THE BRITISH COUNCIL: User and stakeholder research and intranet product choice
About the British Council
The British Council is a UK public sector institution that promotes cultural relations and educational opportunities. For ninety years, it has helped build connections, understanding and trust between people in the UK and countries across the world. Its highly diverse workforce is spread across multiple locations in over 100 countries.
“Chris and Steve were fantastic to work with – true professionals with deep intranet expertise. They quickly got to grips with the complexity of our global organisation, dug into the details of our existing setup, and delivered practical, effective solutions that we’re still using today – over a year later!”
Challenge: An intranet that meets the needs of a diverse, global workforce
The British Council’s Internal Communications (IC) team was looking to introduce a new intranet to improve digital communications and streamline daily work. The legacy solution was no longer considered fit-for-purpose with poor findability and out-of-date content. Content owners also found it hard to update.
The intranet did not deliver the kind of targeted and personalised experiences required across such a complex organisational structure and subsequently multiple local SharePoint sites had sprung up with little overall governance.
The IC team issued an RFP seeking external expert help to define a new intranet strategy and roadmap, draft requirements and identify potential vendor solutions, with a view to issue a new RFP for intranet software.
Solution: Detailed user research to understand key employee journeys
After engaging Spark Trajectory following the RFP process, we set about undertaking a detailed research exercise to understand key employee user journeys, ways of working and desired objectives. We received a detailed tour of the legacy intranet and interviewed key business stakeholders. We arranged 24 remote user interviews representative of the British Council’s workforce across their expansive geographical footprint, speaking to a range of roles across five continents.
We assimilated and codified our interview data and other research material using our Task Trajectory user journey mapping model to understand how employees use the intranet and other platforms to stay informed and get things done. We then presented our findings to the team.
We then applied the data to Spark Trajectory’s Intranet Product Evaluation framework, defining a set of detailed requirements for a new intranet. We carried out a MoSCoW rating workshop with the core project team to validate and prioritise the final functional and non-functional requirements.
Finding the right intranet product and developing a roadmap
We then carried out a detailed product evaluation exercise, identifying a long list of eight potential solutions including the use of SharePoint out of the box as a potential baseline solution. These were scored based on their suitability to meet British Council’s requirements and reduced to a shortlist of three where we engaged with vendors to understand features in more detail and get indicative costs. We presented our findings back to the IC team so they gained a good understanding to inform the business case.
We documented an outline intranet strategy and roadmap to guide the eventual implementation, covering areas such as recommended work streams, opportunities for improvement and a medium- to long-view of strategic steps. Finally, we documented an operating model taking into account the British Council’s requirements to ensure resources are deployed effectively and governance is applied so that the intranet is sustainable.
Outcome: An intranet that supports the daily work of the British Council
As a result of our foundational work, the British Council was able to issue an RFP and successfully appoint a leading intranet software supplier, while planning an overall programme of work informed by our strategic roadmap and plan.
The result is the launch of a successful new intranet that meets all the needs of the IC team while helping employees view and find relevant information that can help them to complete tasks. Content owners are also able to easily update their information and are far more engaged to deliver successful intranet content that drives efficiency.
The new intranet is once again making a difference every day and supporting the British Council’s important work in building connections and trust between the UK and the rest of the world.