3 Key Steps to Ensure a Successful Intranet Implementation
3 Key Steps to Ensure a Successful Intranet Implementation
The days of looking at an internal communication hub as merely a luxury are long gone. While easy, quick access to pertinent information is becoming a standard in our personal lives, having this same type of urgency and accessibility in a professional hospital environment is equally, if not more, important. Whether you’re coming from nothing, a home grown intranet, or an intranet from a third-party provider, implementing it may seem like a daunting task. But it doesn’t have to be! Here are three steps to make the process a little easier to digest.
Establish Portal Governance Group
This is one of the most important steps in the intranet implementation process. Of course, a project like this should have one project manager to oversee the entire implementation. However, the likely reason of acquiring an intranet in the first place is so your hospital (or facility) is looking to make strides in becoming more efficient. With that said, the project manager should designate a group of 5-10 individuals who will help drive this project. Here at HospitalPortal.net, we call this a Portal Governance Group. This group of individuals will not only help drive the project, but should also have input on the department pages that pertain to them. This delegation will help distribute the workload between your team while still allowing the project manager to keep their finger on the pulse of the implementation.
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Develop an Intranet Map
Another step to help make the implementation go smoothly is to develop an intranet map. In preparation for implementation, having this map will help keep everything on track. Some of these items include:
* What to put in the main menu and drop downs
* What departments to include and what types of info. they want to display
* Who gets access to certain pages
* What documents to post and where
* Calendars and content
* Etc.
Although there is project planning software out there that will help with this step, I’ve found that a lot of clients simply use sticky notes or a dry-erase board (or a combination of both) to map out where they want everything. Especially in the earlier stages of mapping out your intranet, being able to move sticky notes around or easily erase and re-write certain layout features and ideas will make figuring out the structure of your intranet much easier.
Organization of Policies and Procedures
This is often one of the more intimidating task when implementing a new intranet. Some facilities just keep hard copies of their policies in a binder; some have them on a share folder on the server; some have them already set up in a policy manager system. Regardless of how you currently organize your polices, this would be a good time to review how they’re all stored and set up. Find a good structure for organizing your policies that works for your facility – usually organizing them in a document tree works well for this. Then note/document when each policy is up for review so you can fit that into a workflow once you reach that step in the intranet implementation process.
