Fressnapf asked us to build and shape a new digital workspace — and to prepare a Europe-wide SharePoint migration and the tender behind it — without letting the transformation become an IT project. We framed it as a people programme first, enabled the internal team to write the mindset, the governance, and the tender themselves, and sequenced the build so 14 markets could roll in one after another without a freeze.
Fressnapf was running a classic pet-care paradox: 14 national units with strong local voices, one HQ trying to keep them in formation, and a digital workspace that nobody really used to get work done. The old SharePoint was a file dump. Governance lived in a few heroes' heads. And a tender for the next generation platform was looming.
IT wanted a migration. HR wanted a collaboration tool. The country MDs wanted local autonomy. Communications wanted a single editorial spine. None of those four asks survived contact with the others. The programme had been re-planned twice already when we joined in May 2023.
The internal team knew the individual moves — content audits, information architecture, Microsoft 365 governance, tender scaffolding. What was missing was a single programme that treated this as a people change first, with the tooling following the mindset, not the other way round.
The ask we accepted: build and shape the new digital workspace, enable the team to write the mindset, prepare the SharePoint migration and the tender, and set up the rollout so fourteen countries could each go live when they were ready — without HQ steering every comma.
The first eight weeks were spent naming what "writing in the workspace" should feel like — before we chose a single SharePoint component. Editorial principles signed by comms, HR, IT.
One business unit wrote the first real pages against the new IA. Their feedback reshaped the design system before it went near 14 markets.
We wrote the scaffolding, the requirements matrix, and the evaluation scheme. The internal team ran the RfP, led the vendor sessions, and awarded the contract. We sat in the back row.
14 countries don't need 14 projects. We left behind a rollout kit — playbook, training, governance, localisation patterns — so each market could schedule its own wave.
The visible layer — SharePoint Online, Viva Connections, Teams — is the boring part. The decisive part is underneath: an authoring system with twelve page templates, an editorial rulebook, and a role model that makes "who owns this page" a question with a name attached to it. Governance is a product, not a PDF.
Next to the workspace we delivered a full migration kit — legacy SharePoint inventory, archive/retire/migrate rules, and dry-run pipelines — and the tender package behind it: requirements matrix, evaluation rubric, and an RfP the client ran themselves to select the long-term platform partner.
European markets rollout-ready with a localisation kit. Wave sequence signed off by regional MDs; no HQ bottleneck.
Programme length. May 2023 → Apr 2025. Three phases — mindset, workspace, rollout — sequenced as one programme, not three.
EU-wide RfP prepared, run and awarded by the internal team. Requirements matrix and evaluation rubric authored together; decision made by Fressnapf.
Legacy site collections inventoried and classified. Archive / retire / migrate rules written, dry-runs rehearsed with internal SP admins.
Page templates in the design system. Editorial rulebook written by comms, validated with a pilot division, handed to every market team.
Colleagues served across HQ, stores and logistics. Author network enrolled and trained; write-mindset adoption paced per market.
They treated our intranet like a product, not a SharePoint project. By the time the tender went out, our own team could defend every requirement — because we had written them. That's what enablement is supposed to feel like.
Fressnapf came in through the [CX] door — a workspace programme with a migration and tender attached. The minute the internal team said they wanted to own the mindset, /skills joined. The minute the SharePoint inventory turned into a data problem, [Elements] joined. Neither needed a new procurement cycle.
That's the design: enter through any door, get whichever units the actual problem calls for, run it as one programme, invoice it as one contract.
See how the four units combine →Programme close: April 2025. Before we signed off, the Fressnapf team had to clear a fixed list. Anything unchecked meant we stayed. All cleared; we left.
30 minutes with Jan B. Fischer, partner leading [CX]. We'll tell you within the call whether this shape fits yours.
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