Why Digital Workplace Projects Fail Without a Solid Strategy

Digital workplace projects often fail—not because of poor technology, but due to a lack of a clear digital workplace strategy. Without a clear roadmap, even the best digital collaboration tools or intranets struggle to gain traction. In this guide, we explore why digital workplace initiatives fail, how to build a successful digital strategy, and what best practices ensure long-term employee engagement and transformation success.

The workplace technology for employee engagement or digital collaboration might be easier, better and cheaper, but essentially it comes down to people and humans are the tricky bit. When a group of humans gets together, we don’t naturally decide things in rational ways. We’ve all had those meetings where, to our mind, the wrong thing got talked about and the big issue got sidelined.

Digital workplace technology is especially difficult when people confuse "cool new workplace technology product" with "digital transformation". Here comes the next product (such as AI tools like Microsoft Copilot) with a poorly defined use case, little evident user need and a low chance of success. It's bound to face problems with change management and product adoption and, voilà! Project failure. Meanwhile, the tools that we 100% know that employees need for their jobs and their sanity whither on the vine: unoptimised, unusable, unfindable, inaccessible and ultimately frustrating. So why is it that we find it hard to come up with digital workplace strategy that works?

In this guide we are going to talk about some of the key reasons that digital workplace projects fail and then learn how to put together a successful digital strategy, a timeless best-practice technique independent of technology or flavour of the month.

The reason digital workplace projects fail

We can think of strategy as the art of working out what the problem is and then coming up with a good plan to fix it. However, most groups of humans don’t do this naturally. They like to spend the minimum amount of time discussing the problem and then spend most of their time considering the solution.

Here’s the quandary: you can’t solve the wrong problem.

Bad solution Good solution
Right problem 👎 🎉
Wrong problem 💩 🤷‍♀️

In our dreams, we identify the right problem, and we implement a brilliant digital project, then throw a party 🎉. We’re patted on the back. Well done you! There is of course the risk that things don’t go as wonderfully as we’ve planned 👎. But all is not lost. It perhaps wasn't as slick as we were hoping, but we’ve probably taken a big step forward to provide digital tools to employees.

But if you fluffed the bit where you were working out what the problem was, and jumped to the wrong conclusion, even if you hit your project out of the park, you will turn around and your users will be shrugging 🤷‍♀. They won’t care, it won't contribute to employee engagement because it didn't matter in the first place. It might have even been better for your wrong-problem project to (ahem) bomb 💩. Better that than to very efficiently deliver the wrong thing.

Once wrong-problem projects are underway there is nothing you can do. No amount of testing, training, usability or communications that will bring it back on track. It will become a sideline and an irrelevance and a testament to the hubris of those that sat in that meeting declaring the solution "job done".

There's a great term that describes this process called “Bikeshedding”. The (entirely apocryphal) story is that a group meet to decide on some things for the construction of a nuclear power station. The first item on the agenda is really difficult and full of hard science, economics, risks and probabilities. It is passed unanimously. The second item on the agenda concerns the construction and location of the bike shed. This is a topic that everyone feels able to discuss with confidence so 45 minutes of intense debate ensues.

I reckon that bikeshedding happens all the time at the beginning of digital workplace projects. No one wants to talk about the hard stuff or say “Stop. We just don’t know. Let’s find out. Let's go and ask some employees.”, so the time is taken up by accessible trivia. People confuse the time taken with importance and the die is cast.

Once wrong-problem projects are underway there is nothing you can do. No amount of testing, training, usability or communications that will bring it back on track. It will become a sideline and an irrelevance and a testament to the hubris of those that sat in that meeting declaring the solution "job done".

Successful digital workplace strategy

The answer to all this of course is a decent strategy process. This should start with a discovery phase that goes and gets some data to increase decisions makers’ perspective. Perhaps observing users and seeing what they need? Maybe speaking with stakeholders about what is important to the business? A little glance at metrics? A perusal of the other strategies that influence you? Then taking those expanded minds and coolly discussing the actual problem in clear terms and lining up potential solutions.

How do you create a digital workplace strategy

Well we know how we would create ours. If the digital workplace was a game you had to play, how could you play it and win? You need a game plan rooted in the reality of your employees' working lives. Spark Trajectory does strategy based on user research. You need to understand how people work and what frustrations they have. Always start with some form of discovery. If you don't do that you are the people in a conference room assuming that you know what people need, or equally as bad, just blindly following a certain vendors roadmap wherever it takes you, and then wondering why “adoption” is so hard.

So here's a little run down of how you can put in the very basics of a decent strategy process.

1. Discovery methods and sources

Most of your time in discovery is to understand what users and stakeholders think and use their digital tools currently. There are many ways to collect data to try and understand the current state and what people think about it.

For instance:

  • Stakeholder interviews.
  • Focus group and workshop findings.
  • User interviews and observation.
  • User surveys and free-text feedback.
  • Analysis of metrics.
  • Benchmarking data.

By pooling this rich source of data, themes will emerge:

  • How people feel about what they’ve got.
  • What pulls them to the existing tool set and what repels them from it.
  • The sorts of tools and content that they want in the future.
  • Sources of enormous frustration that cause them strong negative emotions.
  • What tools critical to their daily working lives.
  • Their overall satisfaction "all things considered".
  • External context and input.

