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

Designing in the right direction

Intranets can lose their direction for any number of reasons. Some principal ones include:

• the organisational landscape changes significantly due to growth, mergers or change in overall direction
• the intranet becomes a casualty of its own success with expectations exceeding original scope
• there are multiple owners without a single focus to align disparate stakeholder needs

Getting back on track has been discussed in other strategy and design papers including Three elements of every intranet strategy and Intranet (re)design wrap-up, but to summarise:

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

It used to be said that it was too hard to make SharePoint beautiful, but the following selection of examples show otherwise:

Screenshot courtesy of Kiwibank.

Screenshot courtesy of Bennett Jones.

Screenshot courtesy of Bennett Jones.

Screenshot courtesy of Bupa Australia.

Screenshot courtesy of Commwealth Bank.

(Whether you think all — or any! — of these designs is “beautiful” is naturally a matter of taste. The key thing is that each has a clear design and brand, beyond the out-of-the-box SharePoint look-and-feel.)

SharePoint 2010 provides much better tools for tailoring the design of sites, including a range of point-and-click options. These are OK, but limited, and most intranet teams will want to go beyond this.

Lynne Warneke, an experienced SharePoint implementer, outlines the situation:

Plan carefully and budget accordingly! Branding SharePoint 2010 is ‘easier’ than branding the previous version, 2007, but it’s still a complex and involved process if you want a unique visual design that’s a significant departure from the out-of-the-box look & feel. And, as with all things involving SharePoint customisation, there’s a right way, and a wrong way.

When deploying a new intranet on SharePoint, and developing a visual design, therefore:

• Start with clear brand goals. Start by defining the overall intranet brand, and use this as the foundation for the design process.
• Understand the technology platform. SharePoint has its own way of managing delivering sites, that is more complex and technical than many web content management systems. Like all technologies, the best outcomes are gained by understanding the product well, building on the strengths and avoiding the weaknesses.
• Get the right designer. Visual designs must be designed with SharePoint in mind, so they fit with the technology platform, and don’t introduce bottlenecks and performance issues. (There is little value in a beautiful design that costs a million dollars to implement.)
• Get designers and technologists in the same room. Typical website and intranet design processes involved getting a designer to produce a Photoshop file or HTML template, and then “throwing it over the wall” to the developers. This works poorly for SharePoint, so get both groups in the same room from the outset.
• Target effort for the greatest impact. As shown by the examples above, even fairly small changes to the basic template can have a large apparent effect. These include changing the top banner, updating the colours, and tweaking the standard layout elements.
• Manage the effort. Obsessively tweaking the smallest design elements can be hugely costly and time-consuming in SharePoint, and can impact on upgrade options. So be clear about when to “call it quits” on getting the perfect design.
• Ensure designs are accessible. Within the limits of SharePoint itself, all intranet designs should meet accessibility standards, including basic considerations such as colour contrast.

To wrap up with more advice from Lynne Warneke:

In conclusion, make sure you are working from the outset with people who know what they’re doing with SharePoint, heed their advice, be prepared to accept the application’s idiosyncrasies and work within its ‘limitations’, have enough budget to realise your vision, and within all the constraints, do have fun turning SharePoint’s corporate charcoal interface into something that will appeal to your intranet users. From experience I have learned that a more beautiful SharePoint can positively impact user adoption.

On intranets, ticker tapes can be used for:

• emergency information when major disruptions occur such as storms or branch shutdowns
• notification of IT system outages both planned and unexpected
• hooks or teases for news stories or content
• frequently changing organisational information such as share prices or call volumes

The most common way ticker tapes are implemented on intranet home pages is for emergency information or IT alerts.

Ticker tapes are used by some of the biggest news organisations in the world. For example the BBC news site includes a ticker of the latest news.

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

At a basic level, intranets based on SharePoint are just like every other intranet. The same questions of design, structure, management and governance arise, regardless of the technology used to publish the site.

As discussed in the earlier article Promoting the intranet as a service, the intranet should be considered a service, underpinned by a technology product.

SharePoint does, however, introduce some new questions into the intranet planning process. The greatest strength of SharePoint is its breadth of functionality, from content publishing and collaboration, to CRM and application development.

It is this wide range of capabilities that can be so daunting for many teams. Without a clear plan, the results can become a little bit of everything, but no one clear and compelling success.

This article outlines a best-practice methodology for planning SharePoint-based intranet projects. Drawing on the Intranet Roadmap™, it provides a step-by-step approach that every team can take.

The result is confidence from the outset that the project will deliver clear benefits, and an approach that brings together business needs and technology considerations.

Intranet projects on SharePoint need a clear direction

Challenges and opportunities

Intranet projects are not easy at the best of times. Often replacing sprawling legacy sites, they have to meet the needs of a diverse audience with a limited budget and constrained resources.

SharePoint intranets are just like any other technology platform in this respect. Independent of the underlying product, the new intranet needs to be usable for staff, valuable for the business, and easy for the intranet team to maintain.

SharePoint does introduce, however, some particular issues of its own, both positive and negative.

[April article, read the full article]

The introduction of a new technology platform is a two-edged sword for intranets. On the positive side, a good technology solution will bring much-needed improvements and features, both of which can underpin the delivery of a great intranet.

On the negative side, however, a new solution can lead to an unhealthy focus on the technology. Too often, we’ve seen intranet redesigns get highjacked by technology, leading to an excess of new features and an impact on usability. In the worst cases, the new intranet can be harder to use for staff, cluttering the site with unnecessary complexity and solving few real problems.

The more complex the intranet technology, the harder it can be for the intranet team to retain a focus on the most important aspects: user needs, site design, navigation, usability and content.

It doesn’t need to be this way.

Intranet teams can help themselves by capturing the “high ground” at the outset of the project. The (very rough) mockup above shows one possible way.

A concrete vision for the intranet is powerful, particularly when spelled out in a picture. By incorporating new features into the site in the best way, it can help slot in the technology aspects of the project “underneath” the desired user experience, rather than letting the design be dictated by the technology.

We’ve done this very successfully for a few recent projects, and it works even in big and complex organisations. The key is to find the right balance between incremental improvements and sufficient “razzle dazzle” to engage the technology folks and senior management.

Be warned: these mockups can also be problematic. There may not be an opportunity to test the design with users in the early stages of the project, and the project can rush straight to implementation. So manage expectations from the outset, making it clear that this is a “sketch” or “concept” rather than a completed design. And leave enough time to conduct a proper user-centred design process, as outlined in Designing intranets.

How have you used sketches or mockups?