A fully branded digital workplace for a multi-region consultancy

BCS Group is a specialist consultancy working in the data centre and critical infrastructure sector. Its teams advise on the design, construction, commissioning and operation of the facilities that keep digital services running — the buildings and systems behind cloud platforms, financial markets and the everyday online infrastructure that cannot be allowed to fail. The business provides project management, technical due diligence, cost consultancy and commissioning management to owners, operators and investors across Europe, operating in the DACH region and across Iberia and Italy. Its workforce combines engineers, project managers, commissioning specialists and commercial staff, many of whom work on client sites rather than from a company office. Because the sector is technically demanding and growing quickly, the business recruits actively and invests heavily in developing its people. Consistent internal communication across multiple countries and languages is a standing organisational challenge for a consultancy structured this way.

Impressive Numbers

• 10+ dedicated content areas delivered — from onboarding to careers and CSR
• 2 regional variants of employee benefits content served from one page (DACH, Iberia & Italy)
• 100% of navigation, banners and quick links editable by client admins with no code

BCS Group's internal information had grown up piece by piece and ended up scattered. Company news lived in one place, HR content in another, IT support somewhere else, onboarding material somewhere else again, and benefits information in yet another. Each was individually reasonable; together they meant that the answer to any given question was 'it depends where you look'.

That particularly affected new starters. Joining a consultancy where much of the work happens on client sites is difficult enough without piecing together where internal information lives. Onboarding depended heavily on which colleague you happened to ask.

The regional structure added a complication. BCS operates across DACH and across Iberia and Italy, and employee benefits differ meaningfully between them. A single benefits page would be wrong for half the audience, and maintaining separate sites would have doubled the upkeep and guaranteed the two eventually diverged.

There was also data sitting in other Microsoft systems that the intranet needed. Staff directory information lived in Azure Active Directory and meeting room availability in Outlook. Duplicating either would have meant maintaining it twice and having it be wrong half the time.

Finally — and this was a firm requirement — BCS wanted their own non-technical administrators to have full control over navigation, banners and quick links across every page. They did not want to raise a request and wait every time a link needed changing. Anything requiring developer involvement for routine content changes was, in their view, a failed design.

We designed and built a fully branded, feature-rich digital workplace on SharePoint Online, bringing BCS Group's internal content into a single portal shaped around how their staff actually work.

Branding came first. The portal was built to look and feel like BCS rather than like a Microsoft product with a logo added — important for a consultancy whose people are often working in client environments and need a clear sense of their own organisation.

The home page is dynamic rather than static: company news, quick links, upcoming events and a community spotlight video, all driven by content the client controls. It gives someone visiting briefly a genuine sense of what is happening in the business.

Onboarding received its own dedicated hub, reflecting how important that experience is to a consultancy recruiting continuously. New starters get a roadmap showing what happens and when, journey accordions that break the first weeks into manageable stages, and a new-starter directory so joiners can see who else is finding their feet at the same time. The experience no longer depends on which colleague a new joiner thinks to ask.

The employee benefits page solved the regional problem elegantly. Rather than separate sites, one page serves region-appropriate content, so DACH staff see DACH benefits and colleagues in Iberia and Italy see theirs, each with relevant FAQs and named contacts. The structure is maintained once; the presentation adapts.

HR content was consolidated into a documents and announcements page with a searchable library, so policies and forms are found by searching rather than by knowing where they were filed. The IT support portal follows the same logic: a support roadmap, common errors and related articles, designed so staff can resolve familiar problems themselves before raising a ticket.

The staff directory and organisational chart are integrated with Azure Active Directory, which means they are always accurate without anybody maintaining them. When someone joins, moves or leaves, the intranet reflects it automatically — removing both a maintenance task and a permanent source of stale information.

Similarly, the team meeting page handles room bookings synced with Outlook calendars, so a booking made in the intranet appears in the right diaries without duplication.

The learning and development hub gives BCS somewhere to present its investment in people properly: training organised in tabs, training-to-role mapping so staff can see what applies to their position, and career pathways showing where roles can lead. For a business competing for technical talent, making development visible has recruitment value as well as internal value.

A marketing hub brings together a resources library, internal communications and events. A careers page lists live openings so staff can refer candidates, and an ambassadors page gives the community and CSR programme a home.

Underpinning all of it is the no-code administration BCS insisted on. Navigation, banners and quick links across every page are driven by SharePoint lists their own administrators maintain. Routine change is immediate, requires no developer and costs nothing.

Client's Quote / Review

DRAFT FOR CLIENT APPROVAL — please confirm wording and attribution before publication.

"Our people are spread across several countries and often working on client sites, so the intranet had to be somewhere they could reach everything without hunting. It does that — and because our own team controls the navigation and content, we keep it current ourselves rather than raising a request every time something changes."— [Name], [Job title], BCS Group

BCS Group now has one place where staff find what they need, whichever country they are in and whether they are in an office or on a client site. The scattering of content across disconnected pages and tools has gone, replaced by a portal with a predictable structure — which matters most for the people who visit briefly between other commitments, who are the majority.

Onboarding improved most visibly. New starters arrive to a structured experience with a roadmap, staged guidance and a directory of fellow joiners, rather than a set of documents and a colleague to ask. For a consultancy recruiting continuously into a competitive technical market, a new joiner who feels oriented in their first week is a meaningful commercial advantage, not just an administrative nicety.

The region-aware benefits page resolved a problem that would otherwise have grown worse. Staff in DACH and in Iberia and Italy each see the benefits, FAQs and contacts that apply to them, maintained through one structure rather than two parallel sites. Queries to HR about which rules apply have dropped, and the risk of the two regions' content diverging has been designed out.

The Azure Active Directory integration removed a maintenance task permanently. The staff directory and organisational chart are accurate because they draw from the source rather than from a copy, so nobody updates them and nobody encounters an entry for a colleague who left months ago. In a distributed business, reliably finding the right person saves a surprising amount of collective time.

Outlook-synced room booking removed the double-bookings and confusion that came from managing availability in two places. It is a small feature that eliminated a recurring daily irritation.

The IT support portal has taken pressure off the IT team by letting staff resolve common problems themselves. The learning and development hub has made training genuinely visible, with role mapping and career pathways helping people see what is available and where it leads — supporting both development and retention.

The careers and ambassadors pages extended the portal beyond internal administration into recruitment and community work, giving both a visible home and making it easy for staff to participate in either.

The outcome BCS values most, though, is control. Because navigation, banners and quick links across every page are driven by lists their own non-technical administrators maintain, the business changes its intranet when it needs to — immediately, without a ticket, a developer or a cost. The portal has become something BCS runs rather than something they commission changes to, which was their requirement from the outset.