools to update the site with minimal need for additional resources.
Distinct Competitive Advantage
Always on the leading edge of innovation and technology, the new portal is another way that LHH is developing uniquely effective solutions that distinguish the company from others in the marketplace. “Personalized content, powerful tools, ease of use, and the ability to update the site quickly all provide a unique competitive advantage for us. We are offering our customers something truly valuable,” says Estrada.
“We are always looking for new, better ways to serve our customers,” says Estrada.“This solution really helps differentiate the quality and efficiency of the services we offer. While the trend in outplacement is toward commoditization, we remain uniquely focused on personal service. With this solution, we can offer personalized service to individuals and do so efficiently to the benefit of our organizational customers. This solution is one way we can use technology to provide significant valueto our customers.”
As the marketplace becomes increasingly focused on efficiency and cost savings, LHH has developed a technology solution that reduces costs, while still maintaining the quality of service on which the company has built its reputation. “Our organizational customers want to see more efficient tools for training,” Estrada explains. “That leads to a situation where the technology we offer is a very important part of their decision.”
Ultimately, the new portal is helping LHHmaintain its position as a market leader.“This solution is another way we remain at the forefront,” says Estrada. “SharePoint Portal Server 2003 provides us with the tools to advance more quickly and in a way that better maps to customer needs than the competition.”
An Easy Way to Deliver a Personalized Online Client Experience
According to Estrada, SharePoint Products and Technologies provided LHH the tools needed to build a personalized online experience for their clients quickly and easily. “Using SharePoint Portal Server 2003, we could render the site in a component fashion and customize content for individual users,” Estrada says. “It is an eye-opener for our clients. The design really supports dynamically plugging different parts in for different users. We are taking full advantage of this—serving customized content to individual clients.”
Fast, Cost-Effective Deployment, Maintenance, and Future Development
Another important benefit LHH has realized using the solution is its ease of development and ongoing maintenance. “An environment that would support rapid development was a high priority for us,” Estrada explains. “SharePoint Products and Technologies provided that. After learning what the solution could do, we found that it provided a lot of what we wanted to do with the CRN portal right out of the box. Having Web Parts and nice discrete chunks of code has made it very easy to understand and work with. The feature set had a significant degree of overlap with our requirements for the site. On top of that, nConcert Solutions provided a lot of value in making things go quickly and smoothly.”
According to Kit Jeffrey, Vice President, Web Projects at LHH, the solution has enabled the company’s project teams to increase productivity significantly. “SharePoint Portal Server 2003and Microsoft Office 2003 provide a set of intelligent tools to facilitate project team communication and improve productivity. For this project, we havebeen able to reduce project cycle time, improve quality, and more effectively control costs.”
With the new CRN portal up and running, the solution providesLHH the flexible, user-friendly development tools needed to update the portal quickly and keep pace with changing business needs. “We now have a good migration path for getting ahead faster,” says Estrada. “We are developing even more useful content with a big potential for ongoing development and change that others don’t have.”
Estrada says that the solution has also enabled LHHstaff to maintain and update the portal content on their own—a significant improvement over the previous methods that required help from the company’s technology resources. “The solution puts basic content and site administration capabilities in the hands of our staff instead of programmers,” Estrada says. “With the new portal, we just define the page styles and it’s really easy to update. You also have a fair bit of freedom as to how to do it. This makes content updates much more timely and cost-effective.”
Looking Ahead
LHH has begun a number of other projects using SharePoint Products and Technologies. The company is now launching its new intranet, which is built on SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and plans to launch a customer extranet portal later in 2006. “Our long-term plan is to expand our use of SharePoint Products and Technologies throughout the organization, including customer extranets and day-to-day intranet applications for our employees,” says Estrada. “We see the success of the Career Resource Network as just the beginning, and we expect to realize the same value as we move forward with this solution in other areas of the organization.”
Microsoft Office System