How Danfoss uses clear and proactive governance to ensure quality intranet content
Danfoss
EMEA | SharePoint Intranet Festival 2024
Jørn and Hanne from Danfoss will share how their approach to content governance ensures the intranet is built on a solid foundation of quality content that genuinely meets the needs of intranet users. Join this session to learn how Intranet content creators at Danfoss use a ‘Clarification Canvas’ to get really clear on exactly why they need content on the intranet in the first place, and how they are trained to create good content, particularly by always putting audience needs above their own.
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The first speakers are Jørn and Hanne from Danfoss, fantastic work that they're doing over at Danfoss and I was inspired on one of our SWOOP masterclass sessions from SWOOP Academy where Jørn was sharing a piece of work that they've done and I said oh that's something that would be fantastic to share so there's some real gems in this presentation it's talking about how Danfoss uses really clear and proactive governance to make sure the focus is on quality intranet content. I will say no more on that front other than to hand over to Jørn and Hanne to please share your screen I know you've got some slides prepared I'll hand over to you and if you're able to share screen that would be fantastic please fire away. Thank you Pete, I will share my screen in a second.
It should be you see it can you see it now now I can also see it and well some very nice words from Pete I hope we can live up to the speech he did we didn't pay him anything so but we will do our best to live up to it so unveiling some secrets from our journey here so let's move on so just quick about our company we will not spend much time of that just so that you know what we are talking about so we come from Danfoss it's a private owned company with headquarter in Denmark headquarter is very outside on the countryside so fields and then a big building that's where we we are sited we have more than 42,000 colleagues around the world we are in more than 100 countries and the rest you can read by yourself because this is not the most important but this is just the corporate stuff that just needed to share with you guys so let's move on to the important part so a bit about our internet so it's called Danfoss Globe we launched it in multiple steps in during 2023 actually first step was in 2022 but that was a very very silent go live we have 425 page editors and 99 news editors so there's a lot of people who can do content good content and also could do a lot of mess if we do not try to to control what what they are doing and that is what we will tell you about today how can we manage all these people and get a completely awesome internet out of it so how did we do it as I said we came from an old internet and actually both Hanne and me were part of creating that we had some governance but not actually the governance we really liked to have because people were just running in all kind of directions and we didn't really have control of what's going on so we had a lot of sorry from English crap in there that we really wanted to to clean up now that we we did a new internet so what we will share with you today is so how did we manage it so about set the governance take content ownership get the basic right train for skill and then a stronger community so these are the headlines so let's move on with that so about set the governance so the way we are organized around our internet is that we have actually four owners teams within Danfoss so it's communications where Hanne and me are from then we have global service this is the global service organization that goes across Danfoss they owe all the buildings they make sure everything gets cleaned and stuff like that then we have HR and then we have our IT department called digital and IT we are the owners that gives a very strong foundation when we decide something then we can everyone go in the same direction so this these four teams where we are part of we own the digital employee experience then we have IT they are taking care of all the technical stuff the solutions they make sure that everything is running it's based on maybe they didn't say that on Microsoft SharePoint our new internet so it's everything global service they do the support around our editors if they have some issues they can call them they will take care of that everything around user experience this is communication this is basically Hanne and me taking care of that and then of course we have all our users and editors and whatever everything around that and I will come more into that and one thing that I think you all know it's very important that you do the stakeholder management and by us having all these owners it makes it much easier for us if we decide something and tell them hey this is the way we do then there's not so much complaint from the rest of organization because we have all these areas behind us and we get the message out so this is really important that you have your stakeholders in place and you know how to deal with them so a bit about the roles and descriptions that we have in Danfoss you can see here we have an area owner or could also be called a hub owner these are the one who owns an area on our internet you cannot have an area unless you have an area owner or a hub owner so these are the ones who are responsible for all the content that is in within this area it's a bit like a beekeeper making sure that everything goes smoothly and stuff like that then within these areas there can be different sites this is like the queen bee you know they rule within their own area but still they have to comply to what the area owner is telling them and what we are telling the area owner so they run their small kingdoms in democracy and then we make sure that that works and then we have the editors that's a little bit like