Optimising Intranet Governance
NSW Department of Planning Housing & Infrastructure
APAC | SharePoint Intranet Festival 2024
Discover how to effectively manage your intranet with a robust governance model featuring clearly defined roles, user experience-focused change processes, regular content audits, and a strategic Content Council guiding decisions. Stephen will explore the benefits of implementing a comprehensive style guide built on clear principles to enhance content quality and user experience.
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So, we have Stephen here from, who is a Digital Change Manager at NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure. And Stephen is going to be sharing on a topic that I know is surely top of mind for every single person on today's event, and that topic is governance. So, Stephen's going to give us a rundown on their SharePoint internet journey, how they approach roles, responsibilities, content, auditing, and a whole heap more.
So, Stephen, I'll give it, I'll hand it over to you now to share your screen and to jump straight in. Thank you. Hopefully, I'll bring up the right presentation.
Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me. There we go.
Can everybody see the slide deck? Awesome. Perfect. So, I'll be going through our intranet sort of governance model and how we manage that internally.
But before that, I'd just like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands on which we are meeting on today. I'm on Dharawal land out in Picton in southwest Sydney, and I'd like to acknowledge any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people participating in a meeting, and I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and recognise and celebrate the diversity of Aboriginal peoples and their connections to the lands and waters of New South Wales. So I'll jump into a little bit, just a quick agenda.
I'll jump into a bit of background, go through our roles and responsibility, how we manage change, changes, support that we provide for this governance model, and then just some quick key takeaways. So just a bit of background of how we ended up where we are. The Department of Planning, Industry and Environment was established in 2019, and with that brought across four corporate intranets that had over 2,000 pages of content.
And then within 2021, we embarked on an intranet redevelopment project, where we did a lot of user engagement, a lot of research to find out actually what they wanted from an intranet, and through that new information architecture was developed, the governance model was developed as part of that, content principles, content strategy, and then obviously the big pieces of this is the content consolidation and rewriting. As part of this piece of work, and it flows on from the last presentation, this was a project delivered jointly by internal comms and our IT department or our digital team. For this part of the program, I was responsible for the content rewriting.
And then after we delivered the intranet, I then moved into the digital team. So that's sort of my role across the piece of work. And then in 2022, we launched Compass, which is the name of our intranet, on SharePoint, built with 20 sites, 416 pages were released, and then we had our content owners and editors mapped as part of that process.
So our 20 sites are purely, and I should say Compass is a very corporate intranet. Our divisions are responsible for their own intranets that then we connect into the more corporate intranet through search and links. And just to highlight some of the common pain points that were identified in the user research, information, there was too many channels, people didn't know where to look, the experience was broken as part of that coming together and there wasn't really that one-stop shop, the operations, people didn't know where to go, so we're leveraging networks.
And then to call it out governance, there was from a content point of view, the information wasn't updated or managed quite effectively. Now, when bringing this together, it was looked at more of a collective ownership of the intranet rather than one specific area being responsible, and that usually falls on internal comms, there'll be a lot of internal comms people in here, and being formally of internal comms, that's where it usually sits, I need a page updated, can you add this in? And there's a lot of a bottleneck or perceived that internal comms own everything. So as part of setting up the governance model, we wanted to shift away from that and have collective ownership across the intranet.
So, and I'll go through it in more detail, but our content is owned at a specific level within a department. Every page has an owner, approver, and editor, and underpinning and supporting the whole framework is the internal comms and digital teams that support the intranet delivery. So it's not like internal comms or the digital have taken a sidestep, they are there to support it, but ultimately don't have that overall ownership, it's very much shared across the department.
So just to quickly go through our roles and responsibilities structure, we have a content council that sits above everything, and they're responsible for the strategic oversight of governance, content contributions, and to be there to empower the content editors and approvers. Then the level down, we have our content owners, and as I said, they sit at a specific level within the organisation. Previously, and even when doing the redevelopment, it was hard to know who actually owned the content, had ultimate responsibility, could sign it off, and we've probably all been there.
An urgent change needed to be made previously, and then you've got to find out who can ultimately sign it off, and within government there are certain channels that you have to go through to get approvals. So that sits within our department, it's at our director level, so it's sort of a step above, they usually manage or have responsibility over a subject matter area, but we're able, because of assigning at that level, we're easily able to go, well, that person owns this bit, and that other person owns that, and there's clear delineation between those subject matters. Then below that, we've got our content approvers.
