Managing a Decentralised Intranet
Victoria Police
APAC | SharePoint Intranet Festival 2024
Deep dive into Victoria Police’s strategies for training editors, structuring content, assigning permissions and roles, and implementing an effective intranet framework. Sarah will share insights into the outcomes of their decentralised management approach, offering practical lessons for enhancing intranet efficiency and collaboration in your own organisation.
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So, at this point in time, I would like to very warmly welcome our first speaker of the day. First up, we have Sarah from Victoria Police. Sarah is their Senior Corporate Communications Channels Advisor and will be deep diving into Vic Pol's strategy for training editors, structuring content, and overall just implementing an effective intranet framework.
Victoria Police have a decentralised approach to their intranet, so we're really excited to hear some of the insights and tips from Sarah today. So, please make Sarah feel very, very welcome. Over to you, Sarah.
Happy for you to take over the screen sharing. Thank you, Em. Hopefully, everyone can see my screen now.
Is that working? Looks good for me. Cool. Okay.
Thank you, everyone, for having me. So, as Emily mentioned, I'm going to talk through some insights from managing the Victoria Police intranet, which is based on a decentralised publishing system. I'm going to run through – let me just go through.
So, I'm going to run through our intranet and its primary role, and then I'll go through the structure of our intranet and the important role of our site managers. Without them, we can't actually run a decentralised intranet. And followed by how we approach training, as well as some challenges that we've faced and some safeguards to kind of keep our intranet rolling.
I'll just mention that some of the screenshots and examples that I show are from our UAT site and kind of dummy or redacted content, just due to the sensitive info on our platforms. So, to get started, just a bit of an overview on our intranet. We have – our intranet plays a key role for some 22,000 employees across Victoria, and it's a range of ranks and roles.
So, we have police members and PSO members, as well as Victorian government staff. And the intranet is primarily our info directory or a central repository of information. So, it just stores a whole load of information for our members and VPS staff to access.
So, it's a pretty highly engaged intranet for us. It's – a secondary purpose is connecting employees with the news. We have, you know, so many kind of single stations.
So, single member stations out in the most remote towns of Victoria. They generally – it's a single station, so they're working by themselves. It's great for them to kind of just land on this page every morning they log on and just see what the latest update is in terms of news.
The news is centrally managed by us, the corporate communications team. And it sits on the intranet homepage and is shared across our other platforms, like Viva Engage. But really, the intranet just exists to help our members do their job.
Members is the term that we use for the sworn members of police and PSOs, because I'll probably mention that word quite a bit. So, as I mentioned, it's governed by the corporate communications team. And some kind of user examples of the intranet to explain how it is so highly engaged is that members will go on when they need to search for a manual, a Victoria Police manual, which is essentially the operational guide or SOP or a practice guide for operational policing.
If there's a project page that's been published for a new reform or a new initiative, perhaps we've got some new equipment they need to know about, this is where they go. They can also turn to health and wellbeing resources. We've got that quite prominently placed on our intranet.
And our intranet is also a launchpad for applications. So, there's many, many frontline applications and other sorts of applications as well. And we can kind of launch to those from here.
I think you'll see on the top right, we've got a toolbox, which I think is a custom web part. And that's customisable for each user, so they can kind of set their own favourite links. And a lot of our members use that to kind of launch their applications from the homepage.
And then, of course, you know, staffing, rosters, performance management, those types of kind of HR resources as well are available on the intranet. So, in terms of the structure, as I mentioned, it's pretty highly engaged with. So, two and a half to three million views per month.
So, yeah, our 20,000 employees are using it, you know, multiple times a day. And it's made up of 40 SharePoint sites. So, each one's dedicated to a department, a region, or a command.
And then we've also got some specialty sites for things like news and policies. Our intranet, I've learned, is quite large. So, we have about 14,000 pages.
And that keeps growing. You know, maybe for a number of reasons, possibly because of our retention policies, possibly because we just like to keep records of all things. And also people like new pages when they can, which I'll get to in our challenges.
But we have 3,000 editors, approvers, and site managers as well. So, that probably explains why our pages continue to grow. So, we have a, in addition to visitor access, which is all employees, we have three main tiers to manage the intranet.
So, each site has their own editors, approvers, and site managers. And I'll get to the site managers very soon. And it's the whole intranet is overseen by Corporate Comms, which is our team.
We are the site admins of all 40 sites. And then we're supported by the ICT department as well, who are the SharePoint product owners and the admins. So, the wonderful site managers.
