September 3, 2012 at 8:15 am | Posted in best practice, content management, governance, intranet, publishing, standards, usability | 3 Comments
Tags: best practice, governance, intranet, publishing, standards, usability, usability standards, users
Has your intranet got content littered all over it which isn’t very useful to people needing to use it?
By litter I mean no or little thought has been given by the owner on how people need to have this information presented so it is easy to use. Examples can include:
- Links to documents instead of content on an intranet page
- Poorly worded content that doesn’t make sense
- Poorly constructed content that is hard to follow
- Poorly presented content with the wrong balance of images, text, and video
I wonder how many intranet professionals are nodding their heads as they recognise some of these examples being on their own intranets! Yes, it is irritating and creates a poor user experience.
So, how can you make your intranet look neat and tidy? I recommend you consider these:
- Usability standard that sets out what the user experience should be
- Feedback button so people can report back on bad examples
- Document library for content that has to be shown in its original format (legal document)
- Training for publishers on tone of voice
- Training for publishers on how to ‘write for the web’
- Guidance on use of different media with best practice examples
- Audit content and encourage/persuade/force publishers to publish it following best practice
And you can always contact me if you need more help and advice.
August 21, 2012 at 8:09 am | Posted in benchmark, best practice, content management, governance, intranet, publishing, standards, usability | 2 Comments
Tags: accessibility, best practice, governance, intranet, publishing, standards, training, usability, value
I have reviewed many intranets and have been amazed at the variety of publishing standards and how they are enforced. These vary from no publishing standards through to everything being locked down depending on the importance of complying with standards. More importantly it is the amount of time, effort, and money that is used to enforce people to comply with the standards when they publish information.
I sometimes think organisations lose the plot and forget to look at the costs being spent for the benefit being gained.
Your intranet needs standards to make sure your organisation complies with business, user, regulatory, and legal requirements in any country it operates in. The best approach is to have ‘smart’ standards that need the minimum time, effort, and cost which achieving the maximum effectiveness and benefits. How many of these questions can you answer “yes” to?
- Do you train your publishers on what your intranet standards?
- Do you also train your publishers on why your intranet has these standards?
- Do you educate and support your publishers with guidance to understand more about your standards?
- Do you embed any of your standards in the publishing templates e.g. branding, navigation menu?
- Do publishers need to comply with your standards before their content is published e.g. images need to have alternative texts before they can be used?
- Do you review content for compliance?
- Do you remind your publishers if their content is non-compliant?
- Do you remove content if no action by your publishers to comply?
- Do you measure how compliant your intranet is?
- Have you measured it more than once?
If you answered “yes” to all these questions then award yourself a gold medal!
If you answered “no” to any of these questions perhaps you had better contact me?
July 17, 2012 at 8:42 am | Posted in governance, homepage, intranet, navigation, SharePoint 2010, standards, usability | 3 Comments
Tags: governance, intranet, navigation, sharepoint 2010, usability, usability standards, users
SharePoint 2010 gives you the opportunity to upgrade your technology to meet the current and future needs of its businesses. It also enables other changes to improve business effectiveness to be made at the same time. This helps to justify the cost to the business from investing in SharePoint 2010 and not just keep everything the same as before. There are many features that SharePoint 2010 offers which will help maximise the benefits.
Your business must aim to give users of your intranet a much improved experience from day 1 with continuing improvements made at regular stages afterwards as part of an ongoing intranet strategy. Here is part 1 of my tips to get your business ready to use SharePoint 2010:
User experience
- ‘Mega menu’ at the top of every intranet page with functional titles that can expand to show the most popular and/or important content as a shortcut.
- Site menu on the left hand side of every page in the site to navigation menu of the site’s contents.
- Breadcrumb trail below the mega menu on every page to help people navigate easily back to a previous page on their journey.
- Title of each page to show in the header and footer of every page.
- Homepage and any other key intranet sites to have common principles of navigation, functionality, and look and feel with the option of having distinct branding. The type of content and its position can vary for each homepage.
- Content pages to have an owner, review and last updated date shown consistently at the bottom of each page. The owner can link to their My Profile for contact details.
- Content sections will clearly show what they contain. People will be able to collapse sections within the main page or expand them to show all the links and content within them. Some sections can be forced to stay open; other sections can have the option to add more links and content if people choose.
- My Profile will provide information about an individual to help people searching for someone realise this is the right person to help them. The details can include contact details, location, manager and place in the business’ hierarchy, whereabouts and relevant information, experience and interests.
In my next post I will cover how to get your business ready for SharePoint 2010 – the publisher experience.
June 18, 2012 at 8:08 am | Posted in best practice, beta testing, intranet, navigation, usability, user testing | 2 Comments
Tags: best practice, beta testing, intranet, navigation, usability, user testing
Many organisations are are planning to or already use mega menus on their intranet to help employees navigate to the information or tools they need to use. I have been involved in developing several mega menus based on different business needs while helping with SharePoint 2010. Some have been more successful than others at giving a great user experience……….and that’s what you are really aiming to achieve.