They're responsible for the day-to-day management of content on Compass, including the approvals and other requests. Previously, before that, we didn't have that group in there. When we first launched, it was with the content owners who would approve, get their approval requests, but we received feedback from that group that they can be time poor, and things were slipping through the cracks, and it wasn't up to content wasn't being updated, so we made a quick change through the roles and responsibilities added in this content approver role, so that the BAU of managing that content can be taken up by somebody else, so the content owner can delegate that responsibility.
Some content owners still hold it, but there is that option to delegate. Then further down, we have the content editors, so they're responsible for the day-to-day delivery of content, so creating, updating, retiring content, and then we have community contributors. We have a feedback form that our staff can submit that then creates a request for either internal comms or the digital team to action, so that could be something like a piece of content that's out of date, broken link, access issues, and the like, and they then feed into changes that need to be made across the intranet, so we have a very top-down and bottom-up approach of managing this.
We welcome the feedback and then manage that upkeep sort of within those assigned roles. Now probably the best thing to focus on is the content council, so the content council was set up, as I said previously, is there to look after the whole experience of the intranet, so they're there to approve, I'll go through the little boxes, don't want to get ahead of myself, so the purpose is to protect the employee experience and moderate their contributions and support the content producers, which I said before. The frequency, this is a group that meets regularly, so they come together and discuss what's happening on the platform, so the frequency is we aim to meet every quarter and at least every six months.
The membership, it's chaired by the internal communications and the digital team directors, so they sit above the top as co-chairs, and then we have members from each subject matter area within the business, so for us that's usually within corporate services, so we have a corporate services representative, we have a people and culture representative, we have a legal and governance representative, and then there's a few internal comms reps, usually in the internal comms rep is from the office of our secretary, so that membership is there so that there is an equal voice across those subject matters, matter experts, and across the business for any decisions that get made at that higher level. So the responsibilities go through to approving information architecture changes, so if somebody wants to make a change to the information architecture, they have to submit a request, which I'll go through shortly. If there's any risk coming through that we're hearing about or it's been fed up, they'll escalate that to leadership for a decision.
They approve suggested changes to principles, standards, change criteria, and best practice material, so as I previously said, that approver role wasn't there before. I went away, had a think about it, then presented back of what the roles and responsibilities could be there, and had to present it back into the content council for approval, and then also to get that collective buy-in, and then they approve requests for new channels, so that could be a new site that somebody may want to create, especially within the ecosystem of the corporate SharePoint structure. It may be even a new Viva Engage channel for externals that came up before, so the content council is there at that higher level of an experience more so than the content experience further down, and it's just to make sure that, as we've probably all seen in our past intranets, intranet management, that sometimes without being checked, the experience can go a bit wild, and we lose a bit there, so this is just there to keep everybody in check, and I'm not going to go into this briefly.
This is more for everybody's benefit on here for when you get the slide deck, so I've mapped the content lifecycle to a RACI for those roles, so we've got assess, design, deliver, and enhance, and then everybody's got a role in that broader sort of content lifecycle, so that's there for you to have a look at. Steal it, modify it, go for your life, but that just gives a broader view of how those roles fit together when we're trying to sort of manage the content on the intranet. Now, employee experience changes.
I'll go through what that process looks like to raise a request to the content council, and as I said, it could be an information architecture change, a landing page change process, or a content consolidation piece. It's not mind-blowing. It's pretty straightforward.
It goes from like a formalized submission, a review by the content council, and then a decision, so with the submission, what we brought in was effectively a one-page business case that the requester has to fill out. They have to describe the change, the reason for the change, the benefit of the change to the user or the business as a whole, and then attach any supporting information, so this was put in just so that when it goes up to the content council, everybody has the same information, and also the person requesting has to actually think about what this change means broadly, and can sometimes be a wedge to get them to stop and think before pushing harder or actually going away and going, oh, we actually didn't need that change. So that's then submitted into the content council for review and discussion, and in the content councils that we've had, I'm the secretariat of that council, most things are discussed, and they're pretty straightforward.