Sometimes general market and demographic data as well as technology developments can also be a useful input and reference point for your discovery phase, although in practice we find this often emerges as not-that-convincing evidence added to a business case.  Use external data with caution, but you may find the following useful:

  • Case studies from similar organisations.
  • General digital workplace trends.
  • Tech habits from the consumer world.
  • Technology developments and vendor roadmaps.
  • The output from external benchmarking exercises.

2. Diagnosis

Diagnosis is a stage of strategic development when you define the problems attempt to explain the challenges that your future digital workplace project faces. It is there to give a full view of the reality of your situation. A good way to think about it is a process for generating a big bank of well-thought-out problems that you can then use to work out what the solution might be, and to be able to work out which is the right problem to work on next.

All of the user and stakeholder research you have conducted needs to be considered:

  • In what areas or activities are you particularly weak? “We are really poor as an organisation at keeping information up to date and ensuring ownership.”
  • In what areas or activities are you strong or potentially strong? “We have lots of people with the business that are excellent at creating content and they implement the brand well.”
  • Are the stakeholder views and user views similar or different? “Managers thought that people should be using AI chatbots, but users just wanted to be look up practical information that was up to date in the traditional way”

Diagnosis is more than a summary of your research. It is a reflection on your current reality and attempts to explain why things are as they are and then communicate this commentary back to your stakeholders for, perhaps uncomfortable, discussion.

The strategic diagnosis documents:

  • An objective view of your intranet and how it is seen.
  • The current ideas and demands on developing your digital workplace capabilities, thoughtfully critiqued.
  • The limitations of what you can achieve realistically.
  • What are the root causes of your past failures and successes?
  • What are the obstacles in your way, now that you want to make changes?

3. Guiding policy

A guiding policy, simply put, is the clever idea at the middle of your intranet strategy. It describes a series of principles of that you will work within and work towards. These principles should provide several things:

  • Provide clarity and reduce ambiguity about what you are planning.
  • Clarify the benefit of what you want to achieve.
  • Position your efforts among the other activities of the business and anticipate changes over time.
  • Seek to multiply your efforts by working with your strengths and mitigating your weaknesses.

Like any clever plan, it takes thought, creativity and leadership, and we can give you only limited advice about that nor send you in a particular path for your specific circumstances without knowing the details. However, when faced with all of your problems analysed in the diagnosis, various directions will become evident. You should aim to summarise this in between three and five principles. It's best to support each guiding policy with a rationale that points back to the discovery and diagnosis phases so that it is backed up by data, analysis and narrative.

4. Roadmap

Tactics are the actions that will actually do the work. "Tactical" is often used in business as pejorative term for "not strategic", but choosing your tactics are an important part of strategy formation. Once the guiding policy has clearly set your overall approach and you’ve decided on where to focus, you are free to choose the tactics that you think will deliver the strategy in the most effective way for you. They come in many forms and could be individual actions or larger projects or initiatives, namely:

  • Specific tools or practices – such as intranet personalisation, Copilot integration (such that it is) or creating and implementing standards or a governance model.
  • The procurement or deployment of specific products or technical solutions.
  • Different ways of approaching a problem – such as data-driven, user-centred or crowdsourced.
  • Organisational hoops you need to jump through or maintain – such as setting up a steering committee or proving a business case.

Many digital workplace teams get tactics and strategy confused. Different tactics could contribute to many different strategies. Once you see AI as a tactic, rather than a strategy, you can imagine how it could be chosen to achieve a strategy of both employee productivity and findability, even though the objectives of the strategies  might be very different.

To the relief of many, you can finally talk about the sorts of tools and products you might start to choose and some of the supporting activities you would need to put in place to choose, procure, implement, test, launch and support them.

You can draw the roadmap up in a nice visual way with different workstreams getting you from A to B. The different parts of that roadmap will be supporting each other but it is more of an overall indication of initiatives than a project plan.

This is a diagrammatic representation of a strategic roadmap, with three workstream flowing vertically with a series of example initiatives.

You've now got a lovely way of describing what you are planning to achieve that everyone can look at and get immediately.

It sounds complicated and time consuming

It could take a week, it could take six months. But literally anything is better that nothing. If you don't have anything at all map out what you know now and conduct some guerrilla research and whip something up in a a couple of weeks. Creating a more fully-fleshed out plan can be part of this first plan and then you can go again.

Sounds like this is going to take a turn for the pitchy

Hell yeah! Spark Trajectory can help you with intranet and digital workplace strategy. Sometimes it is hard to spare the time and sometimes an external view is just what you need. We have innovative research methods and frameworks that can help show you the path ahead. We are experienced research interviewers. We have tools and techniques to help facilitate you and your stakeholder group towards a plan that you are all happy with. You can start your strategic initiatives confident that you are solving problems worthy of your time and your colleagues will thank you for it.

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If the digital workplace was a game you had to play, how could you play it and win? You need a game plan rooted in the reality of your employees' working lives.