Business Background

Woods Bagot is a global design studio spanning architecture, interior design, master planning, research, data, and performance to create People Architecture, which places human experience at the center of the design process to deliver innovative, sustainable and future-oriented projects.

Known for its commitment to design excellence, cultural sensitivity, and a deep understanding of the communities it serves, Woods Bagot was founded more than a century and a half ago as one of the first architecture practices in Australia. Since then, Woods Bagot has evolved to include seventeen studios in cities across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.

Aware that the best future will be created together, Woods Bagot actively engages in creative collaboration with clients, communities, and partners to develop projects that are distinctive and transformative.

Business Requirement

Woods Bagot works on large projects such as multi-storied buildings and public spaces; Their architects construct buildings virtually before they begin the project on-site. The company uses around 23 different software platforms for its various functions. Woods Bagot required a tool to host detailed user and troubleshooting guides for each software for their staff.

Woods Bagot was initially hosting their internal user guides on another wiki platform. However, they faced multiple challenges from both author and staff’s perspectives. Some of the challenges faced in SharePoint include

• Articles required a lot of metadata to be included for them to appear in specific lists
• Even simple functionalities such as a table of contents on an article page and a navigation tree required much programming in the background.
• With their knowledge base having more than 1,300 articles, their staff had to sometimes browse through six pages to find what they were looking for
• Required software specialists to spend much time achieving basic functionality.
• SharePoint wiki’s analytics were also hard to use and not fit for the purpose
• SharePoint was too flexible tempting some staff to tinker with HTML, like adding a collapsible list, and making some workspaces look different.

Woods Bagot looked to create a fresh internal knowledge base where information could be sorted so their staff could search and find what they were looking for while moving through articles seamlessly.

Solution

Woods Bagot’s software specialists evaluated several other platforms in the knowledge management space, before selecting Document360.

Here are a few crucial features that led them to choose Document360.

• Advanced search engine which enables users to find information quickly
• Has an in-built navigation tree, a table of contents automatically driven by headings.
• Opportunities to include images within articles and stream videos to help users understand the information faster
• Design templates for articles so every workspace adheres to the style guide and looks like its from a single author and company
• Options to make an article visually appealing, like creating a table, including bullet points, paragraphs, and images within the table.
• Options to ensure articles are not viewed before they are officially published
• Rich analytics allow authors to monitor how their content is performing and update it accordingly. Analytics includes the number of visitors and time they spent on an article. The analytics also point out the broken links in the content, which helps authors correct them before users click on it and get frustrated
• Flexibility to authors in terms of opting for Markdown or HTML editor made migration and authoring of fresh content simple
• Availability of a Feedback manager allows customers to leave their feedback at the end of every article, giving users and authors a chance to engage with one another
• Knowledge base assistant that functions like a chatbot providing contextual help to users

Michelle Van Kolck, Global Specialist-Design Technology at Woods Bagot says

Among the five alternatives we assessed, Document360 stood out significantly. It outshone the rest by offering comprehensive features, including page analytics, article editing protection, diverse article design templates, an integrated navigation tree, and automatic Table of Content generation. No other platform could match its extensive capabilities.

Business Transformation

Michelle says,

Document360 facilitated Woods Bagot’s shift in redesigning all their content to action focussed solutions.

Our knowledge base served as a crucial e-learning resource for the Design Technology software used by our teams. We aimed to revolutionize our teaching methodology by converting knowledge into actionable tasks. Document360 played a vital role in this transformation, integrating screen grabs, videos, and embedded PDFs as needed.

As a result, the number of people referring to articles and using the knowledge base has steadily increased. The analytics show an increase in the use of the knowledge base every three months since the site went live in October last year.

There has been a clear enhancement in productivity and efficiency among individuals. The rise in usage also suggests that people are relying less on seeking help from others and instead referring to the knowledge base for assistance.

We are very excited about the prospect of the new AI search feature that is in development. This feature will enable us to provide contextual instructions to readers that go beyond just listing related articles with matching keywords. This new feature will help boost our Knowledge Base engagement and make the reader experience of accessing our extensive database significantly more meaningful, time-efficient, and effective.

Conclusion

Due to Document360’s user-friendly interface (for authors and readers), the Woods Bagot Design Technology team were able to launch redesigned training and support materials that teams find easier to reference and locate.