The SharePoint Dude

The PORTAL Method Series – Week 1: Planning. This week, we’ll break down the Planning step in our process. Stop in and read up on how to gather up the masses to reach portal greatness!

Have you ever heard the saying, “If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail”? I don’t recall who said it originally, but it certainly rings true. It rings especially true when planning a corporate intranet portal. Planning is THE single most important step in The PORTAL Method for a variety of reasons.

The first step in planning is to gather together your team. This may sound easy, but depending on your corporate climate, this could prove to be the most challenging step for you. If your company has a lot of red-tape, or seemingly takes “forever” to make a decision about IT, you’ll need to muster your selling skills on this step.

The next step in the Planning process is to determine what you have that is “useful” within your organization today, as well as what you lack. Find out what servers contain critical information, where the users store their favorite “stash” of repeatedly used data, what storage bins, servers, email folders, servers, graphs, charts and doohickeys are still relevant and useful.

Establish a Communication Plan: With your fancy Exec on-board, it’s time to put them to work!  (ok… it’s time to politely ask them to help you).   You want to begin to build a formal Communication Plan to get information about your portal project out to the masses.   You want users to pay attention, participate in [...]

Develop an end-user survey: This is where things get interesting.   All of the planning in the world will not prepare you for what you’re about to hear from your user community.  This is increasingly true the larger the company is. What we want to accomplish in this step is monumental!   You want to drive user [...]

Meeting #2:  Set initial portal goals. Collect the feedback from the Committee surveys and aggregate the results into a single file (databse, Spreadsheet, table – whatever works).  Bring the Portal Committee back together and review the responses to the survey, one question at a time.  Discuss how many questions had the same responses.  Discuss how [...]