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Feature
posted 30 Apr 2004 in Volume 1 Issue 1
Serving the lowlands from higher ground
Scottish Enterprise is one of the largest economic-development agencies in Europe. A recent business transformation resulted in an overhaul of the business processes supporting the organisation and led to the creation of a new knowledge-working strategy. Russell Simpson, SE network intranet and intranet-area manager at Scottish Enterprise, explains how the intranet was redesigned in line with this transformation and used as the main delivery vehicle for the strategy.
Scottish Enterprise is the economic-development agency for the lowland half of
Our intranet had been a classic ‘cathedral of knowledge’ holding our most important documents. Navigation was originally structured around the organisational hierarchy and delivered in HTML via a central publishing unit (CPU). While effective for that purpose, it was not very flexible to new ways of working. Scalability was also an issue, as all content required coding, which was resource intensive. The internal communications team used the homepage as a useful tool to provide a ‘New today’ service of events and corporate information, again published via the CPU.
The decision to redesign our intranet followed the business transformation we underwent in 2001-02. There was a major revamp of the business processes supporting SE and our engagement with customers, partners and stakeholders. A core output of this process was the creation of a knowledge-working strategy and the deployment of a team to support it. Essentially, the strategy aims to meld ways of working with tacit knowledge via communities of practice (CoPs), and explicit knowledge using the intranet for packaging and delivering knowledge where needed. It is also enshrouded in the concept that everyone in the organisation has a responsibility to share knowledge and build on experience rather than reinvent the wheel.
The SE intranet has been designed as the delivery vehicle for large parts of our knowledge-working strategy, and its structure and navigation should further that goal. There were three main issues to be addressed:
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Navigational structure and organisation of information;
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Publishing to and managing the intranet once built;
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The intranet as a delivery mechanism for knowledge working.
Breadcrumbs or springboards
We decided that the most important thing about the intranet was what users regarded as their ‘home’ space. The purpose of knowledge working is to make our staff more effective at what they do and more efficient with the resources they have. We were also seeking to develop CoPs – based on the themes and activities undertaken by SE in economic development – across the organisation, allowing staff to interact and collectively develop products and services for our customers. However, our existing intranet seemed to be reinforcing the knowledge silo structures our business transformation and knowledge-working developments were designed to reduce.
Therefore, in line with the CoPs structure, our new intranet design was created around a small number of launch pages, each of which takes you to a large number of specific intranet community areas equipped with the standard navigation. The intranet communities are based on people’s jobs rather than how they are organised for administrative reasons. The result is an intranet navigational structure that deliberately ignores the organisational structure of SE at the top level. Indeed, shortly before launch, one of our senior directors asked us where his division’s site was going to be. He was slightly confused to be told there wasn’t going to be one. Next, we addressed how we were going to manage the intranet once it had been built.
Let a thousand editors flourish
The essence of our new intranet is about distributed publishing and editorial control. We believe that as knowledge workers, all staff should be seeking to share their knowledge and experience with colleagues. We also believe that for the internal platform, people actually involved in an activity are best placed to decide what needs to be shared and made available to others and in what form. We have over 100 intranet communities, covering all of the major activities undertaken by the organisation, both customer facing and support functions. Each one of these areas is managed by an intranet-area manager, drawn from the staff involved in each specific activity. The role is part-time, but it is reflected in performance-management discussions and targets.
Intranet-area managers are editors and publishers for designated portions of the intranet, and hold full administrative rights over page content and structure of the customisable parts of the navigation. They have access to the content-editor software and can write text, insert images, links and anchors to their pages. They also manage membership of their communities and approve publication of content to their pages by non-members. Should there be a problem with the site or if the content is not up to scratch, the intranet team discusses it with the intranet-area manager, not the person who may have written or published the content.
However, where the subject matter is technical or an aspect of it is not the specialty of the intranet-area manager, content editors may be asked to manage sub-areas. Content editors have the same content rights as intranet-area managers, but cannot manage community membership nor approve document publication. Furthermore, they are not consulted directly regarding site-management matters. Instead the intranet team deals directly with the intranet-area manager, who liaises with the content editors. The new structure of the intranet meant that by launch day around 125 staff, or 1 in 12, had formal editorial rights over part of the intranet. The previous version had three people.
The intranet team is responsible for the strategy for using the intranet as a vehicle for knowledge working, the architecture and navigation design, helping intranet-area managers get the best out of their sections, the development and enhancement of the intranet as a tool, and for reporting, training on the tools, maintenance and almost everything else except publishing content.
It’s a beautiful thing
The new SE intranet is based on three core principles:
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Find – The ability to find information and/or knowledge;
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Share – The ability to share information and knowledge with others;
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Act – Being required to undertake activity.