There is some discussion on how we could improve it, but most of the time because of that business case going through, there's a clear outline of the change, so most of the time they just sort of go through without any change. Where there is a decision will either be submission is approved, rejected, or approved in principle. When it's approved in principle, that's usually when we need to go away to find more information or do extra research, especially if it's a big piece that affects the user experience, and as an example of a time when we had to go away and do a little bit more of research, we had a request for quite a big information architecture change.
It was the combination of content across two topic areas which then equated to two high levels of our information architecture. They wanted a topic rename, and then once the combination was done, a move to another section of the information architecture, so it wasn't as straightforward as pulling a line out of one section of the information architecture and just combining two based on analytics and feedback we received. It was actually quite a substantial change to the information architecture as a whole.
So what we did, the decision was made, approved in principle, and go away and do a quick piece of user research. Now it wasn't extensive, it was a one-week sprint, and because it's internal, it's easy to engage people quite quickly. So what we did, we engaged 11 staff members, developed a new information architecture, prototyped a new landing page, and then went out and did the testing with those users.
So what we did, it was task-based, task and goal-based testing, tested the current version, and then tested the prototype version. And the results from that A-B testing to validate what was actually requested from the change from the task, we saw an increase in the task success rate, and then we also saw we were able to cut the time by half. So just doing a quick week's work of a UX sprint, it then validated, it provided more data to the content council to actually then go, okay, good, pull the trigger and go away and do that redevelopment.
So then once that was approved, then we actually implemented. So that's just one example of how we've used UX to inform those decisions at that content council level. From another point of view, and using that top-up approach, we're getting a lot of feedback that the search was broken, search is broken, search doesn't work, I can't find what I'm looking for.
So based off that feedback from our users, we then also went away and did a redevelopment of our search using UX principles, prototyping, iteration, testing, to then build out our new custom search which we launched, and the feedback that we got has quietened down. The feedback of things can't be found or it's broken, I haven't seen that feedback in quite some time. So just adding in little user experience sprints actually pay off in the long run.
So support. So this model of those assigned roles and keeping the content fresh and up-to-date doesn't happen on its own. So the whole governance structure is then supported by some reference material and some actions that we undertake during the year.
So one of the best things that we do to keep everything in check is our auditing. So our intranet was launched with a clear intent to provide trustworthy content for employees. So as part of that, we have an intranet audit process that is conducted every six months.
During that process, we get the content owners, approvers, and editor roles checked and validated. We then make sure that the content meets four key criteria, which is that it's accurate, that it's actually correct, up-to-date, and trustworthy. It's purposeful.
So we want people to think about what value is that content serving. We want it to be clear, so plain English principles, and then people first. So it's not created from the business lens, it's created from the employee lens.
And I will say that is still quite a challenge and there are a lot of discussions that happen throughout the year of trying to keep that in check, especially around page titles and the type of content that goes up. So as part of the auditing process, we've managed to keep our page average at around 480 considering we launched with 416 and we're about to come up to the two-year birthday. And as part of that, and sometimes we find, previously what I've found is that pages don't get archived or they're up there and they're out of date.
So as part of that, we then archive the pages and across the three audits, we've had almost 150 pages archived. So the auditing is a key component of keeping everything up to date in check and ensuring that people are reminded of their roles and responsibilities so owners know what they need to do, approvers and editors. Now I don't want to go on any further without calling out our internal comms team.
So our internal comms team run the audit process and they're quite robust. They take about a month to do with all the email contacts with owners and editors, plus they run drop-in sessions just to make sure people know what they need to do and if they have any questions. So as part of this process, they're really heavily involved to make sure that we keep on top of things.
Now I'm running out of time so I'm going to quickly go through this. So the channel strategy that we've got is there to support what goes where. So if somebody wants to put something up on the corporate intranet or compass, we refer back to here to make our decision of where it should live.
So we've got ServiceNow which is our sort of corporate services ticketing and we've got VivaEngage and then as we drop down we've got divisional and agency intranet and then we've got, we're calling them community of practices, so that could be team sites which came up in the previous presentation. So we've got that structure, I've got a description, you can refer to that later. Our content strategy so or content principles of what our content should represent, so that helps with the creation.
And as I go into final thoughts before we go into questions, the key takeaways, regular audits uphold the content experience, change requests are managed effectively and equally with the content council, so there's not one area of the business that sort of can go over the top of another, so everybody has to go through the same process. We can manage organisational changes easier because we have those defined roles and responsibilities. The roles help share ownership, internal communications and digital teams need to work closely together as they play a really important role in supporting the overall experience.
