Background

I’ve been asked to create a blog to share our experience managing priorities in an intranet development roadmap.  Like any other software development we’re swamped with enhancement request raised by our clients, international partners well as internally.

Managing requests

By the time this blog is written I have to deal with 500 active requests which need reviewing, examining, clarification, discussion, prioritising, and the most important thing “execution”, in an extremely limited time.

Say if I am incredibly productive and I only have to spend 10 minutes for each tickets, it would take me more than 10 days just to reviewing this tickets without any further action such as examining or writing clarification request.

Dealing with priorities

Perhaps it would take a month before an execution of these tickets can be performed.
There are many technique you can use to help dealing with priorities, one of the most popular one is by calculating the “degree of importance”, where you have to weigh each request by creating a score card. Each card is measured from different aspect such as:

•    Number of clients who has requesting such feature
•    Development time & cost to develop
•    Impact on existing system
•    Potential future sales benefits
•    Current trend & Market analysis
•    Available budget and resources

The Dilemma

Before you know it, we might have to spend more time developing a robust system rather than dealing with the request itself. Sure if you are a large organisation you might have resources to deal or an existing system to deal with this dilemma.

If you are in a small organisation this may sounds like an impossible task. Statistically I might only have less than 5 seconds to deal with each ticket and use the precious time to actually “do-something”.

Blink

A book published by Malcolm Gladwell In 2005 “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” describes the popular idea of  “thin-slicing”: ability to gauge what is really important from a very narrow period of experience. In other words, spontaneous decisions are often as good as—or even better than—carefully planned and considered ones.

It may sounds bizarre and obviously the management won’t like this approach, but sometime in real life, if you are experienced enough you will develop strong intuition. Time is limited and you’ve got to do the “right thing” with all the limitation around you.

Claromentis Development Schedule

Reflecting this back with Claromentis development schedule, we have managed to produce what we called “Rapid development” when developing an intranet software. This means new features are efficiently developed, tested, user-tested, and deployed to the client faster than before at equal or better quality at the same time we’ve managed to implement strict budget control with limited time & resources in current economic downturn.

The idea is simple, quick and accurate decision, spend it efficiently where it should be.

Services development vision, internal customer communications, intranet roadmap

Interestingly we are now working to extend the Quality Manager application in the area of requests and approvals of new policies and procedures, and in enabling a consultation process where comments are received from authorized users, before the policy is approved and formally issued in the Bookshelf application.

Our challenge here is actually how to understand what needs are generic, and which ones are specific to an individual company works. This requirement has always been acknowledged and understood, it is great to finally see the work start. We will need to make the configuration very flexible, so that smaller companies without for example a formal consultation process for new policies are not forced by our software to adopt one. It may even be that for some companies only certain policies and procedures need such workflows and consultation, others can just be created by quality managers.

Prod-Quality quality management software

I am fascinated by the number of intranet components we have been developing recently for our clients.

Strangely no client has ever specifically asked for an analysis of user searching behavior – which puzzles me because if we are all concerned with user uptake then surely we should be monitoring, above all else – when they do and do not find what they are looking for.

This goes back to the ongoing discussion we are having at Claromentis about tagging, quality measurements and our continual challenge to deliver a very accessible information layer through a permission engine.

I am fascinated by the requirement here, and look forward to a debate about how to deliver this – even though no client has asked for it – but I still feel it should be fundamentally important to our client intranet project teams and sponsors.

I would like to propose that we develop a special searching monitor tool that does, as a minimum, the following :

•    Logs into new tables all searches – additional to the current audit log – for special analysis – primarily so that they are not overwritten in the same way as general audit information must be.
•    Delivers reports – probably via tag clouds /semantic analysis / stemming  or some other mechanism that can allow for variations in the actual entered search string – on what users are searching for
•    Saves the top 10 search results for that term, at the time the search was made

Now here is what I would like debate about – we need to track whether the user found what they were looking for. That of course, is far from easy.

My thoughts are the we should:

•    Track whether they click on a returned result – they may not have been pleased with the results of the click but at least they saw something in the search return that was sufficiently positive they clicked on it.

•    Compare this to users who did NOT click on any of the returned results.

•    Over time compare this for different groups and roles of users looking for the same search term – in case we are not making the correct information available to the users who need it.

•    Develop a concept of the “refined search” – so assume that if a user enters a new search within a few minutes – it is assumed to be another attempt to find the same information. Track this refined search term, compare that to the first – and a again report on the users that thought they had found what they are looking for after they had refined their search.

•    Compare that with any tagging or metadata for the resulting file they clicked on.

I would be interested in ideas from the community as to whether this makes sense and of course from our team if we could deliver an engine that provides our clients with an accurate measure over time of what users are looking for, and whether they found it.

The added dimension over time of whether the success rate in specific searches actually improves would of course by a fundamental goal here.

Solutions

We are all familiar with tagging and how the so called wisdom of the crowd can help quality information reach the top of searches as part of a natural process.

However in a recent project we have experienced the opposite end of the spectrum, where our client required that the organization should be able to indicate in an unequivocal way the quality of a particular document.

This was particularly relevant to policies and procedures, where they wanted the policy owners to be able to indicate the best procedures, and flag up those where they felt more work was still required.

By using the Claromentis API we were able to rapidly develop a small extension to the document management system that allows for a 3 tier red – amber – green system to be applied to these documents and restrict this by the permission system to ensure that the control is applied appropriately.

The result is made very visible to the users using the traffic light approach, exactly as the client required.

