ClerksWell have been building, designing and thinking about intranets, portals, digital workspaces or whatever you might call them for nearly 20 years! In that time, we’ve been very successful in helping clients overcome dead ends and set up engaging intranets.
All of our clients have access to our experience and expertise through our proven methodology and can work fluently through the process of creating or re-imagining your intranet or digital workspace by following our step-by-step planner.
So why is an intranet methodology important?
It helps you to work out the questions – the ‘Why? What? How? Who? of your project. Then facilitates you, your team or our team to fill in the answers.
It’s a checklist of everything you need to do for success.
It’s a best practice blueprint that challenges you and guides you in equal measure
Our November webinar walked you through the process in detail, but this blog gives you a quick overview
What does the ClerksWell Methodology for intranet success look like?
We offer 6 streams of services to our clients. We can provide all of these services but our flexible approach recognises that you may have already stated to tackle a few streams before you even engage us.
At the very beginning of a project we go through each stream to examine what it means to your organisation, discuss the best approach for your project, and assign responsibilities.
6 Streams:
The User Experience stream helps you to set up and answer the why and the what questions – What do you need on the new intranet and why? Together we define business problems in a way that leads them towards solutions. We also look at what is practical or affordable given your current or proposed software, budget and timescale.
The Content stream is what makes this your intranet really come to life – the words, pictures, data from your organisation. The first part looks at working on what we know works based on your wish list created in the User experience stream.
Then it’s about the practical building, ensuring that content is stored, tagged and signposted properly so that it can be found.
Branding concerns the look and feel, colours and imagery that brings your intranet to life. It makes it feel like it is a part of your organisation, but can also be an opportunity to reflect your internal persona – it might be more relaxed and fun than your corporate website because this is an opportunity to send out a new message to employees. These are decisions ClerksWell can help you with.
The Technology stream involves ensuring that the platform and everything that connects to it
is all in sync. It’s about recognising the factors such as licensing, permissions or support issues that a new intranet could generate. Once you have that knowledge, you can plan how to succeed.
The Adoption and Engagement stream means communicating with the people who are going to use the new site or system. Giving them a clear message about what is changing, why it is changing (and sometimes what isn’t changing!) is essential to ensure that people don’t expect the wrong thing. We should remember that people’s attitude towards new things and their effective adoption of the new can really vary – from the quick update adopters that will pick up the new with little effort, to the middle ground where a bit of effort is necessary, to the smaller group where anything new is perceived as detrimental. This variation can be made better or worse by communication, so make sure your communication is good, but also ensure there are support opportunities for the most compromised people. This is why as part of our strategy we suggest that the company has what we call ‘intranet champions’. Intranet champions are employees that encourage and promote use of the intranet.
Governance and management is about structure and control – as with all the other tasks we’ve discussed, it concerns getting the right fit for your business. Some cultures require detailed robust processes to be followed at all times, but others will have a looser more flexible approach. We can help you to make it work without stopping people from working.
The important question is how can ClerksWell can help you?
ClerksWell can help you with as much or as little of these tasks as you need or have budget for. We’ve helped hundreds of businesses onto the pathway for intranet success. Our methodology is there to ensure you’re aware of everything that should be done to ensure success (or prevent failure)
Once you are aware – we can do the task for you; help you to do it or point you in the right direction for doing it yourself.
Like what you hear? Then get in touch today via this link here, and check out more of our work here.
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