We've got content workflows embedded, so that helps with embed the roles and responsibilities. We keep the user at the centre of everything and then last one, consider adding a content council to your governance model. And that's it.
Amazing, thank you so much Stephen. I just love the level of detail that you've gone into and how specific you've been able to break everything down. I know there was lots of chatter in the chat, we've got a lot of questions so I'm gonna jump straight into these for the next five to seven minutes or so.
Alrighty, so do you use a separate system to track content approvals or do you use SharePoint's inbuilt workflow? It's a power automate workflow, so yeah I'm not too sure how it works, that's up to our tech team. We went there with a problem but it's definitely triggered through power automate. It leverages from memory, leverages the out-of-the-box SharePoint workflows but just adds in that layer over the top to make sure that the approvals are going to the right place which we manage through a SharePoint list.
So we have our owners mapped to topics which the topics are then matched to the pages. So that's how we manage it across the board. Awesome, okay so does the content council only meet every quarter or six month meeting every quarter or six month cause delays to changes or are most of the change requests handled outside of the meetings? We can do exception like out of session meetings but most of the time those is bigger pieces if we can hold them off we will so it's all sort of wrapped up but we haven't had an encounter where we've had to meet outside or we can manage it with a brief email especially if it's a smaller scale piece.
So that's at a broader level but the day-to-day management of page changes and at a lower level let's say like a level three or a four within our structure can be handled by myself it's more of those bigger pieces that that need to go up if it's affecting information architecture or those high level landing pages home page level one level two but lower risk changes can be handled on a day-to-day basis and I may go and touch base with the co-chairs. Sorry I just noticed a few people were noting a bit of an echo it might have been my screen sharing that caused that how are we sounding now everyone is that a bit better okay perfect excellent thank you. Stephen how many change requests are put forward to the council per year sorry I think you I'm not sure if you had covered that.
It'd be probably five per meeting so we'd be looking at that to be to be honest it's not it's not many considering we've now settled it was probably 10 to 15 in the first year and then the following it sort of dropped down probably five to ten but like on release there is you have to you have to be agile and adapt especially when when you first when you first launched like something like the adding the approver role in but yeah to be around that 10 a year. Okay and I just on the topic as well around search we have a question here from Bob we'd love to hear more about the changes you introduced with your custom search to meet your user feedback do you have any other insights to share how much have I got three minutes I know it's a big one we didn't do a lot of change we did some customization of the adding filters in so we did a left hand filter and more of a horizontal filter for just to break it down to what people were looking for which was web pages files our divisional intranets because we've got our divisional intranets hooked in we made that more prominent within our search it was and then people but it was more about updating the look and feel to make it more intuitive especially with the search results that were coming back what they look like so custom icons making the headings more prominent better description so we did a lot of work around the actual search result look and feel of what was actually being returned plus adding in more filters just to help people find what they're looking for and adding in defining things a little bit better so we added tooltips as well so we added a tooltip plus then also some guidance around the tabs in the horizontal search that was a quick overview okay you did a very good job there okay i'm just jumping back into the q a to see if maybe we can have one more question it's just loading up for me again um does your service now self-serve features use the sharepoint as front end or service now has its own front end portal yeah we've kept it separate at the moment we we did look at bringing in the search results from the knowledge articles from service now into the sharepoint search but didn't get too far down that track but it's into integration to help people find what they're looking for and what we could do especially from that sharepoint search that was definitely something we're looking at but at the moment they are very kept very separate there's no no integration to raise tickets from from the sharepoint site okay i'll give you maybe one last question in the last 30 seconds so Stephen are your divisional agency intranet set up as private team sites or are they communication sites that are a part of your employee facing intranet so they're communication sites um they are owned and managed by the internal comms teams within those areas but what we have done we have connected them to our search hub so that results will come up um with it when somebody searches they were able to click divisional hubs and then it'll bring up more refined results if there's more of an operational operational page or policy that they need to find that's not as high level as a sort of corporate one so that's how we that's how we manage that and you are perfectly on time with that one Stephen i just want to thank you so much again for for sharing these insights and just giving us an insight of your of how this all works.
Meet the speaker:
Stephen Adam
Senior Communications Advisor
NSW Department of Planning Housing & Infrastructure
