I Love it When a Plan Comes Together | Practical Intranet Development

Before you even begin thinking of how to develop your intranet from a technical standpoint, you need to sit down and plan the development of your intranet from a human standpoint. If an intranet doesn't meet the needs of the people using it, the hours of technical work put into it will be worthless. The best way to do this is to bring together the people who will be using the intranet and the people who will develop the intranet, to discuss what is needed.

Identifying the Stakeholders

Before you start building the intranet, you need to know what will be there. In the introductory chapter, we discussed the various people involved in the intranet team: Management, Content Contributors, Developers, Designers, the Network Administrator, and the enduser.

Each of these is a member of the intranet process, and is extremely important to its successful launch.

The Management budgets for the intranet, and depends on its successful operation.
The Content Contributors create and coordinate information on the intranet.
The Developer creates the back end of the intranet, ensuring information can be shared seamlessly and securely.
The Designer creates the front end of the intranet, crafting an interface that's intuitive and easy to use.
The Network Administrator is responsible for the (hopefully) stable and secure operation of the network the intranet is hosted on.
The Enduser is the primary audience for the intranet, and therefore the most important person in the organization to its success. This group contains both internal users of your intranet and external users such as strategic business partners, vendors and customers who might benefit from a higher level of communication with your organization.

Note

The management and endusers make up the stakeholders in your organization's intranet - the people who either make or break its success.

Miss one of these groups, and the whole project can self-destruct. However, of all the members in your intranet development process, two are of more importance than the rest: management, and the enduser. Both have more of a vested interest in the success of your organization's intranet and have a symbiotic relationship: management has to show that the ROI justifies the intranet's development costs, which is best shown by the amount of use it receives from the endusers. As we discussed in Chapter 2, proving the ROI to the Management can be a relatively painless process given the right preparation.

The stakeholders will let you know:

What the scope of the intranet should be. Intranets can be as small as sharing contact and appointment data, or complete information and productivity portals.
What information the intranet should contain. This goes hand-in-hand with the previous point; once you decide what level of detail (basic forms or specific project information) the intranet will contain, your stakeholders will help you to decide what that information is.
The budget for the project.
A time estimate for the intranet's initial development.

Questionnaires

The best way to start planning the development of the intranet is to draft up a short questionnaire, which you can use to direct conversations with your stakeholders. The questionnaire will help you to extract a significant amount of information from the stakeholders, if it is written clearly and succinctly. Avoid using technical jargon in the questions; ensure they can be understood by anyone within the company, regardless of technical prowess.

"The questionnaire will help you to extract a significant amount of information from the stakeholders, if it is written clearly and succinctly."

Here's a sample stakeholder questionnaire. Let's assume for this example that we're installing an intranet at a software development company. Our stakeholder questionnaire might look something like this:

What is your department and position?
How would you rate your need for a centralized resource for information on the network?
- Critical
- Important
- Somewhat important
- Average
- Not Important
How often do you find yourself e-mailing common information back and forth to other members of your organization?
- Many times daily
- Daily
- Weekly
- Monthly
- Never
How would you rate the need for a method of group communication on the network?
- Critical
- Important
- Somewhat Important
- Average
- Not Important
On a 1–10 scale, where 1 is not important, and 10 is critical, how would you rate the following features if they were added to the network?
- Discussion forums
- File Database
- Secure filesharing between different groups
- Common office forms
- Customer relations management
- Support Database
- Other
What do you feel is currently missing as a method of communication among members of your organization?
What daily tasks do you currently find cumbersome and inefficient?
On a 1–10 scale, where 1 is minor, and 10 is major, rate how the above tasks would improve by making these resources available on the network
- Substantial improvement in productivity
- Increased productivity
- Moderate amount of productivity
- No increase in productivity
- Decrease in productivity

Creating a short, but effective stakeholder questionnaire is extremely important in the beginning stages of planning your intranet, Try to keep the questionnaire to about one or two pages; you are going to have a hard enough time convincing people to spare a moment to complete it; if it is short and to the point, then you are more likely to get a good level of response.

The answers obtained from these questionnaires will be invaluable tools in your decision-making process. The more insight you get, the more the intranet will match the needs of the users.

Because of its short nature, you need to pack as much punch into the questions as possible. Go for the following key pieces of information:

If an intranet exists, identify what is currently missing
Identify what resources the stakeholders feel the intranet should have, and why
Identify what roadblocks are in the way of users accessing your organization's resources

Note

Keep in mind that organizations will have different levels of technical knowledge, beware of using too much technical jargon in the questionnaire. Avoid asking leading questions (questions that imply the answer you want). Both of these problems could skew your results.

The results of your stakeholder questionnaire will help you to determine your Functional Needs Analysis, which we will discuss further in Chapter 5. The questions should be designed in such a way as to give you a broad overview of what it is your users want and how useful it will be to them.

Stakeholder Meeting

A great way to kick off development is to book a few hours to sit down with the developers, designers, content creators, and one or two endusers to roughly map out how the intranet should look and function. Even a small organization should be able to appoint a content contributor, a developer, a designer, and two end users. If you are outsourcing your developer or designer, ask them to be present at this meeting.

Each group will have valuable contributions towards the ultimate framework of the intranet: the developers and designers will help to guide the information architecture of the intranet, the content creators will help guide the content of the intranet, and the users will help guide the process overall, by giving you first-hand comments on the suggestions the various team members are making.

Some important questions should be addressed in this discussion, including:

Do the content creators need an administrative portal to enter the content?
Are the content creators' requests possible from the developer's point of view? Can the developer think of a more efficient or viable solution?
How complex is the intranet? Is it a file-sharing service, a collaborative tool, or a central part of their job function?
If your organization consists of several different groups, how do those groups interact with the information on the intranet, and each other?
Should the developer create a custom intranet, or should they use an out-of-the-box solution?

When you hold this discussion, bring lots of pencils and paper. Have each member detail a wish list for the intranet, and show relations between information and groups using the intranet. Have the designer show roughly how navigation would work throughout it. The end users will be valuable gauges for the suggestions your developer and designer make.

Don't be too worried about details such as color or wording just yet, instead try to pin down a basic plan.