It’s an exciting but challenging time for intranets. While SharePoint is just one of many intranet solutions in the marketplace, it has gained real momentum, spreading throughout the globe.

This has introduced a whole range of new possibilities for intranets, particularly in the collaboration and business productivity space. It has also injected new energy into intranets, something that has been long overdue.

But let’s face it, SharePoint isn’t a simple platform. Many teams are finding themselves lost in the huge spread of functionality, or baffled about how best to tackle the necessary customisation and development. Too many projects are missing the mark, or reinventing the wheel.

While extraordinary SharePoint intranets have been delivered, there have also been failures. SharePoint implementers have rapidly built up their technical expertise, but technology is just one element of a successful intranet.

For over a decade, our role has been to help teams deliver intranets that work. Intranets that help staff do their jobs, deliver concrete business benefits, and are easy to use. We look across many organisations, and uncover what works (and what doesn’t), and communicate this to the industry as a whole.

Continuing this, our job in the SharePoint intranet space is to cut through complexity, providing answers, examples, models and methodologies. As highlighted in our last post, we provide the 10-15% that doubles the success of SharePoint projects.

We’ve not lost sight of the fact that there are valid alternatives to SharePoint, but neither are we going to stand by and see intranet teams struggle needlessly with their SharePoint projects.

We’re here to help. Watch this space for much more to come.

The classic texts of project management outline the importance of initial planning and design activities. While they only consist of 10-30% of the project, they lay the groundwork for everything to come.

This is no different in the world of SharePoint intranets. Quite the contrary: with the breadth of SharePoint, and the effort and cost often required, it’s even more important to start with a clear plan.

Based on our experience across many organisations, this is our rule of thumb:

Spend 10-15% of the budget of SharePoint intranet projects on planning and design.

What does this mean in practice? Let’s explore a range of projects at different scales, with some example activities (these lists are not compreshensive):

Small, mostly out-of-the-box deployment

Total spend: $25k
10-15% on planning & design: $3.5k

The goal is to deploy a simple intranet using out-of-the-box SharePoint capabilities wherever possible, using configuration rather than development or customisation. Software licenses may be minimal, with external developer support around deployment and setup.

Planning and design activities should include:

• determine an overall scope (what will the intranet do?)
• confirm what SharePoint functionality will be most useful and successful
• learn lessons from past intranet projects

Medium-sized corporate intranet

Total spend: $150k
10-15% on planning & design: $20k

A typical intranet project, deploying SharePoint as the platform for a redesigned corporate intranet. Core SharePoint features are supplemented with development to deliver key capabilities. Typically involves a mix of publishing and collaboration.

Planning and design activities should include:

• uncover and confirming staff needs
• determine an overall intranet strategy and scope
• develop a concrete project plan (beyond just technical aspects)
• select key SharePoint functionality required
• target customisation and development activities
• apply best-practice techniques to determine navigation and design
• establish simple but effective governance and ongoing management

Strategic intranet project

Total spend: $500k
10-15% on planning & design: $75k

Larger intranet projects, either deploying SharePoint in big organisations, or aiming to go beyond a “standard” intranet. Significant amounts of customisation and development will be used to meet specific business needs, and to provide a strong foundation for future growth. Significant use of all aspects of SharePoint, including integration with other systems.

Planning and design activities should include:

• create a common vision amongst all stakeholders
• determine an overall intranet strategy and scope
• create a roadmap for short- and long-term activities
• establish pilots for leading-edge features
• conduct a full user-centred design process for the intranet
• establish the best project team
• build in-house intranet expertise and knowledge
• execute a change management and adoption plan
• establish robust governance
• draw on global intranet best practices

10-15% of planning doubles the business benefits

While getting the technical deployment of SharePoint right is obviously crucial, the best implementation in the world is worth nothing if it misses the mark when it comes to business and staff needs.

To often, implementation starts before the most basic of questions are answered (such as: what will the intranet actually do?). Without an overall vision, plan and scope, it becomes very difficult to make the hundreds of practical decisions that are involved in deploying a SharePoint intranet.

For this reason, this is our experience:

The 10-15% spent on design and planning doubles the business benefits delivered by a SharePoint intranet project.

Time and time again, we’ve seen a small amount of up-front planning and design work have a huge impact on SharePoint intranet projects. The project progresses faster, with less stress and uncertainty, delivering a result that works well for staff and the business.

