November 27, 2012 at 9:39 am | Posted in benefit, digital workplace, intranet, strategy, value | 3 Comments
Tags: benefit, digital workplace, money, plan, strategy, value
When you are proposing a Digital Workplace to your organisation you need to decide how to present this to your senior managers as well as what the benefits will be. Here are a few tips I have found have helped me and my clients to succeed:
1. Don’t use any technical terms
Find out who you will be presenting, meeting, or discussing your proposal with. Use the language that your audience understands best. Don’t use technology terms or abbreviations.
2. Really understand what your organisation needs
What is the overall strategy for your organisation? What are the key priorities? How can a digital workplace support them?
3. Find a quick win
Try to identify something within your control, needs little time or money to achieve, but will make your senior managers look up and take notice because of the difference it will make when achieved.
4. Find something which will have a big impact
Maybe a difficult and inefficient process? Maybe an activity that can make a big saving in money? Maybe something which affects everyone? It has to make a difference that will get everyone’s attention.
5. Show slides with before and after scenarios
You need to make sure you explain clearly with examples of what is happening now and how it will change afterwards. Your examples need to show money saved, time saved, extra revenue, better productivity, etc. They can be shown words or graphic but they must be clear and easily understood.
6. Be honest about timescales
Senior managers quickly get turned off from a project if the reality is different to the expectation you have set. Make sure you can justify what you are showing.
November 19, 2012 at 9:45 am | Posted in communication, digital workplace, governance, plan, strategy | 1 Comment
Tags: communication, digital workplace, governance, intranet, plan, strategy
In my last post I asked ‘Who should own the Digital Workplace?’. From my experience one function that I feel should not own the digital workplace is Internal Communications.
Communicators’ first priority is to communicate. Their first reaction to collaboration between employees using blogs is to increase the frequency of communications and their prominence on the intranet.
But digital workplaces are used by employees primarily to do things or find information or people, not to read communications. They still do read communications but it is not their main purpose or first priority.
This is a dilemma that communications will need to resolve as they find a new role that continues to add value to the organisation that is more strategic. It is NOT a good approach to seek to own the digital workplace from the view of communications being its main purpose. It isn’t.
While communications still has a key role, increasingly it is human resources, knowledge management and business functions that are largely affected by or have a high influence on how the digital workplace is created that are increasingly involved.
A group of senior representatives who are stakeholders in the digital workplace should form something like a digital board, responsible for strategy, high-level decisions, and priorities for collaboration, communications, tools, and mobile use.
This group should have cross-organisational recognition and support that needs to be seen to be acting in their interests. A clear strategy and prioritised action plan for the short term with owners and timescales will achieve that.
But there still needs to be a leader of the digital board whose authority is accepted. The obvious choice would be the CEO of the organisation. However the reality is the CEO probably won’t have enough time to focus on leading the digital board.
The next best solution is for the CEO to nominate someone or, if not possible, for there to be a senior person who is naturally seen as the ideal candidate by other digital board representatives. The main criteria are someone whose finger is on the pulse of the organisation, is involved and aware of the key decisions being taken, and has the respect of everyone involved.
It is essential to have the right people in place who own the digital workplace strategy and future direction it will take that will benefit both the organisation and everyone working in it.
Am I unfair in my views on internal communications?
Who do you believe are the best people and functions to own the digital workplace?
April 17, 2012 at 12:26 pm | Posted in blog, collaboration, communication, engagement, intranet, research, social media, strategy, value | 6 Comments
Tags: blog, collaboration, communication, engagement, intranet, plan, social media, strategy
In my last post ‘Is your culture right for collaboration tools to improve internal communications?‘ I gave my view on the corporate environment needed to encourage internal communications professionals to welcome collaboration tools being used by employees. Internal communications need to realise they are not the sole people who can communicate using the intranet. Neither are their official channels the only route to communicate with other employees.
To embrace these challenges I suggest redefining the role of internal communications. It is set in a model that is fast changing and risks becoming irrelevant. The days when only managers or CEOs communicated business news and changes to their employees using internal communications will become extinct like dinsoaurs. They need to adapt to the changes and recognise, like some progressive comms people have already done, the need to evolve and move forward and not resist until the bitter end.
I see the role for internal communications changing in this new world where employees want to communicate and collaborate with other employees as liberating and giving greater influence to the organisation. Why?
