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

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]

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]

• to find a specific piece of information
• to complete a task

In both cases, staff come to the intranet at the point of need, with a clear goal in mind. If the intranet is well-designed, and they can find what they are looking for, they will then close the intranet and get back on with their job.

Intranet teams work hard to deliver this vision, carefully crafting the homepage and top-level navigation menus. Major sections, such as HR, IT and Finance are also designed to improve task completion.

This still leaves a lot of content. In any larger organisation, there will be many business unit sites or sections on the intranet, and these can quickly become filled with ‘blah blah’ or ‘about us’ content.

Irrelevant content and poor page designs can have a huge impact on the intranet as a whole, reducing usability, findability and staff satisfaction.

Even in the absence of a major intranet redesign or content cleanup, redeveloping business unit landing pages (their ‘shop windows’) can greatly improve the site.

This article will outline the problems of poor design, and will share examples of how to deliver business unit sites that work. Best of all, these improvements can be made incrementally, within the limits of the central team’s time and resources.

[October KM Column, read the full article]

I have often said that intranets hold up a mirror to the organisations they serve. Their purpose, content, structure and navigation must all reflect the unique contexts that they sit in.

This can be seen in the top-level menu items of intranets. If there was one “right” answer, we’d see the same menu items across many sites; or at least, more similarities than differences. Scan your eyes over the collection of menus above: is this what you see?

I see a lot of variation. Some of this will be due to different staff needs, some will be variation for variation’s sake, while others will be bad design. But which is which?

The ever-present challenge for intranet teams is seeing other sites. This makes it hard to discern patterns, and for “best practices” to organically emerge, as they have done for public-facing sites. Should intranet navigation be more similar? Probably, although we need much more research (as an industry) to know what intranets should be converging on.

The first step is for intranet teams to follow a strong user-centred methodology when developing their intranet navigation, as outlined in Designing intranets: creating sites that work. We then need to find more ways as a community (and industry) for sharing experiences, so we can collectively learn what works, and what doesn’t.

In the meantime, we must not blindly copy designs, and be very conscious of the variations that exists out in the wild. Step-by-step we can then narrow down to good approaches and best practices.

(Thanks for the screenshots: AMP, Arup, British American Tobacco, Bennett Jones, Coca-Cola Enterprises, GE, Intermountain Healthcare, Kiwibank, La Trobe University, LSI, PwC Canada, Sutherland Shire Council and Westminster Abbey.)

The best approach for helping staff is to focus on tasks. These are the activities, simple or complex, that staff need to do on the intranet. The goal is to streamline and simplify how these tasks can be carried out.

Uncovering staff tasks

It is valuable to understand the full range of tasks, including common activities done by a wide range of staff, and important tasks that deliver business benefits to the organisation.

There are many ways of identifying these tasks:

• Interviews and focus groups. Discussions with staff, whether one-on-one or in a group, will naturally uncover information about key tasks. Staff will also express frustration with current bottlenecks, as well as highlighting their most important activities. Guide these discussions to ensure that sufficient information is gained about intranet-based tasks. (See the earlier article Conducting intranet needs analysis for more on this.)

[CM Briefing 2010-07, read the full article]

Within the intranet industry, the homepage also inflames passionate debate. This is particularly true on the question of how long the intranet homepage should be.

In the earlier article Seven roles of the intranet homepage, a range of purposes were identified:

1. news
2. navigation
3. key tools
4. key information
5. community and culture
6. internal marketing
7. collaboration

Effective designs find a productive balance between these seven roles, without any one being excessively dominant.

This turns out to be extremely difficult if the homepage is kept entirely ‘above the fold’, squeezed into a single screenful. Within this limited space, homepages often end up being mostly news with a little navigation squeezed into the edges. Internal marketing and a few key links round out the mix.

If the homepage is made longer, much more content and functionality can be included. This could increase the value of the page, and help to balance competing priorities.

But can it be made to work?

[May KM Column, read the full article]

A client recently asked me: “Navigation, isn’t that a bit old hat? I mean, this is the time of Google. Doesn’t everybody just search?” No, they don’t. Good navigation and good links are vital for the success of a website. A search feature is an added bonus, sure. But if you have one, it has to be as good as Google or even better.

Every once in a while, intranet teams have to justify the amount of time they spend structuring their sites and improving navigation.

Stakeholders, often very senior ones, ask: ‘Why don’t we just provide search, like Google’. This would save the time spent developing a user-centred site structure, and after all, ‘it works for Google, and it’s the most popular site on the web’.

It’s an interesting idea, and on the surface, an attractive one. Search is something that can be bought as a product, and deployed. It’s even possible to get a Google-branded product for enterprise deployment.

Coming up with a good information architecture (IA) for intranets is hard. With a huge volume of content, and widely varying staff needs, intranet teams can sometimes despair of ever producing a site structure that keeps everyone happy.

