Free intranet assessment to drive improvement
- John Scott
How good is your intranet? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Where are the areas for improvement? What are your priorities to help drive adoption and increase value?
Our new Intranet Health Check assessment tool provides an excellent way for internal communicators, IT directors and intranet managers to get a quick assessment of their intranet maturity across a number of key areas and point to where improvements might need to be made.
You can use the Intranet Health Check to decide on where to focus efforts to drive continual improvement, as a data input to consider a new intranet, or just as a way to help kick-start thinking about how to make your intranet better.
In this article we’re explore why it is critical to keep on improving your intranet, why assessing your intranet is important, how the Intranet Health Check works, and the ways you can use it to ensure your intranet keeps delivering value.
Why it’s essential to keep on improving your intranet
Intranets are never done. There is always more work to do. Employee needs and organisational requirements continually change, and intranets need to evolve accordingly to:
- Mirror changes in the organisations such as restructures and acquisitions.
- Support employees to help meet new and emerging challenges.
- Reflect changes in the working practices and the use of technology.
- Meet the evolving expectations of user and stakeholders in order to support employee experience and drive value.
Standing still with your intranet and not evolving or improving is never really an option. As the rest of the world moves on, it means your intranet will effectively fall behind, start to experience reduced adoption, and ultimately depreciate in value.
Intranets get better in different ways. Occasionally you might need to invest in an intranet product like Lightspeed365, but also often intranet teams sustain a programme of continual improvement with smaller, incremental changes. Over the years, we’ve also observed that continual improvement on the intranet tends to be the time when most value is added.
Thankfully, SharePoint intranets and products like Lightspeed365 are great at supporting continual improvement because:
- Most intranets are launched as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with improvements planned on the roadmap.
- Intranets are essentially modular in nature, so it is easy to add new features and content areas, so intranets lend themselves well for incremental changes.
- Microsoft continues to invest in SharePoint and also Microsoft 365 which usually means there are opportunities to make a SharePoint intranet better and better.
- Intranet products such as Lightspeed365 also continue to evolve with new features, which can then easily be deployed.
- Central intranet teams and related support departments tend to be tightly resourced, so incremental improvements tend to be easier to support rather than “big bang” intranet implementations.
- Continual improvement also provides the opportunity to learn what works and what doesn’t over time.
Why assessing your intranet is an integral part of improvement
If you want to improve your intranet, it is essential to know where you are currently in terms of what works well, where there are gaps, which areas you’re less than mature in, where changes are need, and where there are opportunities to improve. If you want to get to a certain point on your intranet journey, you need to know where you’re starting from.
When it comes to improving your intranet, knowledge is power. You can’t improve an intranet based on assumptions, otherwise you might introduce features or prioritise changes that will add little value or have zero impact. Teams who successfully improve their intranet ensure they:
- Have a good understanding of user needs and business stakeholder requirements and keep on top of these as they chang.
- Understand current intranet pain points and how the intranet is being used.
- Understand how their intranet stacks up in terms of maturity and might compare to a typical intranet in a comparable organisation.
- Understand the “art of the possible” when it comes to what you can achieve with an intranet.
But keeping on top of all these areas can be challenging because:
- Intranet teams often don’t have other examples of intranets to compare their own to, partly because other intranets are hidden behind the firewall.
- Intranets cover a multitude of different areas so it can be difficult to assess performance over a number of different areas
- Intranet teams and support functions are super-busy and there is not always the resourcing, bandwidth or headspace to do this successfully.
- Intranet products and digital workplace continue to evolve at pace.
- Everyone has a different view of what the intranet should do – and there can be a lot of noise and sometimes uniformed opinions across different stakeholders, making it harder to establish an objective view and clarity ging forward.
Recognising these issues, we created the Intranet Health Check in order to provide a quick, practical and informed way to assess your intranet maturity and its relative strengths and weaknesses. When combined with other data inputs such as a user survey, you can start to build up a strong picture of where you are with your intranet.
What areas do you need to assess an intranet on?
Intranets are very flexible in that they deliver value across a number of key areas and processes, so any assessment needs to take in these different areas of value. For example, it is possible for have an intranet that is excellent at supporting internal communications but has very poor mobile access or does little to support knowledge management.
The five key areas of that we asses in the Intranet Health Check are:
Communication
Employee engagement
Self-service
Mobile access
Knowledge management
How the Intranet Health Check Works
Lightspeed365’s Intranet Health Check is a self-assessment tool that provides insights into the performance and maturity of your intranet over five key intranet areas – Communication, Employee Engagement, Self-service, Mobile access and Knowledge management. All responses are completely confidential and will not be shared.
The assessment is derived from forty or so carefully curated questions relating to intranet features, adoption and management. We’ve designed the Intranet Health Check to be quick and easy to use, so most of the questions require either yes / no answers or choosing one out of three ratings. It should only take ten to fifteen minutes to complete.
Once you have completed the questions you will get an instant report showing how much your intranet scores out of 100 for each of the five key areas, plus some related commentary with useful insights. We will also email you a link the report which can be shared with others.
The Intranet Health Check is not designed to be a deeply scientific and hugely report into the positive and negative elements of every intranet platform, but more of a pragmatic, quick check into the health of your intranet that will provide real insights with minimal effort.
Six ways to use the Intranet Health Check
Use the results from the Intranet Health Check in the following ways:
Conversation starter
Strategy starting point
Prioritise the roadmap
Business case
Identify requirements
Track progress
Ready to take the Intranet Health Check?
It’s free and will take you only fifteen minutes at most. If you’d like to discuss the Health Check or its results, then get in touch!