the what you call it the worker bee they run around and do all the work and make sure everything works and then come back to the queen bee and tell her how it's done this is how it works so we have set up clear roles and descriptions and when you get the presentation afterwards there is an even deeper description of behind each of these roles what we require of them because there's a lot of stuff that we expect from the different roles that we didn't put in here because it would take too much time to explain everything about these roles but clear roles have shown us this is the way to go so everyone knows what is their responsibility get the basic right Hanne i think that's your turn so i will be quiet for a while yeah thank you and yeah nuka used the bee analogy i think i will talk a little bit more like football or any other game because now we basically have all the players on the field right now we just need all of us to agree upon what game are we actually playing and more importantly what are the rules of the game that we are playing and this is where we set the foundation some is given from communication or branding department you know what what are the design principles how do we want each of the sides to actually appear what is the look and feel we would like that is more given from from central point of view where we created a Danfoss globe lookbook simply articulating yeah the different views and and design principles how do with the platform like sharepoint you have so many options with the web parts available you can do present links for instance or quick links in many different ways how is the Danfoss way of doing it so that we have some super nice experience for the end user across the different pages other things was not centrally done it was more for instance the templates we actually invited the stakeholders in and asked them what is the important piece of information you would like if we are talking segment main page or if we are talking like a regional area and then we collaboratively created the templates there are also some editor tutorials really small tips and tricks and videos shared with them nuka will come back to that later with the playing field the game and the players said nuka we are ready to actually start looking at you can flip the slide please yeah we are now actually ready to really start working with the area owners the site owners and the editors and as nuka mentioned we came from a internet setup where we had the organizational approach now we wanted to go towards the more topic-based approach and in that scenario there is a lot of content review so we had a big clarification phase and an activation phase the clarification phase the first step was evaluating the existing content what will fly what should die what should be archived what should be rewritten and then identify especially now that we are talking about the topic-based approach how can which different knowledge hubs or topic areas would we introduce going forward and here we had a an approach where we are looking at a clarification canvas next that will be the next slide so i will come back to that what are the different tasks what is the requirement for taxonomy and of course people could train and test out a different functionality and then we had the activation phase if you move forward maybe if you'd also mentioned that none of the old stuff from the internet was moved automatically they have to review everything and rebuild everything from scratch again we didn't want to have anything of this old sorry crap into the new internet so it's of course we know we have dedicated colleagues they don't work go to work to create not nice information but there is also always something to communicate and there is also a cleanup required could you move forward no cam so that was one too many sorry here we are so what we did was actually outlining for each of the existing area i took it here as an example saying hey you have so and so many pages on the existing internet you have some additional pages that might be within your area and something else that could be the area owner's responsibility and then we asked them you know this is an example of how you can actually evaluate the content is it critical nice to know always on or and of course with some guidance on what should then happen with the content so we created that for all the stakeholders that we worked with and started out with the session with this as a focus and next was actually identifying what are the different areas of information that should be on the internet and here we introduce something called a clarification canvas and you can actually say it's sort of a contract that we make editing we want to build it as a skill and we are in here for the long run so with our dear editors and area owners and site owners we wanted to sort of make a contract that yes there's room for you on the internet if we agree upon what is it you want to bring how do you want to keep it alive but it's also a contract in the sense that they might have requirements for us for something that the solution should be able to do or that they need our support with so it's a two-way street it's not just us trying to put them into a a fixed form the clarification canvas is yeah it was a powerpoint slide like you see here we talk about what is the target audience who are you communicating to what is the main purpose articulate what it is maybe also what it's not because there might come someone else later and want to also talk about this topic or some border area of the topic and we should actually make sure that we include the relevant information into to an area like this there could be something about what does good look like the kpis what is it we want to achieve and special decisions we always hear this yeah but this piece of content even though no one reads it and we really don't keep it up to date but because of legal responsibility it needs to