It’s 2018, it’s a new year, and some companies may even have a fresh new budget to utilize. Everyone is refocused and ready to kick-off new initiatives. 
Perhaps now is the time you and your organization have decided to move forward with your new intranet redesign project that will move you to Office 365. If this is you, or you’re thinking about an intranet project – keep reading.
What I’d like to share is the secret recipe for a successful intranet redesign on Office 365. These tips can save you hassle and most importantly, budget.
Don’t Leave Out The Key Ingredient
It all should start with some type of discovery and there needs to be a document created called “Requirements.” Often when projects kick-off, the discovery phase is given very little, to no thought at all and often clients leave little to no budget for this exercise. This is a key ingredient, which if left out, can lead to disaster – believe me. In real life, would you attempt to prepare a recipe blindly without reading it before you start? For most of us, yes, why not! Then what happens? You are half way through the recipe and you don’t have all the right ingredients. If you don’t have instructions or if you haven’t read them – how do you know you have the right tools or equipment for the final outcome? How would you know if the food you are preparing is supposed to turn out the way you’ve prepared it? Well, while not everyone is expected to be a chef or even know how to cook– having a recipe with instructions is really helpful, right? Which is why taking the time to put together those instructions or write out your Office 365 intranet redesign recipe is so important.
Get Buy-In Of The Judges
Full disclaimer alert – about to get on my soap box! As with any project, you must have buy-in. The buy-in needs to come from your project sponsor, the stakeholders and don’t forget your users! If there is no buy-in; it makes it hard for you to complete the legwork needed to find out the requirements of your new solution. As with any type of project, make sure that the business objectives are clear and measurable. Also make sure that the benefits are communicated, so that when you solicit feedback from your users – they want to provide valuable information, and they want to keep the project related meetings and discussions on their calendars. Even more important, they will want to use the solution that you’ve spent so many hours and so much of your budget on. Okay, I will get off my soap box now.
How To Design A 5-Star Intranet
When we’re working with a client for an Office 365 intranet redesign project, much of the focus is centered around the Information Architecture (IA) for the new intranet. If you are unfamiliar with what IA is, you can read more here. There are also a lot of great resources regarding IA and how it is directly related to SharePoint Online. When we design IA, we are looking for information around sites and page layouts, navigation, lists and libraries, taxonomy, search, and security. These elements become the ingredients for basic development for an Office 365 intranet. To get the requirements we are looking for, we will often have meetings with either individuals who interface with the existing intranet, who will interface with the new intranet, and/or meet with members of the IT department.
Again, It’s The Judges Who Matter
With that said, another discovery activity that is often overlooked is audience analysis (aka Master Chef judges). Defining the audience for the solution that will be developed, allows us to meet with the right people the first time. This avoids wasting people’s time and your budget. When defining the IA for an intranet redesign project, we are looking to cover some of the following topics:
- Site Hierarchy/Site Pages
- Will there be sub-sites are just pages? Is this a publishing intranet or will departments or groups need to have their own sites independent of the root site content?
- Will these sub-sites be siblings or have a parent/child relationship?
- What type of sites are these – are they publishing sites or team sites
- Global and Local Navigation
- What should the global navigation look like? What is the most sought-after information that should be available regardless of where users are within the site?
- What should the local navigation look like? Should it be inherited from the parent site or should each individual sub-site have its own navigation specific to that site?
- Libraries and Lists
- Are there specific libraries that are needed for the site? What type of content will go into these libraries?
- Do you need any lists outside of the out-of-the-box (OOTB) lists (calendar, announcements, links)?
- Metadata and Content Types
- What type of metadata are needed for the content that the site?
- What type of content types can be created from this content?
- Is there a need for managed metadata?
- Security
- Who should have access to the site or site content?
- Are there any custom permissions outside of the standard SharePoint Online groups?
- Will users be added directly to groups or will you leverage AD groups to provide user access to different sites/libraries?
- Search
- Are there any specific refiners that should be made available to users?
- Is there any highly important content that we want to be displayed immediately to users in the search results?
These are just a few examples of some of the information we look to gather for a very basic intranet redesign as it pertains to IA. The ability to provide clear and concise responses to the questions like the above means that you’ll have a good foundation to start designing and implementing a great intranet on Office 365.
Keep in mind, these examples don’t consider any requirements or discovery around design, custom solutions that may need to be developed, and they also don’t include any additional discovery regarding existing custom solutions, content migration requirements or a full review of an existing environments content.
The Recipe Impacts The Outcome
I hope that I was able to paint a convincing picture that completing discovery and gathering requirements is the key ingredient to the start of a successful project. As you digest what you’ve read here, think about the types of people in your organization that would be knowledgeable for providing good context around what your new intranet should be and what value it can provide to your users. Like I mentioned earlier, no one wants to try to cook a meal without any recipe or basic instructions for what you are delivering (unless you’re Gordon Ramsey) to your internal clients (your users). You want to present a 5 Star intranet just like some of us like to enjoy a 5 Star meal!
Have an Office 365 intranet or redesign project you’d like to get started? Contact us online or give us a call at 240-406-9960 to schedule a free consultation.
