The Challenge
Hume Housing is a community housing provider. Its work generates and depends on a constant flow of documents: tenancy records, property and maintenance files, compliance and funding paperwork, much of it sensitive and subject to retention obligations. As with many growing organisations, that content had accumulated across file shares and folders without a consistent structure, making it harder to find, control, and retain correctly. Before committing to a document management system, Hume Housing needed clarity: what content exists, how it should be organised, who should access it, and what good looks like. Building first and asking later is how document projects go wrong.
What Evocate Delivered
In 2022 Evocate ran a document management discovery for Hume Housing, centred on DocsEvo, its SharePoint-based document management system:
- Discovery workshops: understood how teams create, use, and store documents
- Content review: examined existing content sources, structures, and pain points
- Information architecture: proposed libraries, metadata, and naming conventions
- Access and retention mapping: mapped security and retention requirements for sensitive records
- Fit assessment: assessed how DocsEvo would meet those needs on SharePoint
- Recommendations: delivered a clear set of findings to guide the next phase
Outcomes
Hume Housing came out of the engagement with a clear, evidence-based picture of its document landscape and a defined path forward. Instead of guessing at structure, it has a proposed information architecture grounded in how staff actually work, with access and retention requirements mapped against its compliance obligations. The discovery shows where DocsEvo fits and what a build would involve, so any investment decision is made with eyes open rather than on assumption.
Why This Matters
Document management projects fail when they start with software instead of understanding. Hume Housing shows the value of a focused discovery: it surfaces the real content, compliance, and access needs before a line of the system is configured. For community housing and other records-heavy organisations, that upfront clarity is what makes a DocsEvo rollout land cleanly, and it keeps the eventual build scoped to what the organisation genuinely needs.
