Hello again!
Following on from an earlier post about the work we've done in introducing a new intranet to Shropshire Council, this one outlines where we're at two months on from launch.
The project itself ran beautifully, helped in no small part by Umbraco being unbelievably intuitive (you can be familiar with it within hours - have we mentioned that already?), and the added advantage that we are all now fully Umbraco savvy, so we hit the ground running when deciding to use it, rather than Wordpress, for the intranet, the latter being the original choice.
As it was an adaptation of the WordPress site built by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport we had to rebuild it in Umbraco. Our dreams of making significant improvements to the design and adding in some snazzy new features had to be scaled back to fit the challenging timescale we were working to (as our old CMS had to be decommissioned much sooner than we were expecting), so we decided to split the project into two phases.
This phased approach was a blessing in disguise. It has allowed us to roll out a quick, dramatic change to our intranet as 'phase 1', and bought us a bit of extra time to gather feedback and plan 'phase 2', when we'll focus on the bells and whistles.
The accompanying screen shots show you where we're at with the current phase 1 design, but I should just reiterate that this is a work in progress, and it will be developed further. Funnily enough we quite like the simplicity of the design and structure, so we may not tinker with it too much - a bit more colour to replace the slightly monochrome look, a few design flourishes to keep Dale, Mike and Dan happy, softening some of the sharp edges here and there, etc.
So, what do our staff think about it?
Feedback from staff and other local authorities has been near-universally positive, which was hugely rewarding after all the work we put in, and really quite impressive given that the end product is something all staff frequently use. We were expecting a lot of strong opinions on how it looked and responded in the initial weeks post-launch, particularly as the design and structure are such a departure, so were surprised that there weren't that many complaints (and how easy it was to address the few complaints we did have).
The biggest change with the most risk was our adoption of a ‘How do I?’ approach for finding information, which has so far proved very successful, along with a search which actually works!
Our old CMS held information in a large number of databases, often illogically named or completely out of date, so, for our new intranet, we streamlined the content to fit into a handful of plain English categories. When selecting one of these categories, a short list of 'How do Is?' appears, or in this case 'What is a...', and you can choose what you want from there. If you can't immediately find what you're looking for, the search invariably works as a back-up option.
One thing we did have to cram into phase 1 was the staff noticeboard, which is a place on the intranet for staff to post things for sale, wanted notices etc. Again, because of the short deadline, we built a fairly like-for-like replacement of our old noticeboard (with a few minor operational tweaks), and will be adding to it for phase 2.
What's next...
So now we move on to phase 2, with the project team (minus Cait - sniff...) reconvening in the coming weeks to start on those bells and whistles. Another advantage of the phased approach is that we've got lots of feedback to use in informing the enhanced design, and comments made by the few dissenting voices will be acted upon where we can usefully do so.
The intranet is, after all, for staff, and if all staff have the opportunity to contribute to its design, all the better, as far as we're concerned.
One significant piece of work in phase 2 will be the introduction of a new telephone directory. In phase 1, we are using our old, pre-existing telephone directory system, linked to via a search box on our homepage, but soon we'll have something new in place, fully integrated. How we are going to do that is still being looked into, but we have a number of options available to us.
Needless to say, I'll be back with another update as the project progresses. Speak soon...