Building a new intranet?

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1 A ClearPeople Whitepaper What you should think about before starting your project 1

2 WHAT YOU SHOULD THINK ABOUT BEFORE STARTING YOUR PROJECT Change is often the impetus for most intranet projects. Organisations want to empower their employees by providing them with the tools, knowledge and resources to stay connected and engaged in a world where the traditional office experience is evaporating. More people are working across a variety of devices including laptops, tablets and mobile and are often not connected to a network at a static desk in an office. Such a change in the way the modern workforce operates has forced organisations to reevaluate the way they communicate internally and how information should be shared. More and more businesses therefore are looking to their intranets to help drive this change. But before diving head first into a new intranet project, what things do you need to think about? This handy guide will help you to gain the answers to 5 important questions before you invest in a new intranet. An intranet is an interactive and inclusive collaboration and communications gateway, providing easy access to latest news, content, workflow, documents and applications from whatever device you are on, wherever you are. 2

3 1. WHY DO YOU NEED AN INTRANET IN THE FIRST PLACE? (1) Designing Intranets Creating sites that work, James Robertson (2010) Does your organisation already have an Does it work? What should it do? First, identify if you will be building upon and improving an existing system or if you will be starting from scratch. A new intranet isn t cheap, and it takes hard work and maintenance to get right. The main reason for a company intranet should be to deliver an interactive and inclusive collaboration and communications gateway, providing easy access to latest news, content, workflow, documents and applications from whatever device you are on, wherever you are. In a nutshell, it s about providing a hub to increase productivity and efficiency in an organisation to ultimately do more with less. James Robertson in his book Designing Intranets Creating sites that work (1) identifies five key pillars which all intranets should be built around: Content, Communication, Collaboration, Activity and Culture. If an intranet has these five fundamental pillars in place in theory it should be a resounding success. But remember, the success of an intranet is based upon meeting the needs of its audience - always putting the user first. Don t just assume what your employees want and need. Ask them. Do some research to understand the needs of your business and your staff to find out the key issues and pain points currently experienced that hinder their working day. Remember it s just as important to identify reasons why staff aren t visiting an existing intranet as it is why they are. You ll be surprised by how much insight you can gather from a survey or focus groups. Five key pillars for a successful intranet Content: information, materials, resources and tools to help staff in their day-to-day jobs Communication: delivering this content to an enthusiastic audience Collaboration: encouraging this audience to connect and engage with each other Activity: a place to do things and not just read things Culture: a place that reflects how a company operates, its values, ethos and commitment to its staff 3

4 2. WHO OWNS THE INTRANET ANYWAY? Before you start an intranet project, it s important to confirm ownership and overall governance of the platform. Often ownership is given to the team or stakeholder who manages the budget for the project, but for the project itself to be successful it needs to owned, and more importantly governed, by a team who are invested in its future. Many organisations view their intranet as a HR platform where you fill in a timesheet, download an expense form or look up the recent internal telephone list. Others see it as IT s responsibility because it s labelled technology. And some group it into Marketing and Communications realm owing to the content and resources available. Furthermore some businesses will have a specialist internal communications team and the intranet is managed by a specific Intranet Manager. There is no right or wrong answer here. Evangelists would say the intranet is owned by everyone in the organisation. This of course is the utopian answer but in reality, your company s intranet must be the responsibility of someone. Otherwise its upkeep may falter and usage will drop, deeming it a no-man s land of useless, irrelevant content. Ownership is very much dependent on the nature of your business and its culture. What is important though is that the team who owns and governs the platform understands its objectives and works hard to maintain its credibility and subsequent use. An important point to remember is that the main focus of an intranet is collaboration, so the very nature of ownership doesn t have to sit with one person or team, and can be a cohesive and collaborative effort. We find the most successful intranets are owned by a variety of teams who govern specific pages or areas of the site that fall within their specialisms. This ensures content remains up to date and trusted by everybody in the organisation. An important point to remember is that the main focus of an intranet is collaboration... 4

