Intranet Team Workshop

1
Intranet Team Workshop Introduction to Content
and Best Practice Teams September 27,
2005 Presented by Paul Davis Project Web site
intranet.engr.cornell.edu/intranet/IT/collegeInt
ranet
2
Intranet Presentation

• Goals for the Class
• Charge for Each Team
• What is the Intranet
• Why Project Management
• Developing a Site Map
• Details for Today

3
Goals for Workshop

• Learn About Project Management
• Develop Project Plan for the Intranet Pages Your
  Team is Responsible for

4
Your Intranet Team is Responsible for Section of
Site

• Identify your audiences and the information they
  need
• Prioritize pages to write
• Write the content or find someone to write it
• Develop site map and navigation
• Identify and make changes as needed
• Audience driven improvement
• Determine how well you are meeting your audiences
  needs
• Improve information navigation as needed

5
Oversight Team Responsibilities

• Overall project management Coordination
• Technology
• Overall navigation
• Maintaining consistency across site
• Providing tools and training you need
• Phasing of the project

6
Goals for the Intranet

• Develop a Website to support Faculty and Staff in
  doing administrative parts of their jobs.
• To provide Infrastructure to Support College's
  Best Practices Deliverables .
• To provide intranet to academic departments, not
  just the Dean's office.
• Phase I
• One stop shopping" for information about
  administrative processes in several areas.
• Almanac of reference materials such as data
  tables, reports, and a college fact book

7
How Do I AnswersOne stop shopping for
Information

• Address needs from the users perspective
• Use the language of the reader.
• Complete authoritative information for each
  area covered
• If the topic area is covered on the intranet, you
  shouldnt have to look elsewhere.
• Easy to find what you need
• excellent navigation
• Best source of information on Campus
• But dont rewrite stuff available elsewhere, link
  to it
• Not simply a catalog of existing materials
• Decide what we want first. If its not available,
  write it.

8
Navigation Homepage
9
Navigation Second level Nav Page
10
Navigation Choice Page
11
Template Answer Page
12
Audiences

• Customers
• E.g. someone who needs to buy something
• Need text written in their language
• Presented from their perspective
• Many people will read each page
• Should be written well
• Processors
• Only 10 or 30 people for each topic (e.g. all
  purchasing professionals in the college)
• Will be writing for other people like you
• Can be much more informal

13
Phase I

• Goal is to choose a few topic areas we can get
  done quickly and start seeing value of effort
  quickly
• Safety
• Human Resources
• Graduate Program Administration
• Purchasing and Finance
• Biggest and hardest part of this project is
  writing the pages
• The pages will be written by people who have many
  other responsibilities
• Developing the pages and navigation requires
  coordination and agreement among many different
  people in many different departments
• Want to exercise the Content Risk ASAP
• Sofunctionality not needed to exercise content
  risk was dropped

14
Later Phases

• Staff and Department Directories
• Manage department, committee and other types of
  memberships, print mailing labels, create email
  lists, etc.
• Access control
• Use memberships from above to limit access to
  pages or subsites
• Project and committee sub sites
• Have a place for everyone on a committee to post
  and share documents so you dont have to email
  them around all the time
• Other tools
• Based on your input

15
Finance Site Map
16
How to build your site map

• Identify your audiences
• Identify the section of your topic you will
  address
• Identify the pages to write (include some pages
  targeted at clients and some at peers)
• For each page, identify the questions that page
  answers. Think like people in your audiences
• Use those questions to word the topics in your
  navigation
• One page can be under more than one topic, but
  each page must have a primary topic
• Try to have between 5 and 15 pages under each
  topic
• You can list narrower topics under broader topics

17
Questions?

• Any questions about the intranet?
• About your teams responsibilities?

18
Why Project Management

• Intranet oversight team found it very effective
• Intranet is first of several college-wide
  projects
• Strategic plan implementation
• New student records system
• New finance system
• Cross department and interdisciplinary teams will
  become more and more common
• Campus is unfriendly to projects
• Have had many project failures
• PM skills have become a strategic necessity

19
Project management is mostly stuff you know

• Be honest (if you cant do something say so,
  dont try to be nice)
• Be willing to plan
• Track performance to the plan
• React when performance doesnt match expectations
• Ask hard questions
• Be an effective communicator

20
Project management is mostly stuff you know

• Be effective in meetings
• Set the agenda in advance
• Bring the right people to the meeting
• Take one set of notes for the whole group
• Be respectful and listen well
• If you disagree, speak up
• Ask the hard questions
• Be clear about action items and who is
  responsible

21
Project management tools

• Stakeholder analysis
• Risk analysis
• The triple constraint
• Scope analysis
• Work breakdown structures
• Scheduling
• Monitoring

22
Tools for project training

• Example site map
• Instructions for building site map
• Template for web pages
• Example team charter
• Each other
• Laptops and projectors to take notes with
• Plan to be able to post all your documents to
  intranet in December or early January
• Plan on a Intranet / CommonSpot training just
  before you can post documents
• Remember, developing best practice documents
  takes time
• Plan to have a quiet launch of intranet during
  the spring, probably during spring break

23
Homework

• Have chair send me your project documents at end
  of class
• I need final site maps for the sections you are
  developing ASAP
• Send me your pages once they are near final draft
  so we can start using them to test site. (Give me
  feedback on the templates at the same time.)
• CommonSpot allows a review process for all
  content before it goes live. Have your chair tell
  me what review process your team would like. It
  may be different for pages intended for peers
  than for pages intended for clients.

24
Questions?

• Questions and Comments

25
(No Transcript)
26
Your Intranet Team is Responsible for Section of
Site

• Identify your audiences and the information they
  need
• Prioritize pages to write
• Write the content or find someone to write it
• Develop site map and navigation
• Identify and make changes as needed
• Audience driven improvement
• Determine how well you are meeting your audiences
  needs
• Improve information navigation as needed

27
How to build your site map

• Identify your audiences
• Identify the section of your topic you will
  address
• Identify the pages to write (include some pages
  targeted at clients and some at peers)
• For each page, identify the questions that page
  answers. Think like people in your audiences
• Use those questions to word the topics in your
  navigation
• One page can be under more than one topic, but
  each page must have a primary topic
• Try to have between 5 and 15 pages under each
  topic
• You can list narrower topics under broader topics

28
Tools for project training

• Example site map
• Instructions for building site map
• Template for web pages
• Example team charter
• Each other
• Laptops and projectors to take notes with
• Plan to be able to post all your documents to
  intranet in December or early January
• Plan on a Intranet / CommonSpot training just
  before you can post documents
• Remember, developing best practice documents
  takes time
• Plan to have a quiet launch of intranet during
  the spring, probably during spring break

29
Homework

• Have chair send me your project documents at end
  of class
• I need final site maps for the sections you are
  developing ASAP
• Send me your pages once they are near final draft
  so we can start using them to test site. (Give me
  feedback on the templates at the same time.)
• CommonSpot allows a review process for all
  content before it goes live. Have your chair tell
  me what review process your team would like. It
  may be different for pages intended for peers
  than for pages intended for clients.