Intranet Insight - Stop, breathe and plan
Many organisations are now at the end of Q2 and naturally reviewing and planning for the remainder of the year. If you are responsible for your company intranet, taking a moment to breathe and see how your intranet is doing is a popular past time at this time of year.
If you know that your intranet is not quite working for you but not sure why, understanding the Who, What and how it is being used is key to its continued success.
Over the coming weeks, we will be guiding you through the whole review journey and offering tips and pointers on how to go about evaluating your intranet and what to do with what you find out.
An ongoing intranet review typically covers:
- Reviewing information held on the intranet
- Reviewing usage from across the organisation - Are your end users using and engaging with the intranet as planned?
- Inviting feedback and suggestions from end users
- Referring back to the original intranet business requirements and stakeholder interviews
- Ideas for the next intranet phase
To keep up the momentum, after completing this review it’s a good idea to schedule a mini review every three months to measure performance.
In terms of who to involve in your intranet review, your immediate intranet team are a great way of working collaboratively and enabling you to complete the review. It’s also a good opportunity to engage with your supplier to gauge their thoughts on your findings and ideas for the future.
Your supplier’s role isn’t just about getting you to launch, but to also support you with the site’s ongoing success. They can provide you with ideas and suggestions by showing you what other organisations have done post launch. By providing case studies, additional training or even introducing you to clients with similar business issues they’ll be able to help you steer your site in the right direction.
To kick start your review it’s a good idea to plan regular diary slots before your day to day workload takes over your diary. A great exercise for your first planned slot is to revisit your intranet specification and objectives, have a read through and just start to think about how this reflects your organisation’s intranet today. This may take some time if you have access to this paperwork, if you have inherited your current intranet and can’t locate the latest specification document, then take time to explore your intranet and who is using it.
It’s tempting to rush into an intranet review and bring with it our preconceptions of how it’s going and quickly create an ongoing development schedule and sometimes miss the underlying important issues. This week if you do anything, take a moment to stop and plan your intranet review.
