Planning and delivering your intranet - Kate Cardenas
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Project management and intranets. Lightning talk at Intranet Now 2016.
![Kate Cardenas: Senior Project Manager @Cardenas_Kate
The High Cost of Low Performance
◦ Organisations that invest
in project management,
waste 13 times less
money
◦ However, the PMI reports
a significant dip in the
percentage of projects
meeting their goals
2
Source: http://d.pr/n/16OHV [ http://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/learning/thought-
leadership/pulse/pulse-of-the-profession-2016.pdf ]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
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Planning and delivering your intranet - Kate Cardenas
- 1. Kate Cardenas: Senior Project Manager Planning & delivering your intranet implementation A PROJECT MANAGER PERSPECTIVE Internal communications and user engagement are vital to the successful adoption of any intranet deployment. However, you also need a roadmap and a toolkit to help keep the project on track so that the intended business value is delivered 1@Cardenas_Kate
- 2. Kate Cardenas: Senior Project Manager @Cardenas_Kate The High Cost of Low Performance ◦ Organisations that invest in project management, waste 13 times less money ◦ However, the PMI reports a significant dip in the percentage of projects meeting their goals 2 Source: http://d.pr/n/16OHV [ http://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/learning/thought- leadership/pulse/pulse-of-the-profession-2016.pdf ]
- 3. Kate Cardenas: Senior Project Manager Agenda ◦ Why organisations implement intranets? ◦ Five ways to discover undisclosed business value ◦ Roadmap 3@Cardenas_Kate
- 4. Kate Cardenas: Senior Project Manager Why organisations implement intranets? ◦ Reduce operational costs ◦ Upgrade or replace obsolete technology or expensive existing infrastructure/subscriptions ◦ Organisational transformation: change programmes; mergers/acquisitions ◦ Improve efficiency/employee engagement ◦ Streamline business processes and communication channels 4 Increasingly likely to be a combination of these factors, but sometimes not all this information is available to you upfront @Cardenas_Kate
- 5. Kate Cardenas: Senior Project Manager The Approach ◦ Tell people and they forget ◦ Show them and they understand ◦ Involve them and they remember 5@Cardenas_Kate
- 6. Kate Cardenas: Senior Project Manager @Cardenas_Kate Discovering undisclosed business value 1. Talk to people – No 1! 2. Look out for opportunities 3. Ask lots of questions 4. Leave space for value to emerge 5. It doesn’t have to be sophisticated 6 Talk/Listen to people User stories Interviews Communal areas Meetings Content Champion Group Formal research Surveys Card-sorting Usability tests First-click testing Financial analysis Risk analysis Deploy analytics early Products Project Brief Benefits Review Plan Roadmap/s Project plans Task lists Structured time boxes
- 7. Kate Cardenas: Senior Project Manager A whiteboard roadmap 7 ◦ Visual ◦ Tangible ◦ Create a physical space where the whiteboard is clearly displayed ◦ People should be able to walk up to it and touch it ◦ An invaluable planning and monitoring tool for the team ◦ Captured with @Cardenas_Kate
- 8. Kate Cardenas: Senior Project Manager Thank you 8 Email: katecardenas@hotmail.co.uk LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/katecardenas Twitter: @Cardenas_Kate @Cardenas_Kate
Editor's Notes
- Hello everyone, my name is Kate Cardenas and as a Senior PM, I help organisations implement technology solutions that deliver their intended business benefits, and keep stakeholders engaged throughout the project.
- You probably already know that not all projects meet their original goal, but did you know that organisations that invest in project management, waste 13 times less money, because their strategic initiatives are completed more successfully. However worryingly, the percentage of projects meeting their goals, which has been flat for the past four years, took a significant dip this year. Now for us, intranet projects can present a particular problem that I see come up time and again, many people just don’t care about or are frustrated by their intranets. They often say things like ‘There’s nothing on there for me’, ‘I can’t find anything’, ‘If it’s important, someone will email me’ or my favourite: ‘I’m too busy to use it. Anyway, everything I need is on my desktop’ So, how can we get our very busy colleagues, our stakeholders, to care enough about our intranet implementation and provide the critical information we need, so we deliver on time, and with the intended business value. Today, I’m going to share with you a simple toolkit that you can use in your intranet projects, without needing an excessive budget, to help deliver business value and keep your project on track.