We do the 10-15%

Step Two have been the leading experts in the intranet space for over a decade. Our role is to know what works (and what doesn’t), and to provide practical methodologies for intranet teams to follow.

In a SharePoint project, we don’t deploy or write code (there are plenty of people who do). Our role is to work with or alongside the geeks, providing the 10-15% of planning and design activities that ensures project success.

We draw on our unique experience, insight into intranet projects across hundreds of organisations, and a clear understanding of the SharePoint platform. Bringing this together, we provide the techniques, answers, examples and screenshots that maximise the value of SharePoint investments.

We can also provide ongoing support, to keep things on track, and to see the project through to a successful conclusion.

Want to know more? Get in touch

When you want to create a new site in your SharePoint intranet, this is the page you’re presented with. It’s pretty daunting for an inexperienced site administrator or content owner:

Should I create a team site or a document workplace?
Would a social meeting workplace be more relevant than a decision meeting workspace?
Maybe I need a blog?
Perhaps just start with a blank site and build from there?

This dialog box gives few clues and little guidance. While nothing is ever set in stone, picking the wrong initial choice will reduce the chances of successful adoption and use.

While this kind of complexity is common across many products, not just SharePoint, it generally leads to patchy and inconsistent intranets that are cluttered with under-used sites.

There are three strategies that can be taken:

1. governance
2. site creation workflows
3. training and support

1. Governance

As discussed in Collaboration Roadmap written by Michael Sampson, it’s important to be clear about who has the rights to actually create a new site on your SharePoint intranet. Will every user be able to create a new site, or will this be restricted to a handful of central administrators?

While there is no one right answer, what’s needed in all cases is good governance. This provide a set of basic guidelines and processes that cover:

• creating new sites
• maintaining and ultimately closing sites
• what functionality can be used
• the rights and authorities granted to site owners

The smaller the number of staff able to create sites, the less training and support is required. (Although the result may be a bottleneck that generates widespread frustration.)

2. Site creation workflows

Another approach is to put some structure around creating new sites. This can include a tailored workflow and approval process that guides users step-by-step through the necessary decisions.

Screenshot courtesy of Coca-Cola.

For example, Coca-Cola in the US has created a “Teamsite Wizard”. This asks a number of key questions, with supporting help content. This makes it easier for staff to create a team site, while ensuring that important information is collected about each site.

Screenshots courtesy of Standard Chartered.

Standard Chartered in the UK goes a step further, creating a fully-fledged process that actively guides staff towards the right choices. Governance is covered off early in the process, and then the user is helped to choose the right template. Key details are then collected for the new site, before going into an approval workflow.

These types of approaches help to put structure around site creation, and are particularly appropriate in larger SharePoint intranet deployments where there is inherently less control around creating new areas.

3. Training and support

SharePoint is a new tool for most, and users will be unfamiliar with what it can do, and how to do it. One of the most obvious ways of addressing this knowledge gap is through training and support.

The work done by Transfield Services, showcased in the Governance and support for SharePoint teamsites report, provides a great example.

Extensive training materials are provided online, written in plain language, and supported by short training videos. Following the learning curve of new administrators, information is provided in bite-size chunks, with links to more in-depth materials where required.

While there is a growing body of excellent third-party training materials and books, Transfield chose to create custom documentation to match the specific functionality they’d turned on (and avoiding the features they turned off). This led to a highly successful deployment, with excellent levels of adoption and use.

Consider all three options

The options presented are not either-or. As the size and scale of a SharePoint intranet increases, it becomes vital to establish all three elements. Even when the IT team pre-creates a set of tailored template choices, users can still struggle to choose the right option.

Look for best practices established by other organisations, and set aside resources to make your SharePoint deployment successful, beyond just turning on the technology and hoping for the best.

What have you seen work?
What have you done on your SharePoint intranet?

“If we gave you a team site, would it be useful to you?”

We’ve said before that the breadth of SharePoint is both its strength and weakness. Intranet and project teams now have a powerful new tool to help the organisation work better, but what features to deploy?

The classic technology-centric approach is to talk to stakeholders in each business area, asking questions such as:

• What additional capabilities do you want on the intranet?
• Which of the following features would be useful to you?
• If you had (feature), how could you make use of it?
• What can we do with the new version of SharePoint?

