Functional Needs Analysis - Checklist


You need to define an intranet's functional requirements in the planning stage - well before beginning production. Content in many forms is assumed as a constant (text, video, audio, PDF documents, etc.). It's the other features that need to be determined early. This section includes a list of functional components commonly used in intranets. They are sometimes referred to as "killer apps" which make an intranet invaluable to an organization. Look for something that will eliminate or streamline a cumbersome and inefficient process. Finding the right component (and implementing it well) can be a spectacular career move.

Note

Every organization is different and your killer application may be unique to your company.

Review the following list and classify the functional components that your organization finds compelling into "need to have at launch", "nice to have at launch", "need to have soon", "nice to have soon", or just a "want to have". Once you've organized them by priority, gather information on the technical requirements, cost, and development time required for each item's implementation. Quite often, this data will be the final factor that determines whether an identified "need" makes it into the final Project Scope Document.

We will now take a look at some of the functional components typically implemented as part of corporate intranets.

Brochure Content (Text and Images)

A very basic intranet without a large budget or significant requirements can be quite simple, yet still elegant and useful. If a company just wants to make a limited amount of textual and graphical information available to employees, then this approach can be sufficient. Including links to a public site and other resources is a good way to make this content compelling.

Some companies go forward with this type of idea to begin with. These cases will include information about lines of business, products, services, business hierarchy, and internal policies. As it grows, however, it will typically become difficult to maintain. This is where Content Management Systems and dynamic templating systems become valuable.

Note

A large intranet site with informational utility and no interactivity can be created from brochure content, but the perception may be that it doesn't "DO" anything or that it is just marketing fluff. In addition, long-term maintenance of this content will be difficult.

Basic Content Management System (CMS)

Creating or purchasing a basic content management system can be extremely empowering for an organization. It allows non-technical staff to add, edit, and delete content on the intranet in a quick, efficient manner after minimal training. They do this from a graphical web interface to a database where they can read and write information. This information in the database is then dynamically presented to site users.

A basic CMS would typically allow an organization to manage text and images for multiple content areas, including news, press releases, organizational information, and other business data. It would also allow for the definition and implementation of a workflow for developing, validating, and publishing content.

Some excellent CMS systems of commercial quality are available as open source freeware.

There are many ways to approach the creation of a CMS and they are discussed later on in Chapter 8.

Sophisticated CMS with Dynamic Menu Systems

Sophisticated content management systems can act as complete site management tools that allow new content areas to be created by a range of users with different roles and responsibilities. Every aspect of an intranet site, from navigation hierarchy to content, formatting, and functionality can be controlled through a web-based system. Roles and responsibilities can be defined where some administrators can only add content to the database but not publish it to the intranet, while others can add content, edit it, and publish it to the intranet.

Developing or purchasing a system like this can give non-technical administrators (with some training) the ability to maintain a large, complex web site. This is done through the use of pre-defined templates that will usually have been customized by your development team in consultation with your design team.

More information on CMS systems is available in Chapter 8.

File Management Utility

Among the most valuable benefits an intranet offers an organization is its information centralization. This can give all employees access to corporate data in a single location, and reduce the cost and time required for maintaining multiple file servers.

From an informational perspective, an intranet should be used for more than just the dissemination of raw and processed data. It should be used as a primary method for distributing and maintaining a document repository for all employees. Instead of making sure that all employees have the most current Microsoft Word templates, PowerPoint files, and corporate logos installed on their machines, all these documents should be located on the corporate intranet. This will become the default destination for users seeking these files.

A file management utility will allow select administrators to add, edit, and delete documents through a web-based (HTTP) interface instead of requiring File Transfer Protocol (FTP) access to the intranet server's document repository - a significant security benefit. It can also tie into a User Management system to check user profiles for required permission levels to access certain documents and document areas. Delegating the maintenance for areas of what can become a significant file store will ensure that someone has responsibility for every file group.

Note

While most organizations have unique IT infrastructures, there are some that configure their intranets to run on machines that are also accessible through a local network. In instances where this is the case, Microsoft Office and some other collaborative systems such as Lotus Notes allow "Workgroup Templates" to be defined (any local or network directory path is valid). If this is possible in your organization, you may want to consider allowing this due to the seamless integration it offers with various products by Microsoft and other vendors. While it may seem redundant to make the documents available through both channels, there will typically be numerous instances where a user can access the intranet but not the local network (public web access to the intranet might be allowed by your systems administrators but not Virtual Private Network access to local drives).

Basic User Management

Most intranets include significant amounts of sensitive corporate data. This is why it is important to have at least a basic degree of password-protection in place to restrict access to approved users. If the intranet is available via HTTP to users outside the corporate firewall, then this should be considered mandatory.