be on there yeah fine let's not discuss that but put make a note on it so then we know they should live in there there is a reason why it's in there it could also be other things listed and then the roles who who is the responsible person for for the area who can actually do edits who is responsible for doing the cleanup if something happens if larger changes happen who should you keep informed um and then the review um as i said before we are in here for the long run so we don't just build content and now you go and rock the boat and do all the fancy stuff you want we actually want to come back and realign on the contract look at how did it perform um what does the platform do for you how can we support you even better uh has the purpose changed a little bit then let's let's note it down so we are all aware and i'm not and we are not trying to squeeze you into a corner where you're not supposed to be anymore is that two canvases that are almost alike should we merge them things like that is what we use this canvas for and if you go one slide forward maybe you noticed on the first um one of the first slides where we did an overview that we have i think it's 158 sites um we actually put it into a list uh or a document library and added a few additional columns where we could keep track of the status that's column number one of each of the sites so they could be now it's requested then we will take a look or have a meeting with them then it would be approved then we would create the url that they can actually start adding content to and they can do it right away when we agree upon this is good to fly then they can just start building it then they will be in a building mode for a period of time we will review every single site before it's launched simply again to align are we are we meeting the criteria set is it following the lookbook is it following the design principles that we agreed upon are you using the right templates stuff like this and then we would publish it so you can see a lot of them have the purple have published um we could of course follow the maturity while they were building we asked uh you know also for us it was a lot of hard work to review all of this so we would like to know how far are you when are we supposed to take a look at your site so we introduce this maturity and the next column review complete date i realize there's only one date in here but that's basically because now we are one year ahead we already everything has been reviewed before it went live and now here one year later we will take the annual review and then we will start to list the review date um then there is an overview of who is the different owners of the site and the editors and the url and so and so forth and we might build this more mature when we move a little bit further on so it could be that we will turn it into an app um so but this is version one and it was quite easy to to work with and something that everyone had access to so they could really take a look follow do the updates in here it's not only for us to do the updates it's actually for those that own the pages maybe i can add here that even though that we closed down the old internet there were some pages that were not approved so that was just tough luck if they didn't live up to our requirements and we thought they were not ready they will not be published before they were ready so there were some areas that came on a few days after or a week or sometimes even two weeks after because we really want to have this high level of quality and make sure that it lives up to our ideal of how we wanted to have so but luckily no really people were mad at us they were really said yeah this is actually cool that you're taking this approach we want to have quality in what we are doing so that was actually a nice experience for us because we thought that think of what of all these are really the the bad annoying people but people were actually really happy about that we took this stand no we are not going live before you live up to our standards that was a positive learning from us i think it's also fair to say that because of of this review approach you have the ongoing conversation and that actually also gave us a lot of more insights we also need to document this or maybe we should do some extra training on this or maybe we should support here and actually apply a more modernized approach to to sharing information or creating information so it helped us building the governance while we were flying that's that's how it is often um so it was a conversation more than a Hanne and you're on i'm gonna i'm gonna be the timekeeper here and say we i'm gonna give you another three minutes because we've had so many questions coming in and i want to ask at least a couple of them no problem thank you yes good uh train for skills do it fast so very early we were asked from our colleagues so how how much time do i need to spend in this what do i tell my manager so we took our best guess and created this very early and said well this is the time estimating that you need to take for the training like a news editor three hour training hours paid here just five hours if you want to do the clarification hop that takes eight hours and stuff like that but also sharing with people it's not done here you need to spend time on it after work it takes time so this was once something that also was very appreciated with organization because all our editors could go to their managers and tell hey i need to do this i need to spend time on that yes i'll move on fast of course as we have a lot of material on our internet where they can find more help there are as Hanne said there's a look books there's a news editor corner there are sharepoint tutorials and everything we could reuse from microsoft we stole and shared that and we built some few stuff on our own so there's a universe where people can go in and find a lot of the help that they need in order