These questions don’t work. Both our books, What every intranet team should know and Designing intranets, make the point “whatever you do, don’t ask staff what they want”. When tackling a new SharePoint intranet, it leads to numerous problems:

• Staff, unfamiliar with SharePoint’s capabilities, are unsure what they need.
• Stakeholders, enthusiastic about future possibilities, ask for features they won’t end up using.
• Excessive functionality and complexity impacts on adoption and use.
• Limited project resources are spent on “bells and whistles”, rather than key aspects.
• The new intranet misses the mark, and a great opportunity is lost.

Working out what to deliver

There are five fundamental approaches for determining the functionality of a new SharePoint intranet:

1. Understand staff needs. Conducting effective intranet needs analysis quickly builds up a picture of staff requirements and points of pain, and where the intranet can help. In just a week or two, the intranet or project team will know where to focus efforts.
2. Understand patterns of work. The biggest benefit of new technology is enabling new ways of working, which is hard to get shape around. Use scenarios, case studies, stories and examples to uncover how SharePoint can enable new behaviours and activities.
3. Get everyone on the same page. “SharePoint” means different things to different people, and all stakeholders must meet in the middle with a shared understanding, definitions and priorities.
4. Learn what works. Thousands of organisations have implemented SharePoint intranets, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Learn what it likely to work for you (and what isn’t), and use this insight to guide decision.
5. Start simple. Deliver an intranet that is simple, usable and easy to navigate. Add new SharePoint functionality as the organisation becomes familiar with what’s possible, never adding more than what’s really needed.

There is always time to work out what to deliver before implementation starts. Even a few days or weeks spent uncovering business and staff needs will save months of deployment work, ensuring that the new intranet hits the mark.

Most of all, don’t fall into the trap of starting with SharePoint features, and working back to the project scope. Even with the best will the world, it’s easy to get caught up in technology discussions and decisions, losing sight of the overall objectives and outcomes.

(Need help with all this? As our client list shows, we’ve consulted to hundreds of organisations on their intranets, and most of our current clients are deploying SharePoint.)

In a globe-spanning manufacturing business, these differences are very obvious: individual countries sell different products; the sales division operates very differently from product development; and field engineers are not office-based designers.

Yet even a hundred-person government agency has important distinctions: each area of the organisation conducts different activities; policy officers are distinct from admin staff; project teams are working on different initiatives.

In all these cases, there is a mix of global information, common information that is shared across all staff, and local information, specific to groups or individuals.

Historically, intranets have tended to focus on global information needs, with the majority of resources devoted to HR, finance, IT, policies and forms.

Unfortunately, while this information is corporately important, it’s not what staff need daily. Nor is it the information that drives the core business of the organisation.

In contrast, local information tends to be tied directly to operational needs and service delivery. While it’s only relevant to a subset of the organisation (by definition), it can have the greatest impact on what the organisation does.

This challenges all intranet teams to find a way of delivering a site that meets both global and local needs.

[December article by James Robertson, read the full article]

Large or small, organisations are made of people who have interests and personalities beyond their work activities. Recognising this, the intranet doesn’t have to be serious all the time. Including some fun can send a message that this organisation is a great place to work.

Generally we speak about five key purposes for an intranet: content, communication, collaboration, activity and culture. Intranets play a valuable role in reinforcing the existing culture of an organisation, or alternatively in supporting cultural change. The fun element can subtly contribute to improving culture.

Having a sense of humour at Vancity

Vancity is the largest credit union in Canada and its entry in 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards was commended. For this organisation, employee engagement is a key driver within the business and is measured annually. One of the fun elements on its intranet is the ‘Find-o-meter’ that asks staff to rate their search results in a cheeky, casual way. The options were deliberately written and resonated well with staff:

[December article by Catherine Grenfell, read the full article]

With a focus on the “digital workplace”, the report has a usefully broad view of the internal environment within organisations. As Jane explains:

NetStrategy/JMC and a number of other organizations use the term “digital workplace” to convey the sense of an eco-system of enterprise platforms and services that enable people to work, collaborate, communicate, develop services and products, and better serve customers.

The focus of this report is primarily the internal digital workplace as it is used by the workforce, although today internal and external digital channels are partially converging in areas such as customer service, team and community workspaces, and social networking.