People need to be confident wherever they are in the intranet and with what they need to go and do next. I believe some navigation principles help you decide if a mega menu is for your intranet.
Navigation principles for mega menus
- It helps people get to what they need more quickly.
- The headings are consistently placed in the same position on every page.
- The headings are specific and clearly labelled to avoid any confusion or hesitation.
- The content under each heading is relevant to the heading’s title and links to the right page.
- The content under each heading should only be the most important and popular headings – don’t try to duplicate all your intranet.
- The size of the each section of links under each heading should be limited and be used.
- Test it with a sample of people first before launching or making any major changes every time.
My view is the mega menu must help people to get quickly and easily to the most important and popular pages they need to use on the intranet.
I have experienced both static mega menus (same headings, position nd links) and moveable menus that change as they follow you around from one part of the intranet to another. The feedback has been almost universal from people using them. Static menus work and changeable menus cause confusion and are avoided by most people.
When people are more familiar with and use the intranet more frequently maybe you can test with people want to change to moveable headings and content depending on where they are in the intranet?
March 19, 2012 at 8:55 am | Posted in digital workplace, engagement, governance, intranet, navigation, standards, usability, web accessibility | 2 Comments
Tags: digital workplace, engagement, governance, navigation, people finder, standards, usability
Thank you to everyone who read my last post ‘What is a digital workplace?‘ and contributed to a great discussion helping to define it. Staying with the digital workplace theme I want to show you the views given in my workshop at IntraTeam 2012 event ‘How to build the right governance model for the digital workplace‘ which produced some great responses.
The workshop covered four areas needed for the right level of governance: Ownership, Consistency, Standards, and Integrity. The outcome was:
Who should be responsible for developing and implementing the digital workplace strategy?
Digital workplace principles need to be put into your own organisational context. A board of representatives from across the organisation is needed to coordinate a digital workplace strategy. This board can have decision or advisory status. Alternatively you could have a central business unit responsible for strategy, processes, planning and implementation. While there was no clear decision on who led the digital board or business unit there was a consensus it was NOT to be anyone from Communications!
What should everyone expect or need when using a digital workplace?
Everyone should gain a better work/life balance from a digital workplace although managers and their team members will have different expectations. The digital workplace should have all the information and tools you need integrated, easy to access and to find. You are able to connect from any device you have.
What standards are needed for a digital workplace?
A governance framework is needed with standards forming a key part with tools to enforce them. Standards are needed for:
- Legal requirements: accessibility, personal information available
- Business needs: usability, design, navigation, findability, ownership, information retention and employee terms and conditions need to encourage the digital workplace
- Security needs: confidential information restricted, permissions model adopted
- Technical support: platform functionality, server support, agreed levels of service.
How do employees gain confidence with the digital workplace?
Anyone who plans to work remotely, especially if they are the first person in that team, wants to have the same or better experience than where they currently work. You gain confidence when the information and tools you need for work are always available to use. You feel confident that your personal information is there for you (and only you) to use still. You don’t feel any discrimination because you are working remotely from your manager, team, customers and other employees.
What is missing?
Please help me and the other intranet professionals at the workshop by commenting on the outcomes.
February 27, 2012 at 9:44 am | Posted in benefit, best practice, collaboration, digital workplace, engagement, governance, intranet, standards, strategy, usability, value | 2 Comments
Tags: benefit, best practice, collaboration, digital workplace, engagement, governance, intranet, Mark Morrell, standards, strategy, usability, value
I will be at the IntraTeam 2012 conference in Copenhagen this week presenting on 5 ‘Must Have’ Principles for a Great Digital Workplace and running a workshop on How to Build the Right Governance Model for the Digital Workplace. For Twitter users follow #IEC12.
The digital workplace is a phrase that I have written about before and is becoming more frequently used for intranets that are developing beyond being a traditional communications tool. For me a digital workplace can include:
- employees working from any location (or mobile) as their place of work
- IT infrastructure providing the same or similar experience wherever someone uses the digital workplace
- employees collaborating, searching, and completing tasks as well as reading the latest news
- employees choosing how to do ‘things’ – RSS, mobile, etc. – that help them
- organisations measuring the benefits and encouraging employees to use the digital workplace
I define a digital workplace as ‘work is what you do, not where you go to’. To have a successful digital workplace it is vital organisations have the right strategy, culture, environment and infrastructure to exploit the benefits fully. It needs to become the natural way of working so employees are more effective and productive and your organisation is more efficient and successful.
Find out how five principles can help you to work in a digital workplace, how to use my experience to help you and how to contact me for further help.
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.
