The most crucial part of deploying or updating your Intranet is the planning phase. You need to get ahead of any common or uncommon speedbumps on the road to your world class modern SharePoint experience. This means you will need a SharePoint Intranet roadmap.
Developing a successful Intranet is tricky because you need to ensure that it is functional and able to motivate. Keeping your employees engaged and motivated is the key to performance and adoption. The more involved your employees get, the healthier the corporate environment you can obtain and the closer to your internal business goals you will be.
Get ahead of your Intranet project and plan with a SharePoint solution roadmap.
If you want to develop your intranet roadmap, start thinking about the categories or areas of focus where there could be clear recommendations.
You could probably come up with several technology recommendations as you look at your digital workplace portfolio. What‘s more, you can quickly develop many suggestions if you explore how Governance, Adoption, or Technology Excellence can be improved.
These categories are often missed in most roadmaps as far too many focus on technology projects and assume adoption or governance are considered in each project. However, this misses looking at things holistically and benefiting from efficiencies of scale across projects.
These investments in content management, document management, employee experience, and Technology/Digital Excellence should always have some direct without being tied to a project and its associated outcomes (and budget limitations).
However, producing recommendations is only the start. Once you have your recommendations, you need to define the urgency.
Is it immediate? Is it near term? Is it for the future? More importantly, are some ‘ongoing’ recommendations to recommend a new motion, activity, or exercise that should be recurring?
If you can frame your recommendations by category and by urgency, you have the basis for a roadmap. What is useful here is that most of these recommendations can map easily to S.M.A.R.T objectives.
The next step is breaking things down further, adding more detail, and exploring how urgency and the recommendation should be evaluated. Your goal is to achieve an estimated business value and estimated complexity in most of these break downs. If it is hard to think of how complex or valuable something is, odds are it isn’t specific or broken down enough.
When you break recommendations down like this, not only can you develop an actionable roadmap, but you can more easily prioritize things. For example, by mapping out the business value and complexity scoring, you can put them into a matrix like the one below to prioritize specific recommendations first, especially if some don’t have dependencies or other things that complicate the order/priority of the recommendation itself.
Keep in mind that you can have multiple roadmaps and roadmaps focused on a specific phase, category, or shorter time window than a more program-oriented roadmap that shows how these specific, targeted recommended actions connect and how they might be budgeted/managed.
Do not forget, before deploying your SharePoint Online Intranet, put together a robust roadmap.
If you are still trying to grasp the value of preparing a roadmap, review our recent blog. However, if you are ready to start planning, we are eager for you to dive into our definitive guide to your SharePoint Digital Workplace and Intranet. We are here to help make sure you are squeezing every bit of SharePoint functionality you can out of the product.