1. Strategic
Take a step back from the day to day activity of preparing communications, checking channels are operating OK, and which day to send out a corporate message. Think more about the value communications can have on the organisation, how employees perform, the direction it sets.
Encouraging employees to give their views on communications, even setting the agenda and starting communications on the organisation’s performance, ways of working can help encourage employee engagement.
Get more involved in the organisation’s strategy by influencing how communications in general, not just corporate messages, show the pulse of the employee’s attitude and engagement. Work with HR and the intranet team to use the information on blogs, discussion forums and online polls to identify hot spots that are important to employees – what is working well, what could be improved – and help communicate through channels that employees choose to use with helpful information.
This will show the organisation is listening rather than just talking all the time to employees. It also means employees use their time for more productive activities if their concerns have been accepted and acted upon more quickly.
2. Influential
Having a wider view of what is happening across the organisation brings a better insight to how its aims can be achieved from an internal communications perspective. A more accurate and complete picture given will mean other senior leaders taking notice and seriously considering any points or issues raised by internal comms.
It will mean more major business projects and change programmes will want to involve internal communications professionals at the start so the right priority and consideration is given to their views. It enables internal communications to start setting more of the agenda that will improve the organisation and employees’ engagement with it by its understanding of how employees communicate and collaborate to maximum effect.
3. Liberating
The main focus has been on the content of the communication being word-perfect and grammatically correct with the channels working fine for delivering it to the audiences on time. The focus shouldn’t be on just that, important though it is to avoid badly worded, confusing, messages. Instead it should widen to cover the wider impact of any communications.
So if you threw a stone into a pond it wouldn’t just be the size of the splash the stone made but the ripple effect that went as far as the edges of the pond. Instead of success being the perfect execution of the stone being thrown, it is also the number and size of the ripples and how far they spread across the pond.
This can be achieved by starting online polls to ask for employees’ views, raising new topics in a discussion forums, responding with contructive comments to blog posts giving different views. The aim is to explain and educate employees to understand better what has been communicated. It is not to tell them they are wrong and only the internal comms sponsored message is right.
4. How to do this?
All of this is easier to read about than to do. Don’t worry, I have first hand experience for several years of achieving this as well as helping other organisations with advice and detailed information. If you want further help from me please contact me or find out more about me and what I can offer.
My next blog will give more practical examples of how collaboration tools can help improve internal communications.
February 7, 2012 at 9:19 am | Posted in benchmark, benefit, best practice, collaboration, content management, digital workplace, engagement, governance, homepage, intranet, mark morrell ltd, plan, publishing, research, SharePoint 2010, social media, standards, strategy, training, usability, user testing, value, wiki | 1 Comment
Tags: applications, benchmark, benefit, best practice, beta testing, blog, bt intranet, collaboration, content, digital workplace, engagement, governance, help, homepage, intranet, intranet applications, Mark Morrell, plan, publishing, research, sharepoint 2010, social media, standards, strategy, usability, user testing, value, wiki
Thinking about what is the best way to implement SharePoint 2010?
Are you looking for good examples of managing intranets?
Are you planning how to transform your digital workplace?
Maybe you want to use collaboration tools to increase employee engagement?
Now you can find helpful information on all these areas in one site. It combines my first-hand experience managing BT’s intranet with my knowledge and help improving other intranets to show how you can improve your intranets and digital workplaces.
If I can help you further please contact me whenever you want to.
November 9, 2011 at 10:46 am | Posted in blog, career, collaboration, digital workplace, engagement, governance, intranet, plan, social media | 6 Comments
Tags: blog, career path, collaboration, digital workplace, engagement, governance, plan, social media, training, wiki
How do I engage employees and improve collaboration? is a question I have been addressing in my posts Make a newbie welcome and more engaged,, Integrating and engaging a newbie , How an engaged newbie can become a top performer and A top performer’s career development.
Leslie has been a top performer for some years as Leslie has moved from one role to another. Leslie has agreed to mentor people as part of their career development.
There isn’t one standard way to mentoring. From my experience as a mentor and running a mentoring programme, it is the personalities of the mentor and mentee (protegé), the needs of the mentee and the ways and frequency of contact between them which can create a dynamic, enriching and long relationship or quickly fizzle out to nothing.
