MILLS & REEVE: Intranet product selection, governance and content strategy
About Mills & Reeve
Mills & Reeve is a top 50 UK law firm centred on achieving more for clients, their businesses and the wider communities they serve. The firm has around 1,450 partners and staff based across seven different locations.
“It was an absolute pleasure working with Steve and Chris on our intranet replacement project. Their experience and tools saved us a huge amount of time and internal resource, and ensured we acquired the right platform for our requirements and environment. Their additional help on content strategy and governance has paid dividends – we started (more or less!) how we meant to go on, and having governance and content strategy agreed up front has enabled us to avoid common pitfalls.”
The challenge: replacing a 20-year old intranet
Mills & Reeve had an intranet that had been in place for nearly two decades. Mercury was originally custom-built in-house and while it still provided access to some essential areas of knowledge through different integrations, it offered poor findability and an outdated user experience, and lacked many of the features of modern intranets. It was also very difficult to update, relying on IT support for everything but document management.
Mills & Reeve’s knowledge management (KM) team were keen to provide a modern intranet experience that continued to support KM throughout the firm, but also helped partners and staff to get things done. They also wanted a new intranet to underpin internal communications and employee engagement.
The solution: Selecting the right intranet platform
Following an RFP process, Spark Trajectory were engaged to help the KM team to find and procure a new intranet solution to replace Mercury and provide the modern intranet experience needed to support a top law firm.
First of all, we undertook a discovery period in order to formulate a series of requirements for the new intranet. We carried out a set of discovery workshops with key stakeholders and also conducted a data gathering exercise within our collaborative environment. We leveraged our Task Trajectory user journey mapping framework to codify data based around key user journeys.
We analysed and digested this data and assimilated it into our Spark Trajectory Product Evaluation framework to document a comprehensive set of requirements. These were reviewed and validated with the KM team and prioritised based on the MoSCoW rating system.
We then undertook a comprehensive market review assessing the suitability of key intranet software to meet Mills & Reeve’s unique needs which included requirements for some key integrations. We identified eight potential intranet solutions which we then rated based on the matrix, reducing these to a shortlist of three.
We remained in close contact with the KM team and made a detailed evaluation of the suitability of the three solutions, speaking to each vendor to explore features in more depth as well as to get an estimate of costs. We then presented our findings back to the KM team who went on to select one of the vendors to supply the replacement for Mercury.
Content strategy and governance for sustainable success
After selecting the platform, the KM team felt they needed more support in preparing for the introduction of the new platform to ensure it was both successful and sustainable.
The team engaged Spark Trajectory again to help define a content strategy, governance framework and target operating model for the new intranet. Building on the research we had already undertaken, we held a number of further workshops with key stakeholders to help to help articulate requirements and produced a detailed content strategy that focused on elements such as content areas, publishing models, content controls, publication standards and more. We also consulted our Skills Matrix to understand roles and their core activities.
We then leveraged the Spark Trajectory Governance Accelerator to co-create the key governance controls to define roles and responsibilities, a governance matrix based on a RASCI model, an outline operating model and more. We also engaged with the incoming intranet vendor to help explain the governance model and take this into account in the implementation.
Outcome: An intranet for the long-term
Today Mills & Reeve has a vibrant, successful intranet that supports partners and staff in their daily work while also keeping everyone informed and engaged. The combination of the initial definition of the right product, operating model, governance framework and content strategy has been a critical factor in delivering an intranet that helps knowledge flow in the day-to-day and delivers value for the long term.