Working Without Walls:
Implementing a Modern Digital Workplace for a Tax Advisory Firm

Client Overview

A specialist tax advisory and compliance firm with operations spanning two continents, serving a client base that includes mid-market businesses, high-net-worth individuals, and regional institutional investors. With a workforce of approximately 250 professionals operating across several offices and increasingly in hybrid arrangements, the firm faced a digital workplace environment that had grown organically rather than by design. The result was a fragmented employee experience and tangible productivity friction as hybrid working became the norm.

The Challenge

The firm’s shift to hybrid working had highlighted gaps in its digital infrastructure that had previously been less visible. Collaboration tools were not consistent across offices, document management had developed across a mix of local storage and cloud environments without a governing structure, and the firm’s client files and working papers were not always easy to locate, particularly for staff working remotely. Knowledge management was identified as a priority. The firm’s intellectual capital, including tax opinions, precedent research, and client engagement records, was distributed across systems that were not well integrated, making it harder for teams to build on prior work efficiently. Onboarding new professionals took longer than the firm wanted, relying heavily on informal knowledge transfer. Leadership saw an opportunity to use the move to hybrid working as the right moment to establish a more deliberate and well-governed digital workplace.

Our Approach

Levarcon conducted an initial Digital Workplace Maturity Assessment across four representative offices and a sample of remote workers, benchmarking the firm’s environment across five dimensions: collaboration infrastructure, knowledge management, document governance, employee experience, and IT service delivery. The assessment produced a maturity profile and a prioritized improvement framework.

Based on assessment findings, Levarcon designed a unified Digital Workplace architecture centered on the Microsoft 365 platform, selected for its compliance capabilities, enterprisegrade security controls, and integration potential with the firm’s existing practice management and client portal systems. The implementation rollout was structured in four phases over fourteen months.

Phase 1
addressed the most acute risk: document governance. Levarcon designed and implemented a structured information architecture within SharePoint Online, with role-based access controls, document retention policies aligned to regulatory requirements across the firm’s operating jurisdictions, and migration of content from fragmented legacy environments into the unified platform.
Phase 2
consolidated the collaboration environment, standardizing on Microsoft Teams as the primary communication and collaboration platform across all offices. Levarcon managed the change effort, providing structured adoption support, persona-based training curricula, and an internal champion network to accelerate cultural uptake.
Phase 3
delivered a Knowledge Management solution, leveraging Viva Topics and a curated SharePoint intranet to surface the firm’s intellectual capital in an accessible, searchable form. Structured knowledge contribution processes were embedded into the firm’s engagement workflows.
Phase 4
focused on analytics and optimization, equipping leadership with adoption dashboards and usage insights to sustain the investment over time.

The Solution

Levarcon delivered a fully consolidated Microsoft 365 Digital Workplace encompassing unified document management with regulatory-compliant governance controls, a standardized collaboration environment across all offices and remote workers, a structured knowledge management platform incorporating the firm’s intellectual capital, and an employee experience layer providing consistent onboarding, communication, and self-service capability. Change management and adoption support was delivered throughout, with measurable adoption targets embedded into the engagement governance.

Results and Impact

The following outcomes were measured across the portfolio twelve months following full enterprise rollout:

87%

Platform adoption rate across the workforce within three months of full rollout

4 weeks

Reduction in average new hire productivity ramp time, from seven weeks to three

3 to 1

Consolidation of cloud storage environments from three fragmented platforms to one governed solution

41%

Reduction in IT service desk tickets related to document access and collaboration tool issues

100%

Time from pilot launch to measurable governance improvement on both pilot projects

The digital workplace transformation materially improved the firm’s ability to attract and retain professional talent, with the modernized environment cited positively in subsequent recruitment processes. Client-facing partners reported faster access to precedent and research material, with measurable improvements in proposal preparation time. The firm’s information security posture was also significantly strengthened through the elimination of ungoverned file storage environments.

Client Reflection

The Managing Partner commented: “We recognized that our digital environment needed to catch up with how our people were actually working. Levarcon delivered a transformation that our teams genuinely embraced. The adoption figures reflect both the quality of the technology and the care that went into the change management. We are a more connected and capable firm as a result.”

Conclusion

For professional services firms, the digital workplace is not a support function. It is the infrastructure upon which client value is delivered. Levarcon’s Digital Workplace Solutions practice brings the combination of technology expertise, governance rigor, and change management capability required to move professional services organizations from fragmented digital environments to unified, high-performing digital workplaces.

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