Leslie has the right characteristics to be a mentor. Leslie has broad experience, is a natural collaborator – willing to share ideas and listen to different views, and deep knowledge of many areas of common interest with the mentee to explore.
There are three steps to make it easier for Leslie.
Digital workplace
A digital workplace helps to give the relationship more opportunities to develop successfully between a mentor and mentee. Before it could be a combination of email, texts, calls or face to face meetings that helped nurture and grow a budding relationship into a strong friendship which can last for many years and extend into their personal lives.
The digital workplace means a blog post of interest can be shared with each other for comment, collaborating in a shared workspace on a subject with each other or with other trusted people that can help is easy to do. Using micro-blogging for direct messages as well as re-sending useful comments is great. Having a video call instead of a face to face meeting takes less time, effort and possible delay to fit with other commitments.
Most importantly is the degree of subtlety that a true friendship needs. It means a quick tweet or micro-blog comment helps keep the relationship ticking over when previously no response could chill things for a while and need more time and effort to repair……………..or even worse, lead to a terminal decline and end of the mentorship.
Use the full range of options that a digital workplace offers for how you communicate to find out what works best for a mentor and mentee.
Performance management
You need a framework that rewards a mentor and mentee for their time and effort and value that an organisation gains from helping accelerate the career development of a potential future top performer. While some mentors will be happy just to have some informal recognition, maybe meet their mentee in their own time, for the majority some formal reward is needed.
A performance management framework enables this to be given in an appropriate way. For the mentee, a personal development plan, reviewed regularly with their line manager, can include the progress with the mentor (without breaking any personal confidences). This helps to plan future development and work that maximise the mentee’s engagement to the organisation.
For the mentor it gives a more subtle choice. It may not be a promotion or pay rise but a formal recognition award could motivate the mentor and with publicity encourage other top performers to consider being a mentor. It may help with the future career path of the mentor who wants to progress into a new field of work using the skills learnt mentoring.
Culture
None of this will be possible without the right strategy, values and behaviour for the organisation the mentor and mentee works in. Creating the right environment for collaborative working; feeling we are all part of one big team; seeing the bigger picture and how everyone contributes to the overall success; being clear what is the direction the organisation is moving in; all of these help mentoring.
Without the right culture a performance framework would focus only on individual performance and what is being done now, not in the future.
A digital workplace wouldn’t happen. The old view “if you are out of my sight I don’t know what you are doing” would stop it dead in its tracks.
Combining these three key factors will mean you have a very good chance of many strong mentorship helping the mentee, mentor (like Leslie) and the organisation.
My last post in this series will cover what happens to the knowledge when a top performer leaves an organisation.
September 1, 2011 at 10:45 am | Posted in best practice, governance, intranet, plan, strategy, usability | 2 Comments
Tags: best practice, governance, intranet, plan, strategy, usability
It is important for intranets to be well governed with a clear strategy and prioritised plans for improvements, linking information sites together.
But without publishers being able to write clear, usable and concise information that people can view, use, share, etc, it will fail.
The lifeblood of any intranet is the information that is available. The quality of it decides how useful it is to other people to help with their work.
I recently met Malcolm Davison through Martin White, Mr Intranet Focus, because of his knowledge and experience with effective web writing techniques.
You have an opportunity to find out how good Malcolm is for yourself as he’s running 1 day web content courses in London on 29 September and Edinburgh on 6 October.
I learnt a lot from my one hour meeting with Malcolm. You can learn far more by investing a day of your time with Malcolm.
July 11, 2011 at 8:17 am | Posted in benefit, best practice, governance, intranet, mark morrell ltd, plan, SharePoint 2010, value | 1 Comment
Tags: benefit, best practice, governance, intranet, Mark Morrell, plan, sharepoint 2010, value
Many organisation have deployed or are planning to roll out SharePoint 2010. They will use it as a collaboration platform and / or intranet. But many organisations struggle to realise the full rewards that SharePoint 2010 will offer if implemented well.
Do you know how to use SharePoint 2010 successfully?
How is the best way to roll it out?
Should you migrate to SharePoint 2010?
How is SharePoint different from other intranet tools?
