Background
Our client is a leading government agency who has gone through a recent restructure, resulting in a new department. In line with this restructure, their intranet environment now comprises of more than 20 different intranets, all built in different platforms with different user experiences.
The Department comprises of over 15,000 employees and they have recognised the need to improve the employee experience.
The Challenge
As our client formed through the merging of government agencies the employee experience became fragmented. Each agency brought their own intranet and information repositories which became confusing and difficult to navigate. Employees were worried they were missing out on announcements and found it difficult to find the relevant information.
For communicators across the department the challenges were similar. Resources (technical and content) are diluted, competing channels and confusion about where to put information, lots of workarounds, time lag of communications across divisions and teams, guessing around reporting and measurement, limited and inconsistent segmentation of audiences.
“A single point for information, not this bit is on this intranet, and that bit is on the intranet over there, and this bit is in workplace, and this bit you get by email. Just one place for all information even if this was in workplace and here is the link on this single intranet.” Government Management employee.
A single information repository was required. Whilst there was a broad acknowledgement of the problem, the ideal state still needed further definition. The ultimate end results would connect siloed applications and data sources, allow for a mix of corporate driven and user generated content and provide a single view of customer behaviour.
Through a tender process our client reached out to Antares to discuss an approach for a new organisation wide Intranet. Our experience and expertise in modern intranet coupled with our Microsoft partnership, was the key to our success.
“I’d like to be able to jump on in the morning and know the key big things that should be on my radar.” Government Employee
The Solution
Antares proposed a solution that was built on a SharePoint Modern platform, using an agile project approach. It is fit for purpose by leveraging industry-leading practices to deliver the desired business objectives. The end goal of this project was to create a product which makes it easy for the staff to do their best work.
The digital experiences created provided a single source of truth for the resources needed to do their job.
Antares understanding of our client’s requirements is the need to deliver a minimum viable product (MVP) intranet that lays the foundations for continuous improvement and feature development over time. Our solution aligned with this need by focussing on the most important aspects of a good employee experience portal:
• An information architecture and navigation that is personal, easy to understand and aligns with the content people find most important.
• Beautiful branding and meaningful landing pages using the out of the box features of SharePoint Online that align with the culture and brand of the organisation.
• Key features that enable easy and consistent maintenance, such as templates and publishing workflow.
The Antares agile project delivery methodology focusses on feature driven development and the team adapts to the changing product requirements dynamically. Through the agile methodology we try to deliver very early and very quickly to our customers. Our solutions are assessed frequently, through testing iterations, minimising the risk of misalignments.
“It looks like you’ve formed all our platforms (which are all over our desktop) into one area which I find very useful.” User
The Results
By providing a single unified intranet platform for all agency staff has changed the way our client goes about their day-to-day activities. Their employees can quickly and easily find information and tools, freeing up their time to focus on doing their best work. The solution is rich in content and features that are designed and organised around employee goals.
Our client now has a single information repository that has a consistent experience that provides relevant and easy to find information. It can be further customised to incorporate a more personalisation and rich experiences using Microsoft Viva, audience targeting in SharePoint, bots, and other features. The new intranet also provides a platform in which to amalgamate the remaining disparate intranets to suit their unique needs.