December 5, 2011 at 7:26 am | Posted in best practice, content management, engagement, governance, intranet, mark morrell ltd, navigation, publishing, research, standards, usability, user testing | 3 Comments
Tags: best practice, content, engagement, governance, intranet, killer content, Mark Morrell, navigation, publishing, research, standards, training, usability, user testing
Since 1996 I have been pioneering the best ways to increase adoption of new tools on the intranet. For the 9 years as the BT Intranet manager and since then as a consultant, I have experienced different ways organisations have encouraged adoption of technology. My top 10 ways are:
Research what people need
Ask what their biggest pain points are. What could be made easier? What is missing from the intranet? What is good and they want more of?
Prioritise improvements
How important is the task to the person and to their organisation? How many people are affected by this? How frequently is it happening?
Early adopters to become ambassadors
Identify adopters who have the most urgent need to try something new to solve a business problem. Involve adopters in proposed changes as early as possible to get their buy-in. Satisfied adopters will be your best ambassadors and spread the word.
Make the first experience a good experience
You need to encourage not discourage usage to avoid unnecessary costs in extra effort. Act on early adopters’ feedback. Test with usability experts. Compare with existing best practice.
Advance communications so no nasty surprises
Manage peoples’ expectations. Clearly explain what it is you are offering and where they can get advice, training and help.
Consistent navigation
Give people a bridge from wherever they were on your intranet to get to another part more easily. Show the same headings and position on every page. Find out what are the best navigation headings that would help people most.
Personalise and target information
Give people the relevant information they need. Give people the applications they need to use. Give people confidence their personal information is secure.
Embed standards into templates
Reduce the barrier for publishing. Make it as easy as possible to do. Focus on what is important – the quality of the information – not how to use the technology. Consistently apply governance. Embed standards in the templates.
Compliance tools give users confidence
Standards need to be enforced when publishers’ behaviour falls below best practice. Compliance tools enforce important standards – business, regulatory and legal requirements – and minimise time and administration. Users’ confidence in the integrity of the information must not be compromised.
Clear responsibilities and roles
Who is responsible for managing the intranet strategy, standards, IT infrastructure? What should everyone involved – publishers, contributors – need to do? Align intranet roles with performance management and job descriptions.
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.
August 15, 2011 at 12:00 pm | Posted in best practice, digital workplace, intranet, mobile, value | 2 Comments
Tags: best practice, digital workplace, intranet applications, usability, value
In my previous posts on the digital workplace I have covered ‘Must have digital workplace principles’, ‘5 steps to a great digital workplace strategy’, 7 ways to engage people in a digital workplace, 4 factors critical to good governance in a digital workplace and HR policies to encourage a digital workplace.
To have a successful digital workplace (my definition is ‘work is what you do, not where you go to’) organisations must have the right strategy, culture, environment and infrastructure to exploit the benefits fully. It becomes the natural way of working so everyone is more productive and your organisation more efficient with:
- people work from any location as well as their office workstation
- IT infrastructure for the same or similar experience
- everyone can read news, collaborate, search and complete tasks
- individuals choosing tools – RSS, mobile, etc. – that help them
- organisations measure benefits and encourages digital workplace
Follow these ‘must have’ principles including strategy, engagement, governance, HR policies and IT infrastructure and you will have a great digital workplace.
IT infrastructure
These digital workplace principles won’t work without the right IT infrastructure in place. This will include:
Equipment
Making sure people have the right kit to take advantage of the opportunities digital working offers. Organisations need to fund and provide laptops, smart phones, broadband and/or wifi, tablets like iPads and monitor screens for homeworking. All these are needed for individuals to do their type of work effectively. The aim must be more productive workers who are happier because their work/life balance is better.
Connection
Access to the digital workplace when employees need it is the most critical thing to get right. Get it wrong and digital working won’t happen – simple as that. The network needs to be reliable for speed and availability. If it is frequently down for a hour or so people won’t trust it and be reluctant to change their behaviour so the digital workplace strategy works. If it is slow then people also will vote with their feet and stay in a physical office where the people they need can be contacted.
People must be confident they have secure access to the digital workplace and the organisation needs to be confident it will not be abused by anyone not in that organisation’s buildings. For example if you want to check your pay record online you want 100% confidence only you can do this. Likewise if you need to access sensitive information online the organisation also needs 100% reassurance only those with the right permissions, like you, can use it.
Services
Organisation must have developed and have available the things people need to do their work. Research may be needed before digital workplace is implemented:
- What is the information needed?
- What applications are needed for their work?
- What collaborative tools for sharing?
- Are there mobile versions?
All of these need to be available when they are needed. And don’t guess what they are – invest the time, effort and money to research fully what is needed. It will be seen as an investment in the months afterwards when you see people using the digital workplace because it has all they need for their work.
Make sure these meet the needs of people using. THEY MUST BE USABLE! If not, you will waste a lot of potential benefits in time taken trying to use unsuitable tools.
All of these help create the confidence needed to encourage everyone who is able to, to move to a digital workplace. This may need up front investment but the business case should show the savings made in office space, travel costs, time saved quickly justify the costs.
More on the digital workplace in my next post.
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