These questions and more are addressed in a workshop I will be running on 6 September with Samuel Driessen from Entopic (a great honour for me). I will use my time as Intranet Manager at BT, along with first-hand experience implementing SharePoint 2010 to help you. The workshop will cover:
- What is SharePoint 2010?
- What do you use SharePoint 2010 for?
- How do you plan to implement SharePoint 2010?
- How you roll out SharePoint 2010?
- What SharePoint 2010 governance is needed?
And there will be time and space in the workshop to suit the needs and interests participants will bring with them about SharePoint 2010.
You can find out more and register now for the workshop. I hope to meet many of you there! 
June 20, 2011 at 8:18 am | Posted in best practice, intranet, mark morrell ltd, plan, SharePoint 2010 | 4 Comments
Tags: intranet, Mark Morrell, plan, sharepoint 2010
A successful implementation of SharePoint 2010 depends greatly on having a strategy, stakeholder buy-in, plans that cover best practice and how the features are used. But probably one of most important things often overlooked is the human dimension.
Now obviously people within an organisation need to understand how SP2010 can help them share knowledge, publish content, store documents and find people and information. That’s a given but it is the people who have other key roles that can make or break an implementation’s success rate.
It is critical to the project how the key players manage the relationships between themselves. As the intranet manager, your role is critical to the successful implementation of SP2010. You need to:
- have good relationships with all the key players who can hugely influence the rollout of SP2010
- make sure everyone is clear on what will happen, when it will happen and how it will affect them
- know how is the best way to communicate with each person – phone, blog, email, etc
- be aware in advance with answers for any likely concerns people are likely to raise
- understand business processes and know who to contact so they go smoothly without unnecessary delay
- a basic understanding of IT but not to be an expert – just enough to help with technical issues so you get only nice, not nasty, surprises
- know who to escalate to quickly resolve issues and prevent small problems growing to become showstoppers
- have infinite amounts of patience to tolerate different priorities being pressed upon you
- be tolerant of your stakeholders’ concerns
- remember you can’t do this alone. You must involve other people.
- recognise and celebrate with everyone the successes
Without showing these behaviours your SP2010 implementation is likely to take longer to complete, achieve less success and involve more effort.
If you need any help from me, just ask……..
October 11, 2010 at 10:20 am | Posted in benefit, best practice, beta testing, governance, help, homepage, intranet, navigation, plan, publishing, research, search, social media, standards, training, usability, user testing, value | 2 Comments
Tags: benefit, best practice, beta testing, governance, help, homepage, intranet, navigation, plan, publishing, research, search, standards, usability, user testing, users, value
I have just finished reading ‘Designing intranets – Creating sites that work’, the latest book written by James Robertson. For those of you who have seen James present or read his blog posts, you will know he gives a clear view to help you – whether you agree with it or not.
James is one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on intranets. He has used this experience to write this book.
Whether you are new to intranets or, like me, involved as an intranet manager for years, this book will be very useful to you.
This book will cover all you need to know to be able to create intranet sites that work. And it is the ‘sites that work’ words that make this book different to others. It is more than just a pleasing design. It is what else is needed to be researched, planned and created too that will make your time and effort better spent. Even more, you want the people using your intranet to get the best out of it. This book helps you to do just that!
I have found it helps reinforce why BT’s intranet is like it is and why the things I do are important such as:
As I write this blog post ‘Designing intranets’ is by my side. Some parts of James’ book are looking well used already as I’ve thumbed through them several times for tips to help me!
Why not treat yourself? Read James’ book and help make your life easier and your intranet better by reading James’ book.
September 16, 2010 at 8:17 am | Posted in governance, intranet, plan, publishing, standards | 1 Comment
Tags: bt intranet, governance, plan, sharepoint 2010, standards, strategy
As BT’s intranet has developed over the past 15 years I have seen many different ways of publishing content and various ways of designing and structuring a page to show the content.
But there have always been a few key basic principles which don’t change.
I’m reminded of these as I review SharePoint 2010′s capabilities with its different terms and ways of publishing and managing different types of content.
Here are my basic principles for a successful intranet:
- Intranet strategy aligned to the organisation’s strategy
- Intranet plan agreed with key stakeholders, implemented and reviewed
- Intranet standards that meet business, legal and user needs
- Intranet governance that reflects the organisation’s culture
If you have got these right then it makes any other changes so much easier to manage and achieve.
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