Many intranets just have a generic corporate password for all users. This happens when access needs to be restricted to employees only and a systems administrator simply password-protects the intranet's root directory on the web server. This results in a password prompt appearing the first time any user attempts to access any page or document within that root folder. If the user enters the correct password, they are authenticated as having permission to access everything in the folder.

What often makes these generic passwords inappropriate is that they get stale-dated. When personnel changes occur, ex-employees tend to retain their access privileges because system administrators don't want to change the password for all employees. This can obviously represent a significant security risk.

A Basic User Management system will allow individual users to each have their own access ID and password. An administrator will be able to add, edit, and delete user privileges as requests come in from Human Resources or other appropriate departments. These systems are quite simple to develop, or to purchase and implement.

See Chapter 10 for more information on intranet security.

Sophisticated User Management

A Sophisticated User Management system will allow an administrator to place intranet users into categorized groups, and then define access privileges for each group. These privileges will regulate which users and groups have access to certain areas of the intranet, including content and functional areas. This is so that marketing staff can enter their timesheets (in a hypothetical situation where timesheet entry is part of an intranet), but will only be able to see their own time, whereas a Vice President will be able to enter their own time as well as view and create reports on all employees' timesheets. Most other functional components that can be personalized and customized, such as calendaring, appointment, and CMS systems, would logically be integrated with a sophisticated user management application.

A system like this is recommended for more complex intranets with many users across multiple departments and lines of business. New users can just be added into defined groups according to their role in the company, and old users can be deleted from all groups in a single place.

Something to consider when discussing the need for a User Management system for the intranet is whether or not it should tie into a CMS (if one is being deployed) or other security systems. Minimizing the number of passwords employees need to remember is a good thing, but there are some security drawbacks to this as well. Read Chapter 10 for more information on the Single Sign-On issue and general intranet security.

Contact Management Utility

Most companies have thousands of business contacts, including clients, prospective clients, partners, suppliers, professional service providers, and miscellaneous friends. The personal information for these contacts is normally distributed across various people in an organization, with some staff having the proper address and phone number for a client while other staff have an old address, but correct birth date, mobile phone number, and e-mail address. Centralizing this information in a database to which all users have access is a way of ensuring that everybody has access to the correct contact information (assuming the right contact information exists in the system), and that data redundancy is reduced.

To add significant utility to a system like this, include a component that allows for contact reports - where staff can add detailed notes about conversations and meetings with the contact, ideally accompanied by a date for follow-up (if applicable). The Contact Management Utility could then display the Contact's contact information, with dates and details of contacts available, too. An added feature would be to have this tool automatically generate a reminder e-mail to the person who entered a contact report when the date for following-up with the contact arrives. Also worth considering is a feature whereby each contact can have a "single-point of contact" within the business listed against their name.

Time/Project Management Utility

Tracking projects and resource time spent on projects across an organization is a considerable task for any organization that wants to quantify the work. Calculating the profitability of staff and projects is obviously very important in an environment where the bottom line is relevant.

A Time/Project Management Utility allows company administrators to create project profiles with estimated budget breakdowns, project details, contact and scheduling information. Once a Project Profile exists, staff can track the time they allocate to each project and reports can be generated periodically during a project's development cycle and again at its end. This is an excellent way to control expectations for multiple projects in any size of company.

The level of sophistication in a system like this can vary greatly. Fortunately for someone considering implementing a Time/Project Management Utility, there are numerous commercially available products which can be evaluated for research purposes or for purchase.

Discussion Forums

Discussion forums, when used seriously, can be incredible resources for companies. Staff can use them for any type of collaborative feedback and discussion processes where extended physical meetings are impossible. They allow for paced review, thought, and response in a way that is very similar to group e-mails, but quite distinct.

Once a discussion has started, people can read previously posted comments and post their own thoughts in response to them, or as a new comment. The distinction here is that discussion forums have the potential for multi-threaded discussions where a graphical representation of a discussion's flow of posts and responses is available to users. This is something that is very difficult to do through e-mail and is unique to this type of tool.

As well, a discussion that continues for several months over the course of a project can sometimes lack all the relevant information in context. Use of a forum like this, however, will allow for quick, efficient references to previous points and issues.

Private discussion forums can be created for specific projects, initiatives, and departments, and public discussions forums can be utilized for general corporate questions and answers. A key feature that should be included in any discussion forum is search, so users can search for words and phrases in specific discussions and across all discussions (as per requirements and permissions, to restrict access where necessary).

Calendar Utility

A Calendar utility on an intranet can be helpful for communicating holidays, significant corporate events, and other general reminders (tax filing dates, etc.) to staff. This would appear universally for all intranet users on a Calendar page, or as a secondary item on a main page.

