Introduction:
Significant transformation projects can easily stall as a result of many factors. These projects can be revived with effective project recovery that includes a thorough review and analysis of the objectives and challenges encountered, followed by detailed replanning and consultation that considers all contributing issues.
Problem:
Progress of a corporate intranet project within a Queensland higher education sector organisation was impeded by numerous challenges, ultimately halting its progress as it fell short of delivering the anticipated goals and benefits.
Objective:
myP3 was engaged to assess and revive the intranet project, which aimed to implement knowledge management, publishing, and collaboration technologies, including the use of SharePoint Online and Live Tiles. These enhancements were intended to facilitate the evolving modern workplace, benefiting both educational and non-educational staff across multiple locations around the state.
Overview:
As a recovery project, myP3 needed to first establish good relations and credibility with invested stakeholders across the organisation including senior management, an external vendor and subject matter experts. This was accomplished by emphasising the merits of the outputs already achieved on the project, while highlighting the areas that needed rectification.
The client refined their requirements for a successful intranet deployment as follows:
- The intranet should be user-centric, functional and provide self-service to help staff do their job well and as efficiently as possible.
- Enabling top-down communication about the organisation, teams or projects to improve business communication and information dissemination to staff.
- Getting the right content to users at the right time; enabling staff to have the ability to conduct enterprise search functionality across the intranet to look for relevant content or connect with other staff members.
- Alignment to the organisation’s business goals and objectives whilst delivering a great user experience to create and embed a successful digital workplace culture i.e. brand and purpose, reward and recognition, share business news and direction, giving staff a voice.
Initially, a comprehensive project assessment was conducted, carefully identifying areas of concern, and thoroughly analysing the root cause of identified challenges. Based on this evaluation and the client’s requirements, a recommended approach to recovery was developed which included an extensive top-down evaluation of the business to:
- Derive key strategic drivers for digital transformation relating to content publishing and collaboration.
- Assess existing publishing, content and collaboration practices and portals including points of pain in finding and searching for information across a diverse group of stakeholders and functions.
- Develop aggregate user ‘personas’ to drive the corporate publishing approach inclusive of usability for minority groups of varying formats.
- Recommend and establish fundamental information management principles to guide project outcomes.
- Recommend a concept for and design an overarching information architecture to be applied to corporate publishing, including definition of information domains, corporate taxonomies and content-type schemes.
- Develop content display standards suitable for user requirements.
- Recommend and develop an information governance framework for corporate publishing and collaboration which was accepted.
The effort was conducted iteratively, working with wide stakeholder groups to ensure outputs and change requirements were adequately communicated internally.
Outcome:
Following a successful recovery process, the project was delivered, empowering the organisation to restructure and optimise their information management, publishing and collaboration processes utilising current advanced technologies.
The transformation is further supported by an approved governance framework, principles, architecture, standards for formats, content types and taxonomies which has streamlined corporate publishing and collaboration efforts.
Requirements for a successful intranet deployment, as outlined by the client, were met.