Centrica reduces SharePoint site provisioning from five days to five minutes with self-service solution

Using Microsoft 365 to support varied collaboration scenarios

Centrica serves more than 10 million residential and business customers through brands such as British Gas, Bord Gáis, and Centrica Business Solutions globally. Centrica believes in empowering its 20,000 employees to make decisions that best serve customers and meet the organization’s goals. To provide flexible solutions that enable employees to work efficiently and effectively, Centrica uses the powerful combination of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, which it can tailor to meet the specific needs of different groups working across the organization. “With 70 percent of our employees working from home and a large number of field engineers out on calls, we need flexible IT solutions that give them as much autonomy as possible,” says Carl. “Our employees use Microsoft 365 for almost everything. Microsoft Teams for meetings and chat, SharePoint for storing and sharing files, and Yammer for community and corporate-wide conversations.”

Relying on a manual process delays service requests

For the most part, Centrica employees could independently create the workspaces they needed—channels and chats in Teams or communities in Yammer. But one area that was not automated was creating SharePoint sites, which required manual provisioning from Carl and his colleagues. “We always wanted to offer employees the ability to create SharePoint sites themselves, but we have very strict security requirements that meant we couldn’t give everyone administrative access,” explains Carl. “We also wanted the sites to be branded for our various companies and have the appropriate regional settings for the employees using them.” 

Although the manual creation process was reliable, it was time-consuming and could take several days to complete a request, depending on the availability of support team members. The support team was also constantly receiving last-minute requests that interrupted the flow of their work. Employees often requested sites without explaining what they would be used for. Sometimes a SharePoint site wasn’t the answer, but without more information, Carl’s team had no way to direct the employee to the right solution.

Implementing a self-service solution with the CAR solution

After learning that Centrica was facing these issues, a member of the Microsoft Customer Success Unit proposed a solution called Collaboration Area Request (CAR). CAR is a solution developed by Microsoft Customer Success that uses Power Platform, Azure, and Microsoft Graph. It helps organizations deliver self-service creation of collaboration spaces in Microsoft 365, including Microsoft 365 Groups, Teams channels and teams, Yammer communities, and SharePoint sites. It requires no additional licensing for Microsoft 365 customers and is easily customized to meet individual customer requirements. 

Carl immediately saw the potential for CAR to automate the SharePoint provisioning process and worked with Microsoft to understand the details. Centrica also proposed some additional capabilities to increase the solution’s usability, such as having templates that are available only to certain employees, departments, and business units. Given the versatility of the solution and the low-code nature of Power Apps, these requests were quickly implemented by Microsoft. 

Centrica worked to define and build the set of standard SharePoint site templates required across the organization. These templates included the security requirements for standard sites, along with corporate branding. It also created specialized templates for its intranet team that have additional security requirements and are available only to specified members of that team. With the templates in place, deploying CAR was as simple as running a few PowerShell scripts. “The setup process was great because there were no licenses to acquire and configure,” says Carl. “We spent about a day creating the templates and only a few minutes running the scripts Microsoft provided for deployment. Since the solution is in Power Apps, we can easily reconfigure settings or change things like wording or images at any time.”

Improving the user experience through a centralized app

People receive guidance on selecting between a SharePoint site, a Yammer community, or a Teams channel and then select the template they want to use, based on the use case and corporate branding they want. “CAR also helps people realize alternate possibilities,” says Carl. “Before, they probably would have just gone straight for a SharePoint site because that’s what they’ve always known.” 

Centrica offered self-service capabilities for Yammer and Teams before, but CAR brings the self-service options into one simple experience. “We don’t have to keep repeating a lot of different instructions anymore. We can direct them to the app that helps them pick what they want, rather than us having to say, ‘Go here for Yammer, go here for Teams, go here for SharePoint,’ and it’s three different processes.” Once employees select the type of site and the template they want, the site is created in a few minutes with no approvals required. (Approval workflows are an option in the CAR solution, but Centrica chose not to use that capability.) 

Centrica employees now access CAR through links set up in the same locations they would have used previously to set up collaboration capabilities. The organization also updated its ServiceNow application to route collaboration site requests directly to CAR.

Reaping the benefits in productivity and security

Across the board, CAR has been a great success at Centrica. “CAR is a win for everyone. It’s easy for people to use, and they love having their independence from us. Now, instead of waiting up to five days for a request to be fulfilled, they wait five minutes,” says Carl. “My colleagues and I can focus on more strategic tasks, and our security team is overjoyed because they know the templates will implement our security standards the same way every time.”

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