The new intranet design facilitated three new capabilities allowing for the realisation of these principles:
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The intranet community space;
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‘My Workspace’;
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The user-profile centre.
The issue of portals was raised while we were looking at potential ways to redesign our intranet. After an extensive procurement exercise it was decided that for this iteration of the SE web platform, a portal was not the way forward due to issues relating to cost and integration with legacy systems. However, we had looked at several portals during this time and decided that although our intranet was not going to be a portal, it would have a number of portal-like features, in particular, the intranet community area – over 100 of them.
Each intranet community space has three types of navigation tab: fixed – always on in a standard format; utility – standard format but either on or off; and customisable – can be labelled to suit the business owner’s needs. The standard format is 6:3:3, giving three levels of navigation and 78 pages of content and document targets per CoP area. At launch, this added up to over 6,500 pages of content. The community area allows people performing the same activity across different parts of Scotland and the world to share their knowledge, participate in discussions, and share documents and ‘how to’ examples of approval papers and research. In other words, to become knowledge workers.
Integral to this is the idea that all SE network staff are entrusted to publish documents for the benefit of their community without seeking prior permission. This means staff can target the exact page they think is appropriate and publish quickly – after all, it’s their knowledge being shared. While intranet-area managers have rights over all the pages in their area and can change any mistakes, another key message is that mistakes are acceptable and we can learn from them.
‘My Workspace’ allows users to create their own version of the knowledge available on the intranet. Any information on the system can be saved to and stored within their ‘My Workspace’. This allows staff to collect all of the organisation’s knowledge about a particular project or topic in one place, customising it to their needs. It also means that at the beginning of an activity the existing experience of the company can be reviewed and utilised for the next development. Alternatively, ‘My Workspace’ can act as a quick link launch point to those community and project areas of which a person is a member.
The user-profile centre and staff-user profiles are an attempt to capture the tacit knowledge of the SE network. Economic development is a complex subject and there is a large number of overlapping types of activity taking place at any one time. There is also the geographic aspect to our organisation; great experience in a subject can be built up in one location, not known to staff working in another part of Scotland. The user-profile centre takes the concept of the staff telephone book to another level. Each profile has a number of sections covering information such as name, job and location, but there are also the following sections:
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Current work – Covers the individual’s current activities and projects. It is designed to enable others to find out if someone else is active in their field of interest;
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Previous experience – Responds to the common mistake that organisations make, whereby just because you now have a job doing one thing, it doesn’t mean you should forget everything else you ever did. It allows people to record their past experiences and jobs, both inside and outside of the network. Consequently, staff can access the organisation’s ‘institutional memory’ and harness the experiences of colleagues who may have moved on from an activity, but were involved in its inception;
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Skills, qualifications and interests – Cover formal qualifications, but are also an attempt to identify those skills staff have learnt ‘on the job’ or are practical in nature. Skill with some of the software packages is an example – there are people that can make PowerPoint do miracles and others that can’t get it to open at all. The ‘interests’ field allows people to record subjects they are interested in, or would like to make a contribution to, which are not part of their normal activities. This enables contribution to new project/activity discussion and research, enables the organisation to harness all of its staff experience, and supports the development of communities of interest;
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Together with other fields that are written in a more formal style for biography and brochure use, the user-profile centre is designed to allow new staff members, or someone starting a new activity or project, to have the people network available to a long-serving senior staff member. We hope it will become the ultimate ‘phone-a-friend’ system.
Houston, we are go
In order to meet our business-needs deadlines, the launch date of the new intranet had to be before Christmas. The business-implementation plan indicated that a six-and-a-half week rollout was needed, assuming that the intranet-area managers had all been trained. This meant the final stages of development and user-acceptance testing (UAT) were overlapping with the detailed site-navigation build and content-loading phases. Therefore, the key trigger point in both the development and business-implementation plans was the beta release of the document manager and user-profile centre membership-manager functionalities. This took place on 1 November 2003.
The timetable
Six-and-a-half weeks equal 45 days. When you say it fast enough it seems like a long time, over a month and a half in fact. But when the clock is ticking inexorably, six-and-a-half weeks go by in a moment.
The timetable had three aspects to it:
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Business/technical interface – Finalising the custom navigation, managing the UAT of the platform, and liaison with the development team regarding operation of various aspects of the platform;
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Site build and content loading – Creating over 6,200 pages of content, loading the documents, ensuring content migrated from the old site was still valid, and creating launch-day membership of the various intranet communities;
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Awareness raising and communications – The coming of the new intranet, switching off of the old one, the new types of functionality available to staff, and launch day and what to expect.
All three aspects overlapped with each other in terms of timing and the environments used. So while we were running UAT in the UAT environment, we were completing the detailed navigation build in the production environment. Content loading in 100 areas and the corporate pages was going on while, at the same time, we were doing intranet-awareness sessions in sites across Scotland.
