One Web to rule them all

Feature

posted 20 Jul 2004 in Volume 1 Issue 2

Hundreds of stores. A multitude of different brands. Thousands of employees. Internal strife. Competition knocking on your doorstep. Sweden’s Coop retail chain may sound like any other large business trying to survive. But could a new intranet help unify a company that, at the worst of times, could have been described as schizophrenic? As Daniel Furmaker, head of internet and intranet for Coop Norden explains, it doesn’t hurt – provided you can get an ROI.

Early in 2001, the retail business of the Swedish Cooperative Union was having an identity crisis.

Fractured into several different brands and chains of stores, the company was scrabbling to form an identity not only for customers, but for employees who were experiencing divisive relationships born out of intense internal competition.

Coop was also under pressure from several European hard-discount retailers, such as Lidl and Aldi, taking advantage of the new global economy and preparing to move into what was once sanctified Swedish retail ground.

To combat the internal and external threats facing us, a new strategy was launched. We gathered all the business names under one master brand, called Coop, and reduced the number of chains to two: Coop Forum and Coop Konsum.

The new strategy was summed up under the slogan ‘One Company’. This phrase embodied both the problems of the past and solutions for the future. Coop needed to forget about internal rivalry between chains of stores and between stores and headquarters. The ‘us against them’ attitudes had to be refocused. ‘Us’ became everybody within Coop while ‘them’ became the competition.

As part of that new focus, we undertook a number of large transformation projects, including creating a new intranet for Coop. Previously, a number of different intranets existed, all focusing on company information and news. But like the relationships within the company prior to our rebirth, they were disparate and inefficient.

The new intranet was to be the channel that carried all of the new ideas, tools and processes to everybody within Coop. Aptly, we named it One Web.

The goals were simple but powerful:

One Web shall be the common carrier that makes all the processes and tools we use in our day-to-day work visible;
One Web will, through our new common and web-based way of working, enable us to be more effective and efficient;
One Web is our official, internal-information channel for all employees;
One Web communicates and strengthens our new corporate culture.

The journey

One Web was launched on time and below budget on 21 October, 2002. Considered an important enabler for the major changes that lay ahead, the project chose the slogan ‘One Company! One tool for the future! One Web!’ But a difficult road still lay ahead. Several plans had to be remodelled and numerous challenges met. Management changed, the re-organisation was tiring for everyone, and the project was demanding resources and focus from many key individuals within the company.

Requirement qualification

The project started with a requirement qualification phase that lasted about two months. The One Web project was a strategy driven by the need of achieving better margins within the company.

One Web was meant to both increase revenue and decrease cost. But we faced a different challenge – how to measure the resulting income growth from an improved intranet? When it came to planning the project, we agreed we had to focus on real cost-cutting rather than virtual sales increases. Other projects within marketing should focus on sales figures.

Concentrating on cost-cutting, we had to first find all possible requirements from the organisation. Then we had to find a way to qualify them and focus on the main possibilities. Over 20 workshops were held for different groups within the company. Each workshop tried to gather requirements and generate thoughts, helping participants to think in new ways. After the workshops, 250 requirements were documented, which were then cut down to 50.

Using a one-page functional description and a one-page business case attached to that description, we reduced those 50 requirements to 15 functional descriptions that enabled a cost-cut. With a process redesign and a new intranet-enabled tool, this would generate big savings. From the requirements not in the top group of 15, we chose 10 functions without any measurable business case at all. We reasoned that if you only focus on hard cost-cutting functions, you will get a boring and non-friendly intranet. An intranet needs some functions based on soft values such as image, culture and user experience. By now, the requirement qualification process had left us with 25 functions that, if realised, would enable large cost cuttings and a project payback time of about 12 months.

Change management

Knowing what requirements to focus on, the project continued to redesign processes that were to be renewed as well as laying out a technical architecture and design.

Creating the technical architecture is comparatively easy. Redesigning a process is also rather simple, if you cut out the implementation of the process and its accompanying new intranet tool.

To enable the full implementation and change-management process, we forced ourselves to take drastic action and moved the ownership of the implementation out of the project and into the organisation.

