The way ahead for an intranet can be foggy at times. Gathering demands on your intranet can be daunting, and come in all forms and shapes. E-mails, formal meetings, a coffee break, general complaint, etc.
So to make the intranet team’s job more transparent, and help the organization decide what is important, we decided to try something new.
We created a list with the names of all major business units in our company, alongside the intranet team as a separate unit. This because we can have other high priorities than the end users. Upgrading to a new service pack is one example. Then we list all the demands of each part of the organization, and ask them to rank the top three things they wish for. Before anything is listed, we sit down and talk to the business unit. Once we know what they need, we formulate the demand on a high level. This, so we don’t get caught up in technical details at first, but instead focus on business gains.
The simple, but potentially powerful, list could look like:
Business unit 1
- Highest priority
- Second highest priority
- Third highest priority
Business unit 2
- Highest priority
- Second highest priority
- Third highest priority
We just started doing this, but what I hope we could achieve is:
- Transparency between all business units and us in the intranet team, so all know what is being prioritized.
- A way for each business unit to join forces and decide what really is most important for them.
- A way for us to know that we prioritize the correct things.
How do you collect and sort what is most important for your intranet?
Photo: © Dietmar Rabich, rabich.de, Licence: Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0, Source: Wikimedia Commons
