Column Two

January 9, 2012

Don’t ask staff what features they want on a new SharePoint intranet

Categorised under: Intranets, SharePoint

“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.)

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December 21, 2011

Intranets: global and local

Categorised under: Intranets, Usability & user-centered design

Not all staff needs are the same. Staff in different parts of the organisation, located in different areas and doing different jobs will have quite distinct needs.

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]

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December 21, 2011

Fun on the intranet

Categorised under: Intranets

Intranets vary greatly across organisations, with some focusing on communication, and others on task-related activities. Many are a mixture of both. In all intranets there is an opportunity to have an element of fun.

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]

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December 21, 2011

Digital Workplace Trends 2012

Categorised under: Enterprise 2.0, Intranets

Our good friend and fellow intranet expert Jane McConnell, of NetStrategy/JMC, has just published the Digital Workplace Trends 2012 report. This is a unique view of the current state of intranets globally, and their future direction.

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.

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November 29, 2011

What intranets can do for … engineers

Categorised under: Intranets

Organisations, like people, are often successful because of their strengths. These strengths may sometimes also have a shadow side. Understanding that within these shadows lie openings for the intranet team, provides win-win opportunities for all concerned.

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]

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