Thinking that ownership creates responsibility, the One Web project forced top management to take ownership of every function or else watch it be cut out of the project. For example, our director of food was now appointed the ‘process owner’ of the function ‘space management publication’. That meant he was now responsible for realising the business case connected to that function.

Knowing top management was not going to have time to focus on every function, we also made them appoint function owners. These individuals in the organisation then held the responsibility to cooperate with the project, redesign the processes and design the function from an intranet perspective. It was also the responsibility of the function owner to gather enough competence to cover the whole process within a work group. That way, everybody affected by the change was also kept in the change-management information loop.

In April 2002, the design of all the new processes and functions was finished and the implementation began. The implementation phase was focused on system development, process implementation and function education. Again, heavy pressure was laid on process and function owners. One Web was released on 21 October, 2002, about a year after its initiation.

Measure Success

The launch of One Web did not go unnoticed by anyone in Coop that day. But did that make the intranet project a success? Even though we had worked very hard for about a year, we knew the journey was just starting for everybody outside the project. For the first time, end users had one intranet with common processes, and process owners were forced to show evidence the old processes were shut down and the new followed. It was also time to start measuring the success of One Web.

Measuring success is usually tricky business when it comes to intranets. But we had laid the foundation for our measurements as early as the first requirement qualification phase. We focused on two different dimensions of the success of One Web.

Since we had business cases for all major functions, it was easy to start measuring real cost-cuttings against the expected ones. Every function owner now had the duty to report the ongoing development of the function against the expected business case. If the development was not going according to plan, it was easy to identify what functions had problems and why.

The process owners were then made aware of the problem and could take suitable action to enable the savings.

This procedure gave a very good metre reading regarding every function. But we also wanted to know how all the parts of One Web summed up together, so we measured the total success of One Web against the total business case. That enabled us to follow up the investment plan produced in the early stages of the project and show us if we were on track. We also didn’t forget to measure the soft values like cultural change and corporate identity by using web statistics and interviews.

By now the project had ended and the need for a permanent solution for the development of One Web was clear. An intranet group with the responsibility to keep future development focused on cost-benefit and process development was established in November 2002.

Summary

Focus on ROI

Gone are the days when top management within companies could afford to invest money in an intranet just because everybody should have one. Any business determined to be successful needs to focus on gaining that precious return on investment. Today, intranet development has grown from being mainly focused on advanced information distribution to looking at major business process improvement using web technology internally.

The focus should be on business processes rather than support processes. It’s great to have a new travel portal for business trips available to you via the intranet, but it should not be the first thing you focus on. Helping your employees do a better job is much more important. You must focus on those critical business process enabling tools to make sure you can provide an ROI.

Prioritise

It’s much better to complete one new process than to struggle with five and not reach target. The intranet is something that should develop constantly. Just because a requirement did not make the cut this time, it doesn’t mean it won’t be realised in the future.

Changing the way people work is also difficult, but very rewarding when it’s done the right way. In this respect, you must make sure you don’t get in over your head. Make hard priorities and force top management to take a stand. If they aren’t willing to give you the support you need, you won’t succeed with the process change. Put your strength and your resources somewhere where your prospects of success are better.

And to empower those who can’t see beyond the launch of an intranet, establish a transformation map outlining future changes.

Establish a change process

Make sure you can measure the success of every change the intranet enforces.

By creating realistic and fact-based business cases, you will have enabled yourself to actually have something to measure against. There are too many projects motivated by the argument that every employee will save 10 minutes a day. Even if this is true, you will never be able to measure success or failure.

Establishing a very good requirement qualification process at the beginning of your intranet development project is essential. You will also need a solid change-management process to ensure you succeed with the realisation of the first release. But you can’t stop there. Make sure you establish a long-term process for qualifying and implementing new requirements. It’s easy to make a success story of a project, but it’s very hard to make success last.

Don’t forget the users

In Coop, the intranet is like a pit stop. Our employees must be able to get the information they are looking for quickly and use it when dealing with customers. We don’t want long visits on One Web – get in, get what you came for and get out.

You can also undermine your intranet by overloading it with information or filling it with the wrong information. It’s easy for users to get the feeling the information isn’t aimed at them.

Think about how your information and processes will work and be understood at the hands of the user. An intranet is only as interesting as what it contains, so make sure its content is up to date and relevant for users.