- Firstly, we’ll briefly remind ourselves why organisations implement intranets, then we’ll look at 5 ways to discover undisclosed business value and finally I’ll show why I consider a roadmap to be a vital planning and communication tool
- OK, so I’m not going to spend too much time on this slide as I imagine that we recognise many of these reasons and agree that most intranet projects will aim to deliver on a combination of these factors. What I want to highlight here is that projects can miss out on delivering potential business value because people don’t always know that their problem can be solved by an intranet. So how can we help, if they don’t tell us?
- The approach I like to take is one that I learnt very early in my career Tell people and they forget Show them and they understand But involve them and they remember Involving people encourages ownership. Fostering ownership is important in preparation for handover back to the business as once the project is complete, the intranet becomes their product. Involving people also helps to draw out undisclosed business value
- 1. Now, if you take nothing else away from this talk, I want you to remember this: You’re never going to learn anything if you don’t talk to people. There are lots of ways to do this, some more formal than others, but if you can, set-up a ‘Power User/Content Champion’ group as soon as possible and get them trained; not just in the technology but also in producing internal comms. The most important trait of a ‘Content Champion’ is that they want to be one. They do not need to have a high degree of technical prowess but they do need to be interested. Software implementations are a very challenging process and these people will not only be advocates but they will also provide a source of information for you. It’s important to ensure that you seek out a couple of cynics for this group. If you can find an interested cynic, they’ll often prove to be the best at helping identify new sources of potential value, so don’t be afraid to get them involved. Set-up a weekly meeting of an hour, and ensure that 30 minutes is spent showing them something new. It’s vital that they learn something each week so they can identify ways to help themselves. Also, if you deploy analytics early, once they have a site that is being used, you’ll be able to provide immediate value by demonstrating how well their content is doing, or advise what content might benefit from being promoted more effectively on their sites. 2/3/4. Proactively seek out opportunities to provide business value: Organisation wide emails and meeting minutes can be incredibly rich sources of information. They often share problems or initiatives that you may be unaware of, and which the intranet could support in their delivery. However, once you start to look for opportunities, you will find them so it’s vital that your delivery plan is flexible enough to embrace change when opportunities to deliver business value present themselves. During my last intranet project, by probing a seemingly unrelated point during a meeting, I was alerted to a very significant potential cost saving. I discovered that moving to a new platform by a particular date would save £25k in subscription hosting renewal fees. Now that is a lot of money for any company, this was a charity where the project was funded with public money. Strangely, this critical information had not been shared with me or the sponsor. However, by being able to scale back and re-prioritise the initial deliverables, we were able to bring the launch date forward by 2 months and saved the organisation the £25k. With such significant hard money saved, no one minded that we didn’t launch with a full blown intranet and the remaining sites and features were staggered to come online afterwards. 5. Sometimes, delivering business value doesn’t have to be sophisticated, or result in such a large cost saving. For example, at the same non-profit organisation, their experience of their previous intranet implementation was so poor that, just by involving them in a clearly structured, scheduled and communicated set of research and design activities, we were able to give them a simple and scalable new intranet. Staff feedback was positive, reporting they were able to locate information far more easily than before and most importantly, they felt they had contributed to its design.
- Finally, I’d like to share with you what I consider a critical planning and communication tool. It’s an image of very large whiteboard showing the delivery roadmap. Creating a physical representation of the process, especially in the early stages of development when there might not be much to see, offers people something visual and tangible, so it should be displayed prominently in the project team area. It helps the project team stay on target and focused, whilst stakeholders can see how much is involved at a glance. Get one on wheels so you can move it around. It’s a useful visual aid for helping stakeholders make choices without being overwhelmed with technical complexity. It’s a working tool, it’s easy to adjust, so get your team around it for regular discussions. It’s great for highlighting bottlenecks or resource problems. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you’ll spot potential delivery issues by simply adding on when people are out of the office! I know that project management software can do all of this and I’m not suggesting this completely replaces it. This roadmap was reproduced in Visio for formal project reporting and spawned detailed task lists, but the main benefit of the whiteboard is that it’s in your face. When I’m busy rushing from meeting to meeting, often picking up lots of new information, being able to pop back to my desk, stand back and easily see the whole picture, is invaluable for identifying risks and issues quickly. And so a final tip. Please remember that it’s a working tool, so you’ll need to take regular snapshots of it. I captured this image using a cool app called Cam Scanner. Some of you may already use it. You can download it for free on your phones. It digitally captures and shares everything in clear detail. It’s also handy if you’ve run a stakeholder session where lots of post-its have been used and you are worried that they’ll all fall off before you get the chance to type it all up.
- That’s it, that’s me done. Thank you.