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Get 10 practical tips that will help you build a rock-solid intranet. Some of these you may have heard, and some may new ideas, but all are time-tested and have been proven effective.
In this post, which is part of a new Building a Better Intranet series that I’m writing, I want to share 4 strategies with you. Four overarching themes, that you can and should be using, whether you’re designing and building a new intranet, or trying to breathe new life into a struggling one. Don’t worry, I promise to show you what luck has to do with it, so just stay with me.
This post will the first of a 4-part series on how you and your organization can begin to build a better intranet. In this first post, we will ask the question of "Why do we need a better intranet?", and give you 4 areas that have changed dramatically, and why acknowledging and addressing them is one of the keys to a successful intranet.
Are you considering an intranet project? Or do you have an intranet that no one wants to use? Creating an intranet that your team loves to use doesn't require a PhD, but it does take some time and patience. This article include 3 simple secrets for intranet success.
Failure is a great teacher, isn’t it? And with 63% of all SharePoint projects stalled, struggling or failing to meet expectations (AIIM), you’d think everyone would be learning a lot, right? Well, the collaboration struggle is real, and it’s still going strong today. Are you struggling with SharePoint?
What is collaboration? No, don’t Google it. I don’t want Webster’s definition; I want your definition. Hard question, isn’t it? Now imagine trying to actually measure whether or not you are actually doing a good job of collaborating. How do you measure something you can’t clearly define? Impossible, pointless, meaningless? Trust me, I get it – it might seem that way – but we think measuring collaboration is possible, but it’ll take some work. In fact, this isn’t the first time we’ve touched on this subject, but it’s still something we hear often, and I believe is critical if an organization is going to maximize their investment in collaborative technologies.
No, that doesn't say Government gone too far (though that would certainly make for a very debated article). In our daily work, we see a lot of governance plans, and oftentimes an organization will come to us to help them “untangle” their governance plan, or with a challenge such as user adoption, that ultimately leads back to a governance issue. What I want to discuss in the article is something I have been seeing for the past few years, and talk about often. Governance that goes too far.
Eat an elephant. Put down the hammer. Be lazy for a day. Yes, we're seriously writing about these topics, and how they can help your organization achieve a successful digital transformation. Read on for 10 impactful tips that you can start using today.
The Digital Transformation is coming - is your organization ready? According to recent studies, there are 5 key areas to prioritize for a successful digital workplace. But - spoiler alert - digital is not all about technology. Read on to learn about how better understanding people - and failure - will truly lead to digital success.
Next week, both of C5 Insight’s Managing Partners will be at CRMUG Summit in Reno, NV discussing both CRM and Collaboration failure. The truth is, over the last 5 years or so, we have become somewhat obsessed with failure, not necessarily by choice, but because nearly 60% of all new client work for us is what we call CPR work - in other words, project rescue.
The truth is, the “training” methods we have been using for decades are dying. And if your organization is still hoping to train users on SharePoint, CRM, or any other technology by sitting them in a room to watch recorded videos or a live individual, I want to offer some suggestions that I believe will transform the way end users adopt and learn new technology.
The latest technology out there today is compelling and can do great things. And it’s true, a few could revolutionize the very way you do business. But in an effort to do more with less, move faster than competitors, be agile and lean, and choose “best of breed” technology, we often see organizations forget about the very ones who will make the investment successful and worthwhile.
Warren Buffet once said that “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” In our daily work, we talk a lot about value. However, the truth is, a lot of organizations spend a lot of time, effort, and money trying to measure ROI – the precise financial impact of an initiative - without first understanding the value to the business. This blog entry breaks down how to generate both organic ROI and real business value.
I know what you’re thinking: we already have a project team, do we really need another formal team? After all, that only means more meetings, tasks, documents to write and manage, decisions to make, consensus to get, etc. My answer is a resounding yes, you most certainly need this team. But here’s the truth – while extremely important to the success of the project, this doesn’t have a to be a huge undertaking. This blog entry details 3 practical steps for you to begin building a SharePoint Leadership Team today.
Measure twice, cut once. You’ve heard the saying, right? For this final habit, I wanted to take that saying and use it to illustrate a phenomenon that we often see in technology projects – lack of testing. I call it a phenomenon, because it often defies logic.
Let’s face it - no one ever tells you to focus on the past. In fact, we’re all told, from very early on, to stay focused on the “here and now” and to look ahead to our future. While it may be a bit of a stretch, I would like to encourage those who are currently working on a project or getting ready to start a project, to take some time to reflect on the past. Let me to explain...
Technology is wonderful thing, but never forget that it’s not the only thing. What I mean is this - while technology can provide us with new ways of doing things, automation of tasks, and analysis we could only dream of doing on our own, technology should never be a substitute for your people and your process.
Trips (or projects) do not complete themselves. It takes “unseen” things to make it all happen, and that is where this habit will focus.
There are many opportunities for projects to veer off of course, not due to the unexpected, but due to completely avoidable items such as forgetting the definition of success, lack of focus, an individual personality, or a new technology coming to market. Think you’re immune and that “This will never happen to my organization!”? Unfortunately, in our experience we’ve seen it happen to the very best organizations, which is where this habit comes into play. No one has the intention of taking a cross-country road trip to Santa Monica, only to end-up in Fargo (no offense), or worse yet, to simply stop driving somewhere in Arkansas (again, no offense), and say, “Let’s do something else now.” At the end of the day, technology projects are no different. My guess is, you started the project in order to actually finish the project (and on time and under budget would great too!).
Habit 1: Chart Your Journey
Before you begin your project, define what a successful project will look like, and you have set yourself up for success from the start.
The primary reason for this blog post is to share what our experience (aka the real world) has taught us on how to practically implement Business Intelligence (BI) for our clients. I’ll do my best to keep this short-and-sweet, because in all honesty there’s plenty to say on this topic, and enough BI buzzwords and statistics to confuse the entire island of Manhattan!
We use dashboards very heavily internally and have recently expanded our set of core metrics and KPIs to be about 12-15 charts and graphs (depending on special events we may have, etc.). In this post I will tell you about a fairly quick way to create rotating dashboards with SharePoint. SharePoint is the perfect solution for our needs because it allows us to stay within our core systems and leverage the platform.
On a recent client engagement, we had a somewhat common requirement that we had solved several times before. It was part of a multi-month complete extranet solution with extensive branding and user interface design/layout. The site's overall feel from a UI and design perspective was intuitive, sleek and quite honestly, beautiful. Although the particular requirement wasn't overly complex or new to our team, we decided to solve this using an approach we had never tried before to maintain the sleek look and feel of the site.
In our day-to-day client work, one topic we are very passionate about is user adoption. We talk about this topic both internally and externally on a daily basis. After all, we should never forget for whom we are solving problems and building solutions. Put another way - if a car manufacturer builds 1,000 cars and no one buys them, then what was the point?
The complementary paper includes over 12 years of research, recent survey results, and CRM turnaround success stories.
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This 60-second assessment is designed to evaluate your organization's collaboration readiness.
Learn how you rank compared to organizations typically in years 1 to 5 of implementation - and which areas to focus on to improve.
This is a sandbox solution which can be activated per site collection to allow you to easily collect feedback from users into a custom Feedback list.
Whether you are upgrading to SharePoint Online, 2010, 2013 or the latest 2016, this checklist contains everything you need to know for a successful transition.