How easy it would be to abandon all this work, and to deploy a great search engine instead. Problem solved. Or is it?

[CM Briefing 2010-06, read the full article]

As discussed in the earlier article Escaping the organisation chart on your intranet, this often means getting away from a navigation structure that mirrors content ownership.

Experience has shown that staff will struggle to find information if they have to know who owns the content first. Yet on many intranets, sections are named after the business owners who publish content, or in the worst cases, entirely separate intranet ‘sites’ contain isolated islands of content.

Intranet teams can, however, find it hard to move their sites towards more user-centred structures. Black-and-white goals such as structuring everything according to task and subject often founder in the face of site complexities.

To help with intranet redesigns, this article outlines three broad categories of content:

1. core staff and organisational content
2. business-unit specific content
3. back-office content

[CM Briefing 2010-04, read the full article]

This organisation was previously structured by market units (roughly equivalent to countries) and business units, but with the size of customers growing, a decision was made to shift to a regional model. This immediately raised some important questions about the intranet.

On the current intranet, there is a global site, market unit sites, individual country sites and business unit sites. What should role should these now play?

With the creation of regions, there is a natural assumption that regional intranets will be required, but what should go on them? The default approach was to replicate the existing market unit sites to create the regional sites, but it quickly became clear that this didn’t make sense.

What should staff have as their homepage? How will global and local news be distributed?

What is needed is a clear and concrete sense of the overall intranet model. This defines the shape of the intranet, and the role of individual sites and sections. This could be very simple from a technology standpoint, or make extensive use of personalisation and segmentation.

This is something that we’ve written about before, and Jane McConnell has also covered it extensively.

The intranet model is not easy to work out, and we’ve seen many intranet teams avoid the challenge. Instead, overly simplistic models are put in place that work poorly for both the organisation and staff.

It’s not just global multinationals that have this challenge. We’re starting work with an Australian government agency formed by the merger of previous departments, and they need to work this out. We’ve also been engaged by the Australian arm of a global company, and this is their central challenge to resolve.

We’re now including several days in our intranet projects specifically to work out the intranet model. As these projects unfold, we’ll share our insights and solutions.

What approaches have you taken to delivering intranets in the scenario outlined above?

Intranet projects may confront challenges such as:

• unclear intranet ownership and governance
• tight timeframes
• limited (and often insufficient) budgets
• varied (and sometimes competing) stakeholder opinions
• large number of end users (staff), with widely varying needs
• technology considerations and constraints
• limited team experience and skills relating to intranets
• poor access to best practices and other intranets

Is it any wonder that intranet projects go off the rails? Even the most experienced and well-resourced teams can struggle under these circumstances.

It is useful to explore common mistakes made on intranet projects. These have been distilled from observations across many organisations, in both the public and private sectors.

The purpose of outlining these problems is to help teams avoid them, and to highlight good practices.

[February KM Column, read the full article]

The best-known is the ‘three clicks rule’, which says that all content should be no more than three clicks away from the homepage of the site.

This, however, is a myth.

Three clicks rule

The principles is that "users don’t like to click", and that their satisfaction with the site falls with each additional click.

This has developed into a rule that every page must be no more than three clicks away from the homepage. The big advantage of this rule is its simplicity: it’s easy to state and understand, and is therefore widely known throughout the industry.

It’s also perhaps the only rule that is familiar to management, outside of the intranet and design profession.

[CM Briefing 2009-21, read the full article]

When it comes to user interface documentation, wireframes have long been the tool of choice. However, using traditional diagramming tools like Visio, OmniGraffle, and InDesign, most wireframes today look the same as their ancestors did from a decade ago – assembled with rigid, computer-drawn boxes, lines and text. While these artifacts have served us well, they can also be slow to produce, burdened with unnecessary detail and give a false impression of “completion.”

This was a great group, and their energy made the day fly by. (It’s so much easier to run a workshop when everyone’s laughing and having fun!). It seems they enjoyed the day too:

“Great lightbulb moments! James is an engaging presenter who knows his ‘stuff” — he has great stories, responds easily and fully to questions, imparts heaps of relevant information and keeps to time schedule too.”

“Thanks, lots of inspiration and focus.”

“Great! Really informative and now I can go back to work with tools to use straight away.”

“Changed my thinking alot about the role of the intranet and how we can improve it.”

“Really informative, engaging and useful.”

“Useful, interesting, engaging, well presented. Lots of useful tips and tricks.”

“Excellent. Well presented. Great use of visuals and slides.”

“Really interesting! It got me in the mindset to get working on my intranet and intranet strategy. One of the best trainers I have seen.”

“Excellent – knows his stuff, keeps it interesting, injects humour. Would recommend highly.”

This is the second time this year we’ve run a private workshop session in Melbourne, and the format works well. It’s extremely cost-effective for participants, and a great way for us to connect with a tightly-knit group of participants. Drop us a line if you’d like to organise something similar in your neighbourhood…