Do You Have the Intranet Jitters?

So you were tasked with managing the new intranet project. Do you have the intranet jitters? Well, don’t worry about it! It’s not as daunting as you may think. There are a few things that you can do and resources that you can use to make this task one of the smoothest you have had to manage thus far. In this blog post, I will be bringing to light some ways to ease those pre-intranet jitters.

The best way to ease the nerves about implementing an intranet is to surround yourself with key players from several of the most important departments in the hospital to form an intranet governance group. This distinguished group, yourself included, can help make some of the more important decisions like what features you need, resources that need to be collected, processes that will be changed, timelines, and so on. Instead of making these decisions on your own or with a just a few people and guessing what departments need or want, you can use this group to make this process a lot clearer.

Another way to make the intranet implementation process as smooth as possible is to go to your vendor for help. Vendors are the pros that have done what you are doing 100+ times. They will hopefully have the experience to find the most efficient ways to display information or navigate throughout the site. You and your team can then give input that would be specific to your organization and how it works. Then the vendor can put those ideas into a cohesive package. Here at HospitalPortal.net, we come on site and work with content creators one on one to build up their pages with the information they want and help structure the intranet from our experience of what works. We also include online support and training sessions. With this, you don’t have to be the end all be all expert on the system; you can rely on your vendor for that.

The last piece of advice I would give for people managing an Intranet Implementation project is to remember that you don’t have to do it all in one go. Every single department in the hospital does not need to have their own page, and not every function needs to be done from the new intranet from the get-go. I usually suggest that you roll out your intranet in phases. Start with the essentials first like, the HR department, Policies & Procedures, Med Surg, Nursing, and so-on. Then once those sections of the intranet get settled and into their own, you can start to add other departments such as Housekeeping, maintenance, and others. This will surely lessen some of the pressure from the very start of the process.

Well, do you feel a little better now? I hope so. Implementing a new intranet is quite a big task, but you’ll have support the whole way if you follow the steps above. For more advice on developing intranets, check out one of our recorded webinars on the topic.