Drawing on 456 participating organisations, the report is packed with gems and insights, such as:

The social dimension of the digital workplace is expanding as more organizations are experi- menting with social tools.The percentage of organizations that have some form of social me- dia somewhere in their organizations increased by 10 percentage points from 2010 to 2011.

However, the percentage of organizations that assessed the social deployment as “enterprise- wide” did not increase.This is true for the leadership class as well as for the other organiza- tions.

Forty percent of leadership class organizations are not satisfied with their search configuration and results. Dissatisfaction is higher for the other organizations and is over 50 percent .

In 2011, only seven percent of organizations considered mobile a high priority and made significant investments in mobile services for the workforce.

It looks like mobile solutions for the internal workforce will ramp up in the next year, as over 30 percent consider it to be impor tant and have made “some investment”.

These are just a handful of the invaluable findings in the 158 report, with graphs and key figures highlighting points throughout.

This is a must-have report for all intranet teams planing their future. Survey participants will already be receiving their complementary copy, and for the rest, it can be purchased from the Digital Workplace Trends site.

Consider the case of a medium-sized heavy industry organisation, where much of the workforce are electrical and mechanical trades-people supporting ‘control room’ operational staff. The organisation is unique and unable to buy ready-made technical system solutions so must design and build most of these in-house.

The strength

This situation gives rise to a very strong technical engineering team capable of designing bespoke systems from scratch. For example, measurements and sensor information from across the organisation’s plant are used to provide raw data to operational staff regarding stockpile levels, efficiencies, throughput and plant failures. In essence these systems are windows into the entire operational landscape of the organisation.

A portion of the intranet is used as the delivery system for making these accessible to the staff who need them.

[November article by Stephen Byrne, read the full article]

In 2011 there were over 50 entries, resulting in:

• One platinum award winner: Framestore (UK)
• Nine gold award winners: Queensland University of Technology (Australia), UK Parliament (UK), Lafarge (France), Alcatel-Lucent (France), Lundbeck (Denmark), Malmö Stad (Sweden), ScottsMiracle-Gro (USA), Arup (UK), CRS Australia (Australia)
• Four commended entries: RPC (UK), Vancity (Canada), RSPCA Australia (Australia), CSIRO (Australia)

These excellent entries suggest a number of key themes, six of which are explored in this article.

14 case studies, 200 screen shots

The full annual Intranet Innovations 2011 report features detailed case studies of all 14 winning and commended entries, around 200 intranet screen shots of the sites in question and articles from the judges. It’s available to purchase directly from the Step Two Designs website. At $89 we believe it represents great value.

Here are the six themes we found.

[November article by Steve Bynghall, read the full article]

The 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards uncovered many remarkable ideas and solutions, not least of them being three mobile solutions, from the private, public and educational sectors.

To share these case studies as widely as possible, we’ve published a brand-new Award winning mobile intranets report. This provides three real-world case studies:

• UK Parliament delivering key functionality to MPs, who are rarely in their offices.
• Queensland University of Technology providing staff and students with a mobile portal of remarkably simplicity.
• Lafarge, a global corporation, supporting the yearly senior management retreat with a mobile site.

In addition to the three compelling examples, the report provides further insight from the team at Step Two Designs:

• key themes from the winning case studies
• what staff want on their mobiles
• four types of enterprise mobility
• elements of a mobile intranet strategy

If you are planning to deliver mobile enterprise functionality, this report will give you invaluable ideas and examples to help shape your plans and designs.

Read more about the report

What makes an intranet ‘social’, and what are the differences between ‘social intranets’ and ‘traditional intranets’?

A philosophy and way of working

Social intranets are not a technology, or a specific set of features or functionality. Instead, they represent an emerging view of how organisations should work, and how staff can interact.

The underlying philosophy of social intranets includes:

• recognising that organisations are made up of people, with interests, activities and interactions
• delivering human-friendly solutions that match how people work in real life
• supporting two-way dialogue and interaction between staff
• facilitating cross-organisational communication and collaboration
• enabling staff to be active participants and owners on intranets, and not just passive consumers
• drawing on network effects within organisations, recognising that groups can do more than individuals
• enriching traditional business and internet activities with a social layer

[October article by James Robertson, read the full article]

Developing navigation to ensure the pathways and language are optimised to steer staff to the information they seek is fundamental to a successful solution. A number of familiar and well established user-centred design (UCD) techniques can be called upon to develop this navigation.