Note

Calendars can be a real killer application in settings where people are often in and out of the office, as it increases the possibility of face-to-face communication among staff. The drawback of this, like many other tools, is that it will only be as valuable as the integrity of its data. If people don't keep their schedules up-to-date or its adoption rate isn't very high, then the data will be unreliable and the components' chance at success will suffer.

Employee Directory

A searchable Employee Directory can be invaluable on an intranet, particularly in large organizations. This type of component can be as simple as a searchable phone book or as sophisticated as an all-encompassing Human Resources information system where all employees' data is stored, but the level of access to personal information is restricted according to users' access privileges. In the latter case, individuals would have access to most of their own data, but only names, titles, and phone numbers of other employees, while HR group members would have access to all users' data.

An implementation of an employee directory should include an extended search capability that allows users to search for employees by keyword and sort results by name, location, department, and title. User profiles should include all relevant contact information, including mail address, e-mail address, phone number(s), title, and department. If available, a photograph should also be included - this is a great way for new employees to learn the names of their peers, and for security personnel to verify employees' identities.

An extra "Wow" factor can be built into this system by cross-referencing the complete Organization Chart with staff profiles for multiple methods of navigation. As well as keyword searching, the employee directory could be developed to function like a drill-down database application. This would include listing names and titles for each employee's, who they report to directly, and their supervisor in individual profiles. These names would be clickable and take users to the appropriate profile where they could continue up or down the organizational hierarchy.

Typically, an employee directory will be part of a centralized directory service that multiple components will access to determine who a user is and what their access privileges are. Human Resources or another appropriately delegated administrator would be responsible for administrating it. This would cause authorized updates to staff profiles (when employment status changes) to be reflected in this system and any other systems or components that rely on its data.

Personalization

Personalization cannot be introduced into a project's scope without some level of security (user authentication) either already in place or scheduled for development.

Once a security system is functioning and a user has been identified by it, matching categorized content with their corporate roles and responsibilities (or groupings) can be done by either:

  • a general application server

  • a specialized one-to-one application server

  • a specific personalization engine.

The resulting personalized pages will also usually include some elements defined by the user as per their unique preferences. These elements will typically be limited to basic presentation-layer modifications such as color preferences and how content and functionality elements are organized

See Chapter 10 for more information on Personalization.

Web Access

Many intranets are only available to internal corporate users who are inside a firewall. This is understandable due to security concerns and some internal corporate policies that want to regulate from where the intranet is accessed. When advanced functional components, such as those discussed in this section, are included in an intranet, there will be circumstances where opening access to outside users should be considered. If mission-critical items like a time/project management utility or contact manager are going to be included in an intranet, their immense utility to staff will necessitate allowing them access while they are away from the office (at home, at a client's office, or at a conference, for example).

There are a number of ways to attend to this, but your network administrators should address this issue as its primary concerns regard corporate IT security policy.

Remote Web Access should be considered during the Need Analysis to ensure network administrators properly scope it out (and estimate related costs and implementation time) for inclusion in the Project Scope Document (more on this later).

Boardroom/Resource Booking Engine

Even the most sophisticated organizations are often challenged by how to manage their meeting rooms and hardware resources. This is because many existing booking systems are too vague, too cumbersome, or just badly implemented. Quite often, established reservation procedures are ignored, meeting rooms and technical resources (laptops, projectors, etc.) get double-booked (or booked and not used).

Implementing a usable, web-based Boardroom/Resource booking engine can make an intranet project manager into a corporate hero by replacing an inefficient, often-hated offline process.

Searchable Content

A commonly-held misperception is that an intranet site can easily be indexed and made searchable by keyword. This is not true in most cases.

An intranet site's searchability depends on the following factors:

  • What will the searchable contents of the intranet site consist of?

  • Will only the HTML files need to be searchable? Or will there be numerous other documents in multiple formats (.pdf, .doc, .ppt, .xls, etc.) that will also need to be searchable?

  • If meta information (title, keywords, and short description) about the other documents exists within the HTML files (or CMS database), then it might not be necessary to make them searchable as they will still be accessible through a simple search.

  • How will the content and documents be stored: inside a CMS, or as individual files?

Once these technology and content formatting factors have been clearly resolved, the Search function can be defined. There are many ways to approach this. Note that there is a "Search Solutions" section later in this chapter.

Expense Reports

Creating an online utility that allows authenticated users to file their expense reports will be greatly appreciated by users. This process normally involves lots of paper, processing, and waiting for reimbursements. If you can reunite people with their money in an expedited fashion, you will have found your "killer app".

"If you can reunite people with their money in an expedited fashion, you will have found your "killer app"."

Job Listings

One content group which is normally an afterthought but that should definitely exist in your planning is for internal job listings. Companies should post all employment positions internally so that staff considering career moves stay internal and their corporate knowledge is not lost. Furthermore, this is the type of information that people really appreciate having access to.

