Chapter 3: Where do I Start?

Overview

Author: Darren James Harkness

• Identifying stakeholders

• Choosing the tools

• Planning the development

In previous chapters, we discussed what an intranet is, why it can be useful for your organization to have one, and how to justify one. You're probably already itching get started, but, like any good adventurer, you'll want to prepare for your journey first.

Many web developers dive headlong into an intranet project without first sitting down and properly planning it through. In this chapter, we'll discuss how to do this by:

• Identifying the stakeholders in your organization's intranet and categorizing them into groups

• Creating a specific set of questions to ask your stakeholders to help guide the intranet's development

• Finding the "killer app"

• Identifying common problems met by each of your intranet development team

• Creating a development schedule for your organization's intranet

• Planning a release schedule for features on the intranet

• Building hardware specifications

We'll try to prepare you as much as we can in this chapter, but be forewarned: there may be other issues that emerge, which are specific to each individual organization, such as personalities or relative importance of individual departments.

Whether you have an existing intranet and you plan to improve it, or you're starting from scratch, make sure you have management buy-in before you do anything. Nothing is worse than spending hours on a project, only to have it killed because management didn't know you were working on it. Getting management buy-in can be a simple process, if you follow the steps in the previous chapter. Once you have it, you can start the most time-consuming, but most important, stage of intranet development: the planning and research stage.