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Intranets: six months at a time

We've recently started some mentoring with a large corporate client, who has offices (and factories) throughout Australia and into Asia. They've had an intranet for a long time now, and it suffers from the most of the common issues:

• the intranet is little more than a collection of unconnected sub-sites
• information is unstructured, out-of-date and duplicated
• publishing processes are fragmentary and ineffective
• there is little executive sponsorship
• resources are very limited
• little technology underpins the intranet (no site-wide CMS)
• there is an intranet team of one (who is not even full-time on intranet work)

All that being said, various corners of the intranet are well-used and greatly appreciated, and there is a general desire to deliver a site that better supports the organisation's needs. The question is: where to start?

First day of mentoring

The first (whole day) mentoring session focused on building an understanding of the current situation, allowing us to get immersed in the organisation and its culture. Out of this session came a number of topics for further discussion:

• Designing and implementing search.
• Information architecture needs to be developed for the site as a whole.
• Web content management system.
• Standardisation of look-and-feel across all sites and applications.
• How to create an centralised intranet team.
• Developing a business case/getting extra resources.
• Putting new processes and platforms for establishing new subsites, and supporting authors.
• "The Sharepoint question."
• Design of the home page.
• New A-Z index.
• Intranet project (process) objectives, ie where do we want to be in 6 months?
• Intranet strategy docs, comms messages.
• The (desired) role of the intranet manager.
• Creating a roadmap/identifying priorities/identifying opportunities.

Second day of mentoring

The objective of the second day was to create a plan of attack, and an overall roadmap for what to tackle and in what order. Armed with brightly-coloured post-it notes, we used the initial list of ideas (outlined above) as the basis for brainstorming a much bigger list. This produced 40-50 individual activities quite quickly.

The question remained: how to order (and prioritise) these?

To answer this, we used the very simple scoping technique that we developed a little while back. This starts by identifying the criteria for why we would include something in the initial scope of work. We brainstormed a long list, with these being the top six criteria:

• increases intranet usage
• value to the business/end users (impact)
• high visibility
• success stories (can be communicated)
• helps build momentum for the intranet (and team)
• builds trust in the intranet team

We then talked through our constraints, with these as the top six:

• business culture (regionalism, silos, etc)
• staff resources
• budget limits ($)
• no executive sponsorship
• current lack of trust in the intranet (and team)
• lack of clarity around the role of the intranet

With these in hand, we then worked through each of the activities, assessing them critically against the criteria and constraints. Many items expected to be included quickly fell, while a few unexpected items made the cut.

Documenting as we went, a few hours of work generated a quite short list of in-scope items (the first photo), and a much longer list of items that were out of scope (second photo).

The items that ended up in scope were the following:

• Search
• HR site
• A-Z index
• Redesign home page
• Sharepoint for projects
• Needs analysis
• Key intranet policies
• Reposition intranet manager role
• Visibility and exec level
• Intranet message/comms plan
• Promote intranet
• Promote existing success stories
• Develop relationships with other teams

Six months at a time

Perhaps most importantly, we defined our scope of work as being the next six months. Based this, we could then come up with a clear plan of action, consisting of:

• list of activities
• reasons/criteria/directions
• detailed project plan (including resource requirements)
• communications message (a single page)
• executive briefing (PowerPoint presentation)

We will then do a similar activity to sketch out what might be included in the following six months, allowing this to be listed in the comms message and executive briefing, and giving us a full year's roadmap.

There's all the actual hard work to be done, but in two days, we've taken an overwhelming problem and have converted it into a concrete (and achievable) action plan, within the current resource constraints.

A few comments

There's much more to be written about this, and I'll endeavour to report on progress as we go, but a few quick points I think are worth highlighting:

• The chosen activities are designed as much to build the trust in (and resources of) the intranet team, as they are to fix the intranet itself.
• We are starting very small, but have selected the activities to build up momentum (following the upwards spiral model).
• Strategic aspects (such as intranet scope and goals) become just another activity that is scheduled into the roadmap (and in this case, all of these things will fall into the second 6 months or later).
• This is a very repeatable process that can be used in different situations, and at different levels.
• It's fascinating to see what comes out when you step back for a second, and take a critical look at what we are doing regarding intranets, and why.

Again, apologies for the lack of commenting, but you would be most welcome to email me any thoughts on all of this.

Posted by jamesr on August 20, 2006 08:18 PM
Categories: Intranets