A Final Word About Functional Components

Many of the functional components discussed above can easily exist independently of each other, but in many cases should not. While you can either purchase or lease some components and develop others internally, thought should be given to how the items selected on your Needs Analysis checklist will work with each other. As a general rule you want to minimize the potential for redundant data (having the same information exist in multiple instances) because it will be difficult to track which data is the most correct over time. So if you're going to create an Employee Directory, Calendar Utility, and Resource Management tool (or any other set of components that will rely on common data - in this case user profiles), ensure your technology team approaches their solution holistically.

If the components are going to exist across multiple systems and/or networks, consider implementing a centralized user directory based on Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) or Microsoft's Active Directory. With that in place, other applications could access it through Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), which is basically a XML packet (information object) that components can request from the user directory to determine if users are authorized to access systems, what their group privileges are, and what details are included in their individual profiles.

Available Technical Resources

When the Needs Analysis has been completed and you have a checklist of the functional components identified for inclusion in the intranet, you will need to find people who can make it happen.

The first person you need on your side is your technical lead, the senior developer who will either do most (or all) of the coding or manage a team that does it. This person should have a very lucid comprehension of your existing corporate IT structure and understand the theory of how a web site will function in relation to it. Actual experience developing web sites isn't as important as their appreciation of the process and their ability to manage technically minded people.

Take some time to discuss some of the more complicated components identified in the Needs Analysis with your senior developer. Ideally they will have been part of that phase and already be familiar with the underlying rationale for the decisions made during it. You don't need to understand the technology, but you should get a clear understanding of the issues so that you can relay them to various project stakeholders. If your senior developer doesn't communicate well with you and you aren't comfortable, try to find someone else to fill the role. When things inevitably get complicated, it's very important that you have someone on your side with whom you can talk plainly.

When you're comfortable with your senior developer, you will need to work with them to make some decisions in regard to development approach, hosting platform, and scripting language(s). The resolution of all these issues will determine what skill sets will be required for the development and implementation of your intranet.

If resources with the required skill sets exist internally, you will need to make sure these resources will be available for the development cycle. If they do not exist or are not going to have the availability for your project, you will need to obtain a budget to hire some resources.

There are three distinct options for hiring outside resources. In each case, before making your final decision, have your senior developer meet the resources to determine a level of confidence in their work. A few compelling questions can separate the wheat from the chaff fairly quickly.

The options are:

  • Hire experienced professionals on a full-time or contract basis. Make sure the resources have the required skill sets, sample URLs (to view their previous work) and references. If they don't have sample URLs or CD portfolios of work, then they aren't serious about their profession. Even students and newbies who take pride in their work will create a sample site to demonstrate their skills. For something as mission-critical as a significant intranet project, you don't want to pay people to learn on the job. And you definitely don't want to rely on undependable or unprofessional staff.

  • Hire a small web design agency with experience creating intranets similar in scope and scale to the one you will be building. This agency will typically consist of one to five designers and developers who own and operate their own small firm. Each project tends to be extremely unique to them, and this normally results in innovation and creativity, but sometimes at the expense of efficiency, process, and clear meeting of expectations. Occasionally they will contract out complicated work to specialized professionals when they are busy or project scopes are out of their depth. They will almost never turn work away or say they can't deliver a project on time, on schedule, or on budget. These firms tend to be "hungry," on the cutting edge of development techniques and quite interesting. That being said, make sure to obtain references from people who aren't their friends or family, and be satisfied with their portfolio. Once an agency grows beyond eight or nine staff, they stop being a small web design company and their "process" becomes more defined. Simultaneously, the volume of their documentation and for-hire rates increases.

  • Hire a professional firm. This is typically a company that started as a small web design agency and evolved to either a high-end boutique shop or a full-solution Internet development organization that takes care of "all your web needs" from copywriting to design and implementation. This breadth of work is normally possible due to the staff's depth of experience with smaller companies and projects. The result of this experience is usually greater attention to documentation, preparation, planning, and meeting expectations.

    While these firms' rates can be quite expensive at times, a level of confidence and comfort in the firm's experience and professionalism usually offsets the cost. Do be very clear in your contract about delivery dates and budgets because cost overruns due to delays on your part can be quite upsetting with some of these agencies (you pay for their developers' time even if they aren't working because they are waiting for you to deliver assets, designs, approvals, or something else required to continue or commence their work).

Remember: All your resources should make you comfortable with their skills.

Additionally, remember to think about who will be doing maintenance on your system(s) after launch. If you're hiring external developers, will they deliver adequate training to your staff so all updates won't result in additional charges? Or would you prefer to contract maintenance to an external staff at a fixed rate or on a retainer? These things should all be considered and budgeted for (if necessary). Don't be left high and dry.




Practical Intranet Development
Practical Intranet Development
ISBN: 190415123X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 124

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