Intranet Strategy Workshop

When a new client purchases a ThoughtFarmer intranet for the first time, they usually have a rough, high-level idea of how ThoughtFarmer's features will address some of the frustrations of their employees and encourage collaboration amongst their staff. But purchasing ThoughtFarmer is just the first step in a series of activities that need to be contemplated, planned for, and executed in order to make sure the new intranet has the greatest chance to be successful. We encourage our clients to define a strategy which maps the most important goals they have for the new intranet with a plan of action to ensure these goals are achieved.

Strategy setting workshop in action

ThoughtFarmer by itself is just a tool. The right strategy can help make sure the tool is used in ways to help achieve our client's goals for their intranet. Some clients come to us with a well-thought out and articulated strategy, however some can benefit from some guidance. One of the services we offer as part of our consulting engagements is an intranet strategy workshop that helps outline a framework to articulate their strategy for their new intranet.

To accomplish this, we ran a half-day workshop with the core intranet team and key members of their stakeholder groups to surface the pain-points and primary goals they would like to address with their new intranet. From there, we articulated the conditions that needed to be true for these opportunities to be realized, identified potential barriers that could get in the way of these opportunities, and came up with mitigation strategies to overcome these barriers.

Strategy setting workshop output

The workshop relies heavily on affinity mapping using the K+J technique (so many sticky notes!!!) to come up with a list of prioritized opportunities they will strive to address with their new intranet. It is also a generative workshop so to keep the scope manageable, prioritization techniques (often through dot voting or other techniques) are used to ensure that the highest priority items in each phase of the workshop are chosen and articulated.

Articulating workshop output into an intranet strategy

This workshop's primary purpose is to articulate our client's overall intranet strategy and generate a body of work for the team to tackle before, during, and after launch in order to ensure their new intranet addresses the key opportunities identified in their strategy.

The secondary benefit of this workshop is that it got the entire core team and stakeholders together in one room to help create the strategy together, increasing each person's sense of ownership. Being a part of the process often increased each stakeholder's dedication to bring the project successfully to completion. This workshop served to drive home the importance (and often immediacy) of the next steps that each person and their teams will need to take on in order to ensure that the intranet launch and continued management is a success.

The result of this process was a well engaged team, each with a sense of ownership in the intranet to work towards making it a success. They had a great intranet launch and the uptake by their staff has been fantastic so far.