Scaling SharePoint Online: Wessex Water’s Approach to Site Governance

Wessex Water, a leading water and sewerage company headquartered in Bath, serves 2.8 million customers across the South West of England. With over 2,300 employees, the organization undertook a major digital transformation in 2017, migrating from on-premise SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint Online.

While the migration provided modern collaboration tools, a critical challenge emerged: employees needed the ability to create SharePoint project sites on demand, without waiting for IT. At the time, every request for a new SharePoint site required several hours of manual IT effort.

The main challenges included:

• Time-consuming setup – IT spent hours creating each new site.
• Lack of consistency – without a standardized approach, project sites risked becoming fragmented.
• Compliance concerns – uncontrolled growth could lead to governance and security risks.
• User frustration – employees had to wait for IT, slowing project timelines.

Simon Day, Application Support at Wessex Water, explained:

“We wanted to enable our 2,300 employees to create their own SharePoint project sites, as the IT team was currently addressing these requests manually which involved several hours of IT effort per site. This would no doubt reduce the pressure on IT, however we also realized this new self-service functionality comes with its own challenges, such as site duplication, compliance issues and the inevitable IT sprawl.”

The organization needed a solution that balanced self-service flexibility with governance and compliance.

After evaluating options, Wessex Water implemented ProvisionPoint Enterprise, a governance and provisioning platform for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online.

ProvisionPoint Enterprise allowed the team to create template-driven SharePoint sites, giving employees self-service capability while ensuring sites were consistent, compliant, and fully governed.

Key capabilities included:

• Customizable templates – each site was pre-configured with the right libraries, metadata, and content types.
• Built-in governance – rules ensured compliance with internal policies and industry standards.
• Duplicate checks – new site requests were automatically validated to prevent redundant or overlapping sites.
• Self-service provisioning – employees could generate sites instantly without IT intervention.

Simon emphasized the benefits:

“We knew exactly what we wanted – a repeatable, templated service for our SharePoint users to create consistent SharePoint project sites and site collections. As a major utility company, we also had strict guidelines to adhere to, and ensure compliance rules were followed. Each project site had to feature access to specific components, such as libraries, metadata and appropriate content types.”

The solution enabled Wessex Water to define how each SharePoint project site is created, with rules for all site components including lists, libraries, features, content types, and site columns. Classic SharePoint site collections, such as team sites, document centers, and records centers, could all be provisioned automatically.

ProvisionPoint Enterprise transformed Wessex Water’s SharePoint operations:

• Efficiency gains – site creation went from hours of IT effort to instant, self-service provisioning.
• Reduced IT workload – IT no longer managed every site request.
• Improved compliance – every site adhered to strict governance rules.
• User empowerment – employees could create sites on demand, eliminating bottlenecks.
• Scalable adoption – between 5–30 new sites are created each week, with over 1,800 compliant SharePoint sites live since rollout.

Simon highlighted the impact:

“One of the features of ProvisionPoint Enterprise is that when a site request is made, it automatically checks if one already exists to avoid creating a similar site, avoiding sprawl and site duplication – which was one of our initial concerns when this project commenced. Users feel empowered and are able to create sites much faster than before – there are no more bottlenecks.”

Building on the success of SharePoint provisioning, Wessex Water is now exploring ProvisionPoint Enterprise for governance across Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Groups, extending the same consistency, compliance, and user-friendly management to the organization’s full Microsoft 365 environment.