Jargon doesn’t translate well
The last thing to be done before the beta release of the platform and the start of the final stages of business implementation was UAT. The intranet team volunteered to run the UAT phase, which involved some 40 people scattered across the network testing whether, from a user’s perspective, the platform did what the technology wizards thought it did.
UAT is a strange thing in that while it is about rigorous testing of functionality, it is normally the first time people get to see a new piece of technology. Most people are more interested in how it looks and feels to use rather than whether it performs the technical functions specified in the design. Therefore, we had to emphasise performance to our users.
Testing requires going down a checklist made up of individual activities and checking a box when each one works (or doesn’t). It means taking 40 minutes to do something that would take 90 seconds in real life. It is also timed carefully to ensure all responses are received by a certain time so that the development team can make appropriate changes. However, it is a distinct disadvantage when your testers don’t understand your test script. We had spent so long working with the development team that while we understood documents containing phrases such as ‘Environmental requirements (you need a computer)’, other people didn’t. So stage one of UAT was slightly fraught. We had to explain what the instructions actually meant, as well as soothing the panic attacks of technology-adverse testers. Stage two went well because the instructions were written in plain English, moreover, there were no real bugs in the system.
A month in the life of an intranet-area manager
Earlier on in the year, we had trained all of the intranet-area managers on the content-management system and encouraged them to ‘play’ with it via URL so that no-one would see their efforts and, when the time came, they would be proficient. Needless to say, there were a great many things more urgent and important for them to do. That, and normal staff turnover and attrition, meant we had to do some refresher training for a number of intranet-area managers in the immediate pre-launch period. The training was undertaken by knowledge analysts across the network.
Most people who have dealt with software know it is a world of continuous development and improvement. Constant innovation, with new versions of software packages that promise to deliver the perfect solution, is the norm. Three-and-a-half weeks before launch, our content-management supplier issued a new release that promised to fix all of the things our users didn’t like. However, our supplier’s marketing team had also become involved, completely redesigning the interface and renaming the product. So, not only were we faced with having to retrain over 100 intranet-area managers and rewrite our user manuals, we also had a communications issue in that, at first glance, this was an entirely new product – and we hadn’t even been able to use it.
Cue a weekend of ‘will we, won’t we’, as we weighed up the advantages of the new version against retraining our staff and, at the same time, using it ourselves to see what had really changed. Fortunately for our stress levels, the new version was easier to use, didn’t require any more training – just use of the handbook, and cured some of our usability problems. We made the necessary changes to the handbook and breathed a huge sigh of relief as our adaptable staff took it all in their stride.
Tick box when finished
We now had a navigation structure, intranet-area managers that could create content, and lots of blank pages. The next step was to ensure that when the site went live, there would be content on all 6,000 pages. At this stage, the knowledge analysts came to the fore. Each one was allocated a number of areas and a checklist – time and activity bound. Over the next three weeks, the knowledge analysts and intranet-area managers added content and documents to the site, culminating in a signed area-release form indicating an area was ready for viewing. By this time, we had changed the subject-specific navigation on a large number of the areas, some more than once, and added another 500 target pages. We now had a site that was ready to launch.
Tell the world
While the intranet-area managers were filling pages with content, the knowledge analysts and intranet team were running all-staff-awareness sessions. This comprised a live tour of the site outlining the functionality, and a question-and-answer session afterwards. All staff were encouraged to attend and some of the sessions were quite busy because the development team was still putting the finishing touches to the site and debugging. The presenters soon learnt whose areas were content-rich and several intranet-area managers were surprised at the compliments they received from colleagues because they weren’t told their areas were going to be used as examples.
Over the two-week pre-launch, we showed off the system to over 75 per cent of staff face-to-face via the awareness sessions and by hijacking time at the normal management/staff briefing meetings.
Launch day
Launch day dawned in the same way as most December days in Glasgow – cold, dark and wet. And because SE is a worldwide network, the first people to see the new intranet would be our European Union office in Brussels. This meant we had to turn the new system on before 8.00am, as Brussels is an hour ahead of the UK. Hence the technical team was in the office at about 6.30am checking on server configurations and other technical aspects. The intranet team was in around the same time doing more important things, namely, opening boxes of chocolates. Other organisations launched web platforms with champagne, caviar, lights and lasers, but we chose chocolate.
We could have launched the intranet as the key vehicle for our knowledge-working strategy and a vital business improvement measure. While we did do all of that, we felt we would get a lot more attention if we did something a little different, especially with it being so close to Christmas. It is at this point that 1,500 chocolate Santas become vital to the success of the SE intranet. Along with the chocolate Christmas puddings and the white chocolate Snowbites, the Santas were at the core of the launch activities.
