Step Two Designs

CMb 2010–03

Measuring the effectiveness of intranet teams

Written by Catherine Grenfell, published March 30th, 2010

Categorised under: articles, intranets

Intranet teams are responsible for creating an intranet that is a useful business tool, flexible enough to meet changing business needs, easy to use and trusted by staff. In doing this, teams also need to assess how effectively they work.

In a previous article we explained How intranet teams should spend their time. This article outlines some metrics that teams can use to measure their own. These are not the same as the ways to measure the effectiveness of the intranet itself.

Intranet team responsibilities fall into three main areas:

• day-to-day maintenance
• projects and new initiatives
• managing relationships with staff and stakeholders

Day-to-day maintenance

Day-to-day maintenance of the intranet is core business for any intranet team. Most teams will have a variety of valid measures for this, including:

• timeliness of content updates
• number of complete support calls
• number of training sessions run for the publishers
• adherence to service level agreements
• number of content pages reviewed
• up time for the intranet

These tangible measures can be useful but it’s important to focus on quality at the same time. If content updates are fast but inaccurate, or support calls are closed without solving the problems reported, the numbers are not going to be meaningful.

Remember that good measures of day-to-day task completion over time can be used effectively to demonstrate workload or resourcing issues to management.

Projects and new initiative

Projects and new initiatives are part of the most interesting and challenging work of the team, and traditional project management measures may be appropriate here. These include:

• milestones met and deliverables on time
• outcomes meeting specifications
• staff and business goals achieved

More process-oriented measures can show the effect of project work on the intranet team itself:

• number of excessive hours worked to deliver the project on time (lower is better)
• effect of the project on day-to-day tasks
• evaluation of the project’s effect on basic tasks such as publishing content

Managing relationships with staff and stakeholders

Relationships are very subjective and can be difficult to measure. However, there are two indicators that can help indicate how healthy a team’s relationships are:

• frequency of contact
• number of ideas and suggestions shared

Results of satisfaction surveys are used in many organisations. These can identify successful relationships and areas for improvement.

The ultimate indicator of a good relationship is how early in the process the intranet team is engaged. If a team finds out about a new initiative at 5 pm on the day before it goes live, the relationships need work. It the team is included in the first walkthrough of a proposed business change, it’s a different story.

Be careful

Measuring success is a very specific business and metrics need to be appropriate. If you adapt measures from other sources or organisations, make sure they are reworded to reflect their new context.

And be warned, the things that are measured will be the things that management will focus on. Make sure that the set of metrics that is chosen reflects the full range of the teams work and achievements. This will be good for team morale, as well as its standing within the organisation.

Tags: governance, intranet teams, intranets, measures, metrics