Michelle Goodwin from AGL Energy Limited talked about content migration for a new intranet, especially around getting people involved.

Key points:

• (Early 2008) Implemented MOSS 2007 and redesigned Intranet. Aim was to help employees complete business tasks and improve productivity.
• Change management (real world), “a structured approach to dragging individuals, teams, and organizations kicking and screaming out of their comfortable world into a new unknown one against their will.”
• Mission at AGL – (a) who owned the content, (b) ensure content was still valid and get it moved, (c) generate excitement – it’s EASY to use. But there was another challenge – the biggest one was getting SharePoint installed. Four groups involved in deciding how to set up SharePoint – took 6 months.
• How did you get them on board – (a) we threatened (“move it or we’ll delete it”), (b) phone and email them to harass them, (c) bribe (we offered to help), (d) reward and acknowledge (“a big party at the end”). Also – identified relevant authors, valid content versus historical content, site structure (“we designed the structure and gave it to them), and guidance and help.
• Training approach – 2 days – day 1 on SharePoint basics, day 2 on content and layout. They wrote the training material just for AGL Energy – didn’t use any off-the-shelf training material. Also had a user community that’s very active, where they support each other and ask questions.
• Did some proactive outbound internal marketing about the new intranet, called “The Grid” (the name came through an internal competition).
• Key features – “I would like to” (common processes, ‘I would like to upgrade my chair’), Your Tools (organizational chart), dynamic home page (changes 1-2 time each day), global and enhanced people search Creplacing the phone book – needed to enable aliasas / nicknames), Friday Employee Picture (to help people learn about each other), and Feedback link.
• Would do more of … project management, stakeholder engagement, governance, business owner. Would not … unclear accountability, unclear decision making.

Questions
1. With doing the site structure yourself, how did you mitigate risk of getting it wrong? There will be some people who will tell you – from the business, from the steering committee.

2. For migrating documents and policies, how did you manage volume? Asked people to think whether the document was still being used. Migrated the most current one only.

3. Did you turn on My Sites and wikis? Wikis were turned on a year later (people had to learn other things first). My Sites are not enabled yet.

4. Size of the project team, and time taken? 5 people, and 6 months fighting on server architecture, then another 4 months for working with authors, etc.

5. Don’t drop-down menus drive you batty? We had to do it to stop all the business units wanting real estate on the home page. They can be a bit annoying.