Essential UCD techniques include:

• content inventory and evaluation
• card sorting
• information architecture development
• wireframe development
• usability testing

However if the architecture itself is not tested, significant time invested in wireframe development and site build may be wasted.

Having a simple and effective method for assessing the proposed site architecture, before wireframing, allows the designer to refine and retest the site map before developing site visuals which tend to be more difficult and expensive to rework.

[October article by Stephen Byrne, read the full article]

Screenshot courtesy of UK Parliament

Mobile devices become ubiquitous in the consumer space, with “there’s an app for that” reshaping how people get access to information on the move. Up to now, however, the situation within organisations has lagged far behind.

In many cases, staff can’t even access corporate information from home, let alone on mobile devices. Thankfully this is now changing, and innovative organizations are now mobilising their intranets and corporate systems. This has a real impact for staff on the go, transforming intranets into essential tools which makes their working day easier.

Two very different organizations show the way.  In the UK Parliament, MPs are hardly ever at their desks. Now they can receive essential real-time updates of what’s happening in the chambers and committees directly to their phone, all wrapped up in a beautifully designed interface perfect for the mobile environment.

At Queensland University of Technology (QUT), staff and students are provided with a mobile interface to access key information, wherever they are on the campus. This includes exam results, photocopy credits, campus bus times, and breaking news.

This is one of the key themes to emerge from the 2011 intranet Innovations Awards, the annual global competition run by Step Two Designs. Now into its fifth year, the awards attracted over 50 entries showcasing some of most innovative intranets from all over the world.

James Robertson, managing director and founder of Step Two Designs, said “Three of our winners this year were superbly executed mobile intranet projects.  By absolutely focusing on the user and cherry picking only the applications and content that are essential when out and about, the intranet teams have delivered huge benefits with relatively little cost.”

Robertson continued “I expect there will be more mobile entries in next year’s awards.  With widely available connectivity and increasingly sophisticated devices, it is possible that mobile intranets will start to have more impact than their traditional desktop counterparts, particularly where the user population is out in the field or in the frontline.”

Beyond mobile access, innovative intranets do much more. The overall Platinum award winner for 2011 is Framestore, a UK-based animation studio who produce visual effects for movies, television and commercials. Other winners this year come from France, USA, Denmark and Australia.

To see the leading edge of intranets, and hundreds of screenshots from other intranets, obtain a copy of the Intranet Innovations 2011 report.

Last week in London I had the pleasure of presenting at the Interactions 2011 conference. This was the second of my presentations, a 20-minute exploration of the eternal question: user-driven personalisation or targeting/tailoring?

Key points:

• Not all staff needs are the same, and this must be addressed in some way by intranets.
• The overall requirement is to meet both global (common) and local (specific) needs.
• User-driven personalisation treats staff like adults, and allows them to configure their own intranet experience.
• A great idea, but the hurdle to get over: only 5-10% of staff will personalise (as discussed in Designing intranets).
• This hurdle can be overcome if personalisation is essential for work (such as at Framestore).
• The alternative is tailoring/targeting/customising based on what is known about staff.
• There are many ways of doing this, as shown in the sampling of screenshots in the presentation.
• Tailoring is typically done in one of three ways (see Segmenting staff information needs).
• It works, but requires work.
• Do something to better meet staff needs, and start simple.
• And in response to a question: yes, you do have to get Active Directory right first (see Clean up your LDAP or Active Directory).

Last week in London I had the pleasure of presenting at the Interactions 2011 conference. This was my opening keynote, outlining a vision for the role that intranets should play within organisations.

Key points:

• There are three broad “life stages” for intranets (see Introducing the essential intranet, noting that “new intranets” are now called ad-hoc).
• Intranet teams start asking lots of “what” questions (what is the intranet for?), then “how” questions (how do we make search work?), and eventually “why” questions (why do we have an intranet?).
• Clear business value and impact can only be demonstrated when intranets are essential.
• I then gave a tour of some of the recently-announced 2011 Intranet Innovation Award winners, including Framestore, UK Parliament, QUT and CRS Australia.