to do all their work we also had a lot of other interactions we have something we used we were engaging a lot we have something that's called dee forum this is where we shared updates tips and tricks and people could ask questions they were also encouraged to put in their own tips and tricks so we have this community during the whole build phase and we still have it where people can share whatever if they have questions or whatever and we told people instead of sending a mail to me and share it in here because if you have that question there's probably a lot of other people who have it so that really works well we still have a monthly meeting with all the editors and area owners where we share updates they can ask questions if it also heavily used during the build phase we had a lot of videos tips and tricks we shared with people and then we had during the whole build sessions we have every thursday we had a session called ask the experts a morning and afternoon session since we are a global organization where we showed up as experts and people could ask whatever questions they had if they were just struggling with something so that's what we did to help them and JoHanne you have one and a half minutes i guess so to wrap up so what we gained from our clarification canvas approach it's actually a lot a tie back to how we operate in Danfoss we use this plan do check act approach and really for us we learned you know set clear expectations back it up with templates and timelines and and talk about the process that you're doing with you with those that are building the different sites yeah create the material that will support them don't be afraid of the dialogue it's actually the dialogue that will reveal all the needs from within the organization that you need to act upon as the the owner and take the time to review sites ideally together with them on meetings but we had a big backload of things we needed to do basically in a couple of days so yeah we did it ourselves and and shared information with them afterwards but ideally sit with them talk have the dialogue around why is it done like this maybe it should be changed here and there and keep the dialogue running it is a process and it's an ongoing process and the second you leave it both as an editor or us or the area owner it will start to be cluttered or outdated that's the nature of content content comes surface from everywhere and we need to keep track of what we are sharing is relevant for the users so keep the dialogue going then you will have the aligned editors you will have a lot better connection with them you will see that you have content over quality and the end result is actually that your users will really like it because then they will start to find what they're looking for they will find that it is relevant that they find the latest information available so i think with that said that was our experience fantastic you're getting you're getting lots and lots of reactions there are so many questions in the q&a so Jørn and Hanne thank you so much for sharing this if um if you want to stop sharing then i think we'll be able to see your lovely faces in uh in large format because i want to ask a couple of questions from the q&a and apologies for those that we don't have time to go through all of them but Jørn and Hanne after this talk if you jump into the q&a there's lots of questions that i'm sure you'd be able to uh give some replies to directly in there i just want to ask two that catch my eye um the first one is from nana who asked what was the overall timeline for launching your new intranet from start of project until go live well uh there was a a bit of stop and go in between where we did did it but we actually kept our timeline with plus one month because when we were close to the finish line it was september we were supposed to go shut down the old one and then people were starting oh then we don't have time for holidays so we extended with one month just so that people should not miss their holidays but i think and what what did it take from the early start was one and a half year yeah i think we actually had the pre pre-launch that was a silent launch with really no content in it in december first of december and maybe we started first of november then and then the final launch with the the big the big launch that was the end of september okay um second question i want to ask and we have like a minute really quick response to this but um if there's a short version for a question from ernst once the canvas are in place and the sites are launched longer term who's monitoring how often how much monitoring is automated um we don't automate a lot of things but the organization that you saw with the it being the technical support they are doing they're making sure everything is flying and also trying to help when whenever sharepoint introduce something new or tackle some some changes here otherwise it's uh hr it's global services and it's uh no can i so we are basically four people four and a half person that is taking the leading role here and we do the review together with all the actors so all of this structure and the planning and the organization up front is giving you the superpower to be you know do more than four people's work in a really efficient way yeah fantastic hey thanks thanks so much um really appreciate you kicking off the festival with such a such an interesting talk the chat's been going crazy the Q&A's been going crazy please do if you have time stick around and go into the Q&A i'm sure there'll be some people reaching out to you afterwards also do remember share your LinkedIn profiles or ways that already fantastic and because i'm sure lots of people will want to reach out and say hey tell me more um really appreciate it thank you so much thank you for having us.
Meet the speaker:
Jørn Nurkka
Senior Communications Advisor
Danfoss
Hanne Schou
Digital Employee Experience Manager
Danfoss
