November 25, 2014
Too often organizations fail at developing a strategy prior to embarking on an intranet renewal project. Avoid that mistake with our intranet strategy process.
November 25, 2014
Too often organizations fail at developing a strategy prior to embarking on an intranet renewal project. Avoid that mistake with our intranet strategy process.
Intranet redesign projects start – or at the very least should start – with a deep understanding of what you are going to accomplish, who you are going to accomplish it for and how you will measure success. An effective intranet strategy:
We will drill down into each of these eight steps in additional posts in this series.
This intranet strategy process has been designed for large organizations – more than 5,000 employees with global or very diverse work forces. Smaller organizations need to find the same answers that this process aims to reveal, but can often combine steps or begin with an predetermined set of quick wins.
Step 1: Define your business context
Before you begin contemplating an intranet renewal project, you need to:
Do you have clarity about who is responsible for the success of the intranet? An intranet governance plan answers this question, along with associated issues such as:
Intranet ROI is often spoken of and very rarely actually tracked. This is partially for good reasons – most of the value provided by an intranet does not lend itself to hard return on investment calculations:
The one area in which solid ROI calculation can be performed is in terms of employee efficiency. If you measure how long it takes employees now to complete the most common tasks – and your new intranet reduces this time – you can demonstrate time savings which have a real hard cost. To do this, you must perform a time and task analysis on your existing intranet- otherwise, you won’t have a baseline against which to calculate the return on your intranet redesign project.
You need to understand the motivations of the employees that use your intranet; both the motivations that the intranet fulfills today and those areads where it fails. It’s important to separate the facts about intranet use and satisfaction from anecdotes and persistent myths that develop in all organizations. Valtech employs multiple techniques to gain this understanding:
The objective is to gain a rounded view of your user needs in a format you can then translate into a more effective intranet.
While you are unlikely to fully flesh out the new intranet’s information architecture during development of a strategy, it is very useful to capture a shared vision of the intranet visually. This provides a concrete artifact on which stakeholders can discuss, and in an ideal world agree upon. We call them aspirational wireframes and their role is to:
These wireframes provide a visual framework for ensuring stakeholders are aware of the possibilities of the intranet redesign and aligned on the vision for intranet renewal.
To be effective, your intranet strategy must be based on the reality of your current technology landscape:
Answering these questions defines the limits of what your intranet renewal project can accomplish – your strategy must live within these limits or identify funding for extending them.
You will almost certainly have more needs than can be realistically fulfilled in the initial phase of an intranet renewal project. You will need to make hard decisions about where priorities lie. These decisions need to be informed by four factors:
Valtech commonly uses user stories and a prioritization workshop with key stakeholders to manage the prioritization process.
All of the information gleaned and decisions made in steps one through seven need to be captured and summarized in an intranet strategy. Valtech usually finds that the strategy presentation has several distinct components:
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