FI Consulting, a US-based consultancy, had spent twenty years building up proposals, client materials and governance documents, but had no effective way to organise, browse or search any of it. The firm was already running Microsoft 365, including SharePoint Online, Teams and OneDrive, yet search was weak, storage was inconsistent, and there was no shared logic for where new information should be filed. We ran a structured discovery project to define the foundations of a stronger knowledge centre, covering taxonomy, information architecture, search behaviour and the browsing experience around it. Rather than moving straight into a build, the engagement produced a clear blueprint: a proposed taxonomy, an information architecture and sitemap, and interactive wireframes. FI Consulting went on to implement its new site elsewhere, on the back of that blueprint, and their CEO called the discovery an outstanding professional services experience.
The challenge
FI Consulting’s problem was never a shortage of documents. Over twenty years the firm had generated a substantial body of content, including proposals, client project materials and governance documents, all sitting inside an existing SharePoint repository. CEO Roman Iwachiw put it plainly during the initial scoping discussion: there was no centralised structure, which meant employees struggled to find what already existed and had no clear sense of where a new document should go.
Microsoft 365 was already in place, and that was part of what made the problem worth solving properly. Internal notes from the project describe document storage and search functions as inadequate, with employees struggling against poor search capabilities and no intuitive system for browsing information. That combination is familiar in enterprise knowledge management: weak findability, inconsistent storage, unclear information architecture, and no shared logic for organising things in the first place. Fixing one of those on its own rarely fixes the others.
Does this sound familiar?
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Why start with taxonomy and information architecture?
FI Consulting wanted a genuinely better knowledge management system inside Microsoft 365, not a like-for-like refresh of what already existed. That meant working out, before any development began, how information should be structured, how people should browse and search for it, what taxonomy and metadata would support findability, and what the information architecture and sitemap for a future knowledge centre should actually look like.
Treating this as a discovery and design exercise rather than a rushed implementation was the right call. A platform built on unclear logic just reproduces the same problem in a new interface. Before FI Consulting committed to building anything, they needed clarity on the thinking behind it, so the engagement was structured as a sequence: a project kickoff, a knowledge centre discovery workshop, a taxonomy workshop, a review of the information architecture, sitemap and interactive wireframes, a recommendations playback session, and a formal knowledge transfer and close-out. Workshop notes from that sequence describe the goal as understanding FI Consulting’s vision and preferred approach for the knowledge system, identifying the needs of both employees and managers, and establishing the most effective approach for designing and structuring the platform. That is more than a visual exercise. It combines user experience, taxonomy and business context, which a navigation redesign on its own would never touch.
What was delivered
The discovery produced a set of deliverables FI Consulting could use directly as the basis for implementation, ordered here by how much each one changed the way the business could plan its next step.
- Information architecture, sitemap and interactive wireframes. One review session was framed around exactly this: the IA, the sitemap and the interactive wireframes together. In practice, this gave FI Consulting something they had never had before: a concrete, walkable version of what browsing the knowledge centre would actually feel like, rather than a description of it.
- A proposed taxonomy structure. A dedicated taxonomy workshop was run to define the required taxonomy for the platform and establish the logic to be used for automated tagging. In practice, this is the layer that makes search worth having: without a shared taxonomy, a better search bar just returns better-ranked noise.
- Recommendations on search and navigation behaviour. The original scoping work had already framed the target solution as an information architecture solution based on SharePoint, built to centralise documents and make information easier to navigate and search, combining a search-based and an exploration-based approach so that people who know what they want can search for it, and people who don’t can browse their way there instead.
- Guidance on scope, phases and implementation considerations. In practice, this meant FI Consulting could weigh a phased rollout against a single build, with a realistic view of what each option would take.
- Knowledge transfer materials and close-out documentation. At project close, the handover confirmed that FI Consulting received the recommendations John provided, along with the initial wireframes, design concept, and further detail on how a consulting engagement to take the work further would work. In practice, that meant FI Consulting’s own team had everything it needed to keep the project moving, whoever ended up building it.
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“I want to thank you all, everyone, but especially John, for an excellent project. I'm very satisfied in terms of both process and results. In my opinion it was an outstanding professional services experience.”
Why it mattered
FI Consulting took the roadmap we produced and implemented it with someone else, and its CEO still described the discovery as an outstanding professional services experience. It shows a discovery project standing on its own as a deliverable, rather than working as a way into a build we didn’t ultimately win. Several of the routes out of a knowledge management strategy don’t involve us building anything at all, and FI Consulting is that argument happening in practice, verified, in a client’s own words.
Roman Iwachiw, CEO of FI Consulting, was direct about why implementation went elsewhere: the price tag to go further was well beyond what the firm could justify against its budget. He was equally direct about the value of what came before that decision, telling us that Content Formula had put FI Consulting in as good a position as it could be, with the foundation set. A later account update from Andrew Eastman, in October 2025, confirmed that FI Consulting had gone ahead and implemented the site based on the discovery work, with some adjustments made internally as development progressed. By January 2026, the team had completed testing of the new site, was making post-test adjustments, and had a planned launch in the first half of Q1 2026.
Before the discovery, FI Consulting had a broad, familiar problem: too much information, weak search, and no organising model to fix either. Left alone, that kind of problem tends to get worse rather than better, because every new proposal or governance document added to an unstructured repository makes the eventual clean-up harder, not easier. The discovery gave the business something far more specific to work from: a defined taxonomy and tagging logic, a user-centred view of how browsing and search should work together, and a phased view of what implementation would actually involve, backed by interactive wireframes stakeholders could see rather than just be told about.
That’s the real test for a discovery project: whether the client is left with a foundation solid enough to build on, even with someone else. FI Consulting was.