As we’ve discussed previously, it should be expected that the cost of an intranet solution will vary greatly from organization to organization, depending on the platform you use, the features your new platform has available out-of-the-box, the customizations you choose to add, and the costs of migrating content and managing the user adoption process.
Fortunately, there are steps you can take to reduce these costs and save money for your organization. Read on to learn three tips that, in our experience, will help you save money when implementing a custom intranet solution.
1. Set Clear, Realistic Expectations
Before you dive into the details of the cost of various platforms and features, it’s important to know exactly what benefits and objectives your intranet solution will provide to your organization. By setting realistic expectations around these objectives and benefits from the start, your implementation will remain focused on your goal, while also reducing the risk of scope creep.
2. Understand and Know Your Platform
Almost every custom intranet solution has some sort of “backbone,” whether that’s a cloud-based platform, a commercial platform like Microsoft SharePoint, or an open-source platform. No matter what it is, learn both the features, benefits and the constraints of the platform you choose.
When you understand how your intranet’s backbone works, you can avoid trying to implement complex custom capabilities. In addition, you will be able to use your platform’s built-in ways of implementing the functionality you need quickly and easily, rather than reinventing the wheel because you don’t know what is already built into the platform.
3. Understand Your UI/UX Needs
User Interface (UI) challenges, User Experience (UX) missed expectations and complex customizations are often the usual suspects when examining what drives up costs with custom intranet solutions. These extra costs typically arise from the need to rework features that users don’t like or that don’t work properly. There is also the potential to waste a lot of money implementing features that people are unlikely to use very often, or implementing them in a way that is inconvenient for your users.
In light of these potential pitfalls, it is essential to make usability testing a key part of your strategy for implementing a custom intranet solution in your organization. Begin by finding out what people want from the new intranet in terms of the user experience that it offers, and then make sure you get at least some of those users to test new elements of the interface before they are rolled out.
By involving the intended users of the intranet in the UI/UX design phase, you can reduce the need to spend more money reworking features after the system launch.
Final Thought
The key thing to remember about implementing a custom intranet solution is that it isn’t just another IT project. When you overhaul your business’ infrastructure on this kind of scale, you need to have a clear plan in place to make sure the whole process comes in on time and on budget.
That means the most important part of your planning will be developing a clear understanding of why you are implementing a custom intranet solution in the first place. What do you hope the new system will deliver, and how will you know if the project has been a success?
By answering these questions, you can avoid losing focus on the key goals of the implementation project and therefore keep costs under control.
