The first 100 days building a new intranet

3,5 months into the new job as the intranet manager at Region Skåne I’m on an exciting journey. Starting anew has been really fun—it is very satisfying to be able to work again full time with the thing I love the most: Intranets!

My mission at Region Skåne is clear from the beginning: To build a new intranet. The initial project steps have already been taken and my job from day 1 has been to get the project moving again after a half-year hiatus pending the new project manager (me).

What should an intranet project include? A good start is checking the Step Two Intranet Roadmap and make adjustments according to the particular organisation and situation. Below is our modified roadmap for the Region Skåne project.

This is at the same time the project Work Breakdown Structure. Notice the lines connecting every activity, they show in what order we must do all activities and how they depend on each other. Every activity also has time estimates. The last project activity, in the bottom of the blue column, is measuring intranet success through Task Performance Indicator tests and this will take place in Februari/March 2018. Launch of the new intranet (bottom part of the orange column) will be in iterations, preliminary from November this year to March next year.

Right now we are in the upper part of the yellow column. This part is about user needs analysis, establish vision and goals for the intranet, KPIs and relations between the intranet and other systems. (Which system takes care of invoices? Easy, that one: The economy system. But documents? It should be a document management system, every CMS is traditionally really BAD at handling documents. But since the organisation has several document management systems—which one should we use, and in what way? And who is the right person to speak with in this matter? This is a tricky question in many organisations. The advantage of being new is that you can ask a lot of questions about basic things without making a fool of yourself.)

This Friday we will get the results from the user needs analysis. Fredrik Wackå is our consultant and the model is the Top Tasks/Customer Carewords. This, and getting out to see the ”real” employees in action (the intranet customers!), is two important parts in understanding the organisation and the user needs. Watching the nurses at the Thorax intensive care unit coping with all the patients and all the necessary digital systems is a sobering lesson in what is REALLY important when dealing with healthcare. Inferior UX is really not something they should be exposed to, ever! And intranet nice-to-know content should really not be in their way during the work day when they are looking for info about the right procedure for treating the patient.

For the nurses, the future intranet should be an initial dashbord for rounding up the right “start buttons” for the core healthcare systems, providing links to the right places in the right document management system(s), bringing together relevant information and other stuff the nurses need an ordinary day at work. In the end, if we do this right, the intranet could actually contribute to saving a life—for real.

And that’s a wonderful thought!