To use jargon, the chocolate was a ‘positive behavioural reinforcement measure’. If one of the launch-day crew spotted someone using the intranet, the user would get a chocolate Santa. If the user was completing a user profile, he or she got a Christmas pudding. And better still, if he or she was seen uploading a document, the gift was a white chocolate Christmas Snowbite. It was all based on the belief that people will do an awful lot for chocolate – and react well to the humorous aspects of how they might get it.
In each of the local enterprise companies, knowledge analysts were co-ordinating local activities, while each floor of the headquarters’ building had two intranet team members stationed on it, with a ‘roving patrol’ as back-up. Team members were not expected to be on the go all the time, although local activities were encouraged. It was expected that everyone would be fairly active from 9.00am until 10.15am, as people logged on and saw something new. After that, we expected the team to have a quick wander around every hour or so as the front page changed and new competitions, hints and other stuff occurred.
We had decided there would be an ‘area of the hour’. This would be one of the areas where the content and layout was good, and the intranet-area manager was keen and would answer questions positively. The area of the hour would change throughout the day and was a mixture of headquarters-based areas and those hosted in the local enterprise companies across the country. It attracted a prize for the intranet-area manager and a ‘well done’ memo from the intranet team to his or her line manager. It would also reinforce the message that the new intranet was not static like the old one. Instead, it could and did change throughout the day. It was easy to create new content as an area manager and worth returning to as a user.
Competitions for competitive people
People working for SE are, by their nature, problem-solving folk. They are also fairly competitive within their business units and the whole organisation has a developed ‘esprit de corps’. With this in mind, we designed competitions that would run throughout the launch day. Each one would run for an hour and came in the form of a multi-part riddle. Each of the component parts of the riddle required one of the new types of functionality to be used for the clue to be solved.
The answers required staff to search for people – one of the new types of search; search for documents using the new search engine; and use the topic A-Z – one of the new applications. It also required staff to use the navigational structure to get to and from the answer locations. All the competitions were designed to show off the new intranet’s differences and enhancements, as well as to give the intranet team the opportunity to show staff how the applications and functionality could be used in a work context. Once again the homepage was used to promote the winners and demonstrate how easy it was to change content quickly and easily.
Bumps in the road
Even the smoothest ride has some bumps, which now make us smile, but were, at the time, heart-stopping. We had load tested and done a huge amount of system testing during the development and UAT phases of the project – trying to simulate usage and demands on the system. Everything had seemed fine, as it did at 7.48am when we switched the production server to live and the system went operational.
Things seemed to go well as Brussels came online. Telephone calls to the office indicated their glee at being fully integrated, system-wise, for the first time, and able to see things in real-time. By about 9.30am, virtually the whole network was online as the login procedures default to the intranet homepage. But then we started to see a significant slowing of the system speed. The non-technical members of the team assumed this was just a result of heavy usage and, luckily for us, so did all of the users. The technical team was, however, becoming slightly white faced and disappearing into server rooms for hushed conversations. As the launch manager, I started to become a tad concerned when I clicked on the homepage and it took 15 seconds to return. The answer came soon enough – caching.
Our content-management system is a dynamic rendering package and creates the page you are looking for based on your user profile and permissions. We had not set up any default cache periods so the system was going back and recreating the page from scratch every time someone looked at it. Because everybody was looking at lots of pages, coming and going from the four key launch pages, the servers were taking a beating, which was slowing things down. Some mystical tapping of keyboards and, lo and behold, everything speeded up again.
During the launch day, we also realised that the system we had bought and the philosophy of diffused publishing could sometimes cause problems, even in the most careful of hands. Around mid-morning, our chief executive sent out a message encouraging staff to go online and see the new intranet. Our internal communications team provided a picture of him to go with the message, which we would put on the homepage at the start of the next ‘hour’ session. Unfortunately, our intranet executive hit the wrong tab and the system not only published the picture on the network homepage, but on all of the individual area homepages every time they were refreshed, eliminating the hard work of over 100 intranet-area managers. Luckily, our technical geniuses were able to set the clock back five minutes and everything was restored, providing a glowing example of the flexibility of the system.
And the world turns…
At 2pm, the US offices started to come online. We gave the whole thing an American feel and ran special competitions based on information that US staff would probably know better. At 5pm, we ran the last competition and changed the homepage to welcome our colleagues in the Asia-Pacific region. And so launch day was over.
The feedback we received from staff about the launch activities was overwhelmingly positive. People liked the new system, including its look and feel. They were impressed by the structure and the way they could personalise a view of the intranet; moreover, they could upload their documents without complicated permissions. Our development partners told us they hadn’t seen a major launch go so smoothly – and I think they were telling the truth. Oh, and everyone enjoyed the chocolate. q
Russell Simpson is SE network intranet and intranet-area manager at Scottish Enterprise. He can be contacted at russell.simpson@scotent.co.uk.