Prod-Document document management, Quality

A previous post referred to the fact that we for some time now have been using Process Manager to create a very efficient sales lead management process.

We have just started a new process that uses Process Manager to manage our own update needs for our public web site site – in effect this process sits in the lead capture/ marketing space, rather than in management of actual new leads.

By using our own software change logs, as we release each new version of Claromentis intranet software this new process makes sure that not only is our internal documentation ( user guides, wikis and data sheets ) updated, but so is our external public facing web site. Requests for site updates can be assigned by Claromentis to any user, depending on the design skills required to implement it. The requirement is well described and the request can be status managed and re-assigned as needed.

The reportability of Process Manager is once again key – the regular update of our own site is important and the inclusion of process manager dashboards  into our own ISO9000 monthly management reports is really important and helps to make this process sustainable. Once again we are very aware that the technology is just one side of the process, people still need to make it happen.

Prod-Process

During an intranet training session today that was focused on design, it really dawned on me how functional components and smart objects are becoming in the intranet software world.

As an example – in our own sales management we use Process Manager to manage our inquiries, until we open up a Sales Manager opportunity – with just one click.

Now on our sales publish page in our intranet staff get a live view of the incoming leads and their status – a simple Process Manager component gives a window onto that project that is always and instantly up to date, with direct access to every individual lead. The page also shows the live sales documents folder through a smart object.

We are also continually enhancing our components – for example the ‘most popular document’ (or pages) component is now being enhanced into a new version, at the request of a new client – so it displays on the intranet home page the most popular document for each user.

In fact I struggle to see what can limit the usefulness of this growing library of components and documents. Just today we decided that a most viewed topic in a forum can turn an administrator populated FAQ into a genuine FAQ – as it continuously reacts to show the genuinely most popular questions in any FAQ board.

Resources-Technical components

Choosing the right name for your intranet is probably one of the most exciting tasks for the Intranet Development Team. (By the time I am writing this I am still struggling to choose name for my baby, perhaps it’s not quite the same

I am seeing there are few interesting patterns based on what our clients decide at the end, here is some example:

1. Greek mythology

Intranet system named after a Greek gods and goddesses, or Greek influence  is definitely the most popular.
Athena - from the Greek goddess of wisdom, the arts, industry, justice and skill, It is the name of Intranet system at Nominet UK.
Atlas -  Atlas was made to bear the weight of the heavens, or was it the earth, this is what will become our own Intranet, and perhaps we’re hoping atlas can help us bear the weight of daily project work and pressure from clients.
Odyssey – An ancient Greek epic poem attributed to Homer. Is the name of intranet for Prometheus Real Estate Company, keep it in-line with Greek theme.
Eureka – (I have found it) exclamation used by ancient Greek scholar Archimedes, appropriate name for Care UK intranet, it certainly has scholar and research flavour to it. Care UK  is hoping their intranet will become  the source of finding information for the entire organisation where every member of staff can say ‘eureka!’.

2. Net-isation

Putting ‘net’ at the end of a choosen word seems quite popular, it’s a hint to network, transmission, exchange information.  Here is some popular example  Infonet, datanet, skynet.

Or you can simply attach the company name with ‘net’ such as intranet for Hanover housing is called the h-net.

3. Synonyms & Popular Culture

Intranet is a virtual place where information is stored; recently many companies are pushing collaboration and application through their intranet. Given this nature these are of popular word to represent the Intranet itself:

he Matrix – Albany Group named their Intranet “The Matrix”  apart from influence from popular sci-fi movie, in cyber culture matrix also means the Internet and other networks that flow into it are altogether.

Nexus - One of the most popular name for the Intranet adopted by many clients. It comes from the Latin “nectere” meaning “to bind.”. The Intranet is a collaboration hub.

Dimensions - Babcock Infrastructure Services named their intranet “Dimensions” Perhaps their vision is to make a multi-dimensional working space.

Basecamp – is the name of The North Face intranet where they visualise their intranet is the a basecamp of outdoor lifes.

4. “My”

Adding “my” in front of company name emphasise on the sense of belonging and ownership. There are several companies who named their intranet with MY+Company name, such as  MySunPower  or  MyGFI.

5. Play with words & accronyms

Tiggle – is a clever acronym from “Tussauds Intranet Global Gateway Linking Everyone” – an Intranet name for Tussauds Group.

Inflo – Interesting play on word. It sounded like “Info”, Inflo is the name of the Intranet/Extranet system of Prefered Brands where they do flooring franchise business.

I am hoping this post will inspire many companies who are thinking about choosing name of the Intranet, why not run a naming competition to find out who comes up with the best idea within your company.

Intranet-Extranet humor, internal customer communications, intranet, intranet software

It is great when you join up a process and see seamless integration in software solutions to really support you across the whole process.

We use our own intranet software to deal with website leads and sales management of opportunities that result from them. Whereas previously we used Process Manager to manage the leads and Sales Manager to manage opportunities once meaningful interactions had occurred and an account manager needed to be involved – we had no clean implementation to produce a truly integrated approach. Recently two developments have really boosted our sales efficiency :

•    We started to use Process Manager SLAs to act as auto responders, which meant people who had shown interest in our software were sent personal emails and useful data sheets via 3 emails

•    If an interaction takes place we developed a Process Manager Plug-in to provide a one click process to generate a CRM company, contact and opportunity record in Sales Manager.

The net result has been a very significant increase in discussions with potential customers, and a really efficient enquiry handling process for our own business.

Prod-Sales integration, intranet software, processes