Plan, design, manage, and improve your intranet
Take control of your intranet, with Sam Marshall’s Intranet Success full-day masterclasses. London, 24th / 25th November 2015.
An intranet roadmap is a way to communicate, at a high level, how an intranet will evolve. In some ways it is a bridge between a strategy and a project plan, and the people who benefit most from it are often the power users and site owners that make up an extended intranet community but may not be part of the core team.
In my previous post, I discussed “what does an intranet strategy look like?” and said there should be a section on implementation. The roadmap depicts implementation against a specific timeline and shows the intermediate steps that may be needed to an end goal. For example, technical upgrades that may be needed before blogging can be introduced. It doesn’t need to show every step, but it needs to show enough to:
1. Help people see what is coming: Often enthusiastic employees set up ‘rival’ services like Yammer because they’re frustrated that their intranet can’t do something they see as important. Having a roadmap can buy you some patience, or even better, allow you to bring early-adopters on board at the pilot phase and turn them into advocates.
2. Show some of the dependencies: Intranets span so much of an organisation, and rely on technology, process and people elements, that it can be helpful to have something that reflects how they all fit together. Sometimes it may feel like an organisation is always waiting for the ‘right’ IT to come along, but too often after a technical go-live nothing happens because the content process and governance aren’t ready either.
How you visualise a roadmap depends on what you want to communicate. At ClearBox Consulting we use the 7 streams of our intranet framework to balance strategic, technical, process and feature changes. An example is shown below for a one-year plan (but I’d go for longer if strategy and sticky-tape allow).
- An example intranet roadmap – click to see larger