Picture an organization that is used to sharing documents via email exchanges and hard print outs. Team members have to contribute to a common deliverable, but are left duplicating efforts and working on outdated versions of the document because updates are made offline and then emailed to the rest of the team. This leads to frustration and inefficiencies. Or worse yet, imagine an organization that does not share files and is left with an information void and resources with institutional knowledge.
Many companies that operate in silos would benefit from increased collaboration within and across departments. Even companies that do regularly collaborate could benefit from implementing best practices with files sharing and creating a standardized intranet platform for the whole organization to use.
There are many benefits of an easy-to-use intranet site, including:
Engage upper management and gain support of the intranet site creation initiative
Create a Project Management Office (PMO team) to drive the initiative
Identify stakeholders who will be affected by the project
In general, everybody across the organization will need to contribute to make the site development and adoption a success. But, at a minimum, you need to engage: Upper Management, the IT Department, Department Leads, and a PMO Team. Below is a depiction of how the groups will collaborate.
Below is a generalized list of critical steps to follow when beginning to undertake an intranet site development process:
To help ensure success, there a few additional things to keep in mind:
So remember, if you want to begin to break down those inter-departmental silos, maybe all it takes is an easy-to-use company intranet that is developed with the end-users’ needs in mind and makes it easier to collaborate and file share!