Migrating to a new intranet – how do you support the content owners?

At a recent meeting in one of our intranet community of practice groups we discussed what you can do to support your content owners when an intranet re-development project goes into to the labour-intensive stages of migrating content to the new platform.

The content owners may have many questions: Where does our content go in the new structure? What content do we actually have? Should we delete some of it? Will time be allowed for content quality and improvement work? Will there be a freeze period when we won’t be able to work on the current intranet?

The group members offered several ideas for dealing with this issue:

• Establish a network of intranet contact persons that employees can go to with their questions. Help managers appoint these persons by sending out a short job description first. Make sure to inform your contact persons through regular email, meetings and workshops.
• Host a regular intranet-café for example every other week where employees can show up without appointment. Two hours away from the desk allows employees to effectively work on their content; a task that would otherwise often be pushed to one side.
• Offer focused mini courses lasting only 1-2 hours on specific tasks, for example “how to create a news item” or “how to set up a template”.
• Spoil your editors with inspirational sessions from external speakers, for example on what makes good content.
• Have a help page on the intranet for your editors. Some elements of this page could be a forum for questions, a calendar with courses and short instructional videos or e-learning modules.
• Distribute instructions on cardboard that can be placed on desks for quick reference. It could be a short guide on how to get started.
• Motivate editors by communicating to them about the users of their content. Is it easy to read and relevant to them? Personas for your main user groups can work well as tangible reference points for editors. Another idea is to gather intranet statistics per editor, making the numbers relevant to each person.
• Showcase “the page of the month” or otherwise communicate about actual successful cases from around the organisation. You could even create an internal intranet award.
• If possible, go meet your editors when they call for support. It might take longer, but is so much easier than over the phone, and often other issues will emerge this way.

Finally, you could consider these two more radical approaches that also came up:

• Let departments put their old content on a usb stick first, and if it not requested or used within a year, they can quietly dispose of it.
• Implement a system that is so easy to use that you don’t need any technical training at all. One member organisation has recently launched an intranet with only front end editing, and haven’t done any training whatsoever. Instead they have a couple of video clips on the intranet showing how to get started.

You can get more useful, tangible ideas like this for all aspects of your intranet project at our full day seminar, the International Intranet Day, on March 24 in Copenhagen.

Do you have other ideas for successfully navigating through a migration phase?