5 steps to intranet launch success in your small business

 •  15 Jun, 15  •  3 min read

Every small business is different, but if you follow these five steps you’ll be able to launch your intranet with 100% confidence in its success.

Step 1: Kick-off and planning

You can’t wait to get building and creating your intranet, but there are things you need to discover first if your intranet is going to succeed. Gather your stakeholders and get your intranet project started with some planning meetings. They might not be super exciting, but they are vital to a successful intranet.

  • Firstly you need the intranet’s objectives and purpose. These will help steer and guide your project and the people working on it.
  • Secondly you need to know what information the intranet needs to hold and what tasks it needs to help your colleagues perform.
  • Thirdly you need to plan the structure of your intranet. All those pages, policies, galleries and forms need to have a logical home that make it easy for everyone to find what they need.

Our intranet experts use a range of tools to help in the planning stages of your intranet, from group exercises to user surveys, to help make sure the intranet you build is the intranet you need.

Step 2: Training

Once you’ve planned it you need to know how to build it. Although Interact is intuitive and easy-to-use, a little instruction at these early stages can really help speed up your intranet’s progress.

Training for your Intranet Managers and Site Administrators will give them all of the skills and knowledge they need to be able to build the structure of your site as quickly and efficiently as possible and make the best use of the tools available.

It will also be really useful to anyone you want to be able to add any content to the intranet. It will give your content authors and intranet champions the confidence to contribute and help make your intranet the go-to place for all of your company information and communications.

Some great training from us combined with your brilliant planning will mean you can spring straight into step 3.

Step 3: Build and configuration

This may sound tricky, but is pretty straight forward. You found out what you needed to build in step 1, how to build it in step 2, so this is where you actually build it.

Create the top level navigation structure, followed by the lower level and then add the content.

Here’s where your stakeholders, content authors and intranet champions come in. An Intranet wasn’t built in a day or by one person, so get some help. Some governance or guidelines will really help, especially if authors aren’t used to writing online content, and of course they would have all received training in step 2.

And while that’s all going on you can tweak the application settings and defaults to suit your business and get the most out of your intranet.

Step 4: Theme design

Here at Interact we have a dedicated team of designers that can create and implement a great design for you. To suit your requirements we can either put together a simple design with just a logo and a few key colours, or we can really go to town with custom backgrounds, your own fonts and some adverts for your homepage.

A great design will give your intranet a strong sense of identity and help to embed it into your businesses culture. It can also reflect the purpose, mood and vison of your intranet.

Our project managers and success coaches will be able to guide you through the process to ensure you get the right design for your organisation.

Step 5: Launch

Someone once said, “if you build it, they will come.” Well unless you tell them about it, they won’t. Informing people and getting them excited about their new intranet is so important, not to mention really fun coming up with a great intranet launch campaign.

Relate it back to the objectives you came up with in step 1; pick a few key ways that the intranet is going to make everyone’s lives easier and really go for it with banners, free gifts, clowns, even glitter cannons. Anything you can do that can build anticipation and drive engagement will mean everyone will log-in to the intranet on launch day, and continue to log-in.

Need more help?

Following these five steps means you can build an amazing intranet that will be a success – now and in the future. Interact’s Jumpstart pack has been designed to include all these steps, with as much or as little time devoted to each to ensure you achieve your objectives. So it’s truly customisable to your business.

If you want any more information, I’d be delighted to help, so feel free to get in touch.