5 3. WHAT SHOULD THE INTRANET LOOK LIKE? Design will make or break your intranet. True story. One of the most common failures in a company intranet is users not being able to find what they want and design is paramount in ensuring that content is easily found. Now by design we don t necessarily mean pretty pictures, typography and branding (although this does factor into it). But from an intranet perspective, design is about getting under your user s skin, to understand how to make their experience slick, intuitive and easy. But who are your users? Simply grouping your employees into one homogenous mass is the quickest route to intranet failure. Different teams in different locations, and indeed different individuals will all need to use the intranet to solve different problems on a daily basis. To help you identify the main audience groups of your intranet, ClearPeople suggests creating personas. A persona is a realistic representation of the archetype user types of your intranet. Based on qualitative (user interviews) and quantitative (surveys and analytics) user research, they express each group s expectations of the intranet and help to consolidate, uncover and define the direction of a site by highlighting the specific and overall needs of each user type. Personas are one of the best practice methods of the User- Centred Design (UCD) process, which ensures that a system is easy to use, fits with user expectations and meets business goals. From the page layout to the information architecture, every design decision and functional decision should put the end-user experience first. Does it work well for your staff? Is it useful to them? The answer always has to be yes. And never just assume. It s important to research your user s needs and to test the design solutions. At ClearPeople, we uncover this type of information during the Discovery Phase of every intranet project. We aim to uncover the content types, page types and key user journeys of your new intranet in a series of workshops where we ll identify the pain points and potential labelling issues with the current intranet and offer ways to overcome and improve the navigation system for the endusers. Alzheimer s Society homepage as designed by ClearPeople 5

6 Card sorting exercises are a good way to determine whether the users accept and understand the structural navigation of the intranet. It is a standard practice of the User Experience (UX) process and helps to gain insight into any areas of confusion and difficulty with existing or proposed layouts, because finding what you re looking for independently of search, is essential to the adoption and usability of the intranet. To help evaluate the findability of content through the navigation system on intranet, we ll also conduct tree testing. Tree testing can help to refine and improve a site s structure before the build takes place. Here, we create some common user tasks that are mapped against the sitemap and then ask end-users to perform these tasks using the proposed navigation on the site structure. Results can be evaluated quickly and tricky terms that cause findability problems can readily be identified and adjusted. Similarly, building Use Cases to document the functional needs of your end-users is essential in tracking, refining and prioritising the requirements of an intranet project. Use Cases are the foundation from which your Functional Specification is written to ensure the delivered User Interface (UI) supports them. UI UX User Interface: The user interface (UI) is everything designed into an information device with which a human being may interact. User experience: User Experience (UX) involves a person s behaviours, attitudes, and emotions about using a particular product, system or service. 6

7 4. WHAT CONTENT SHOULD BE ON THE INTRANET? We ve already established that an intranet should provide employees with the information, tools and resources they need to carry out their jobs on a day-to-day basis. But what content is this exactly? We wouldn t recommend undergoing an intranet project without first understanding the content you already have available. While time consuming, it is near impossible to change something for the better without some honest selfreflection. And the only way to do this is to carry out a content audit. The aim of the content audit is to provide a foundational cornerstone for content strategy that provides an insight into what content already exists on or for your intranet, how it s organised and how it s displayed at a granular page-by-page level. The goal of a content audit is not to simply collect data but to have the information you need to make good decisions about what needs to be created, changed or removed to provide users with a better experience and service. We have worked with clients who have described their past intranets as jungles or mazes owing to the sheer depth of content on their site and the inability to find relevant information quickly. By understanding what content you have that needs migrating to your new platform will help you to identify the good, the bad and the ugly, as well as give ownership to each separate page to ensure content is kept up to date and relevant. All pages of the intranet should be trustworthy. If a user finds a reason to distrust any information on the site, their usage will no doubt decline. 7

8 5. WHAT TECHNOLOGY SHOULD I USE? At ClearPeople we encourage our clients to think about technology last. Technology is simply the enabler and not the solution. People should always come first. There are hundreds of different products and systems available to build your intranet platform upon, but it s about making the right technology decisions that best fits the purpose of your people. We re experienced in building award-winning intranets on SharePoint, Sitecore and Office 365 and will recommend a technology that best fits your user and business needs. Of course, it s always important to understand what technology your organisation already uses and if the new intranet needs to integrate with other external systems like payroll or CRM. Talk to one of our experienced Consultagents today for a no-nonsense chat on how to make the best decisions for your new intranet. Call us on +44 (0) Visit us at Drop us a line at theconsultagents@clearpeople.com Or pop in for a coffee at 20 Canning Place, London W8 5AD 8

9 ABOUT CLEARPEOPLE ClearPeople is a Consultagency a team of over 50 bright, expert humans specialising in delivering technical consulting services and digital strategy solutions since We work with our clients to transform their digital workspace through people, processes and technology. As market leaders in delivering intranet solutions for clients including Alzheimer s Society, Cystic Fibrosis Trust and Fred Perry, we can offer you unparalleled advice and bespoke solutions to help your business increase efficiency, reduce costs and maximise your ROI. Written by Ricky Wallace Marketing ClearPeople 9