As I said, the reason that we can run a decentralized intranet, which allows Corporate Comms to continue with our work, is because we have three to five managers allocated to each of the 40 sites. So, they buffer us from a lot of the day-to-day inquiries. And who are they? They're mostly VPS staff.
So, the government workers. We do have some police members who are quite keen all the way up to, I think we've even got an assistant commissioner as one of our site managers on one of the sites. Or more likely a sergeant or a senior sergeant.
We've got a couple of superintendents. And they've opted into the role in addition to their official capacity. It really comes down to the department or the command or the individual.
But there's no requirement in terms of full-time or part-time or rank or VPS level. We really just encourage a good cross-section of areas. And we see them as our site gatekeepers.
So, they're responsible for granting and revoking access, providing training, overall site maintenance and management. And they each have access to the SWOOP Analytics dashboards as well. So, when they need to run reports or if their AC or someone wants to know who's seeing what, then they're able to run those reports for them.
As well as just delegating tasks and receiving page feedback. I'm not sure if it's typical for SharePoint pages. But we've got the page feedback button on each of our pages.
Something that we encourage site managers to do each time they grant access is to give new users a link to the help site. So, we have quite a useful help site which has training videos and user guides. So, every time access is granted, this resource also needs to be provided as well.
So, we provide the site managers ongoing support as well as annual formal training. So, that training is then recorded and shared on the help site as well which is just pictured here on the left. We also run a private Teams channel which is quite almost deliberately hard to view but that's pictured there as well.
And that's where they can share updates and ask for advice amongst each other. And it's the easiest way for us to kind of communicate to everyone as well. So, training in general.
So, each year before there's a training we run and... Sorry, I'll start with the training. We provide them... Yeah, sorry, I think I jumped. Bear with me, sorry.
There we go. I think I skipped audit. So, yeah, the annual audit is something that we run.
It's just once a year and it gives everyone the opportunity to remain a site manager or they can opt out or nominate someone else. And it's also just a great time for us to kind of remind them of the role and responsibilities and give them the heads up of the upcoming training as well. So, now I'll go into general training.
For our team to not get bogged down in help me emails every day which still do, they do happen. But we provide formal training sessions once a year. One for editors and one for approvers.
Sorry, one for editors and approvers and then another one for site managers, I should say. Site managers obviously quite different to the training that is required for editors and approvers. So, last year we decided to do the training ourselves rather than our external consultants.
I think we really just wanted to localise the content. Our organisation is very nuanced and we also need to strongly emphasise accessibility requirements because that's a government requirement for all of our digital content. So, we needed to really focus on that for our training.
What works well for us is to set it up as a webinar and promote it on the news and on the help site. So, people can register in advance and it's a screen demo on Teams very similar to this and it's recorded with a dedicated Q&A at the end. And we also just have a second person to facilitate the chat as well so nothing gets missed.
Once a year doesn't seem like much. It's not, obviously, but because we record each session we split it in chapters, transcribe it and upload it to our help site for anyone to view. And our help site has essentially become a bit of a useful self-service resource.
So, in addition to the training videos there's user guides for different web parts, how to publish, how to store documents, how to replace documents rather than having two different versions. So, yeah, we tend to send people there as much as possible. And, of course, we do provide ad hoc training as well but we'll generally try to round up a big group of people to be more efficient with that time.
And we also encourage site managers to train people from their site as well to help filter some of those requests for us. So, by the time we get any Help Me emails in our inbox they've generally been filtered down to people who've watched the training and have more direct and concise questions. So, we can solve some much quicker and there's obviously a lot less repetition as well.
So, some challenges. So, a big challenge that comes with the territory of Victoria Police is staff movements. So, our employees are commonly moving internally to fill new roles.
They're backfilling or on secondments. Some police of certain rank are in positions for a fixed term before they have to move on to a different area. So, the names on our permission lists are constantly having to be looked at and updated.
It also means the frequency of changeover means that our internet knowledge is lost. So, there's a lot of repetition of onboarding and training and retraining and sending them to the help site. Another one is that when we migrated from the old system to SharePoint, there was a lot of customisation that perhaps met a need that SharePoint couldn't meet back then.
Our recent challenge has been to strip back a lot of the custom features and processes and use more out-of-the-box functions that have, you know, vastly improved since 2020. We've learnt the hard way that some of our custom web parts, for example, they just stop working once Microsoft makes an update. So, you know, we want to try to prevent that from happening.
And I'm not sure if anyone else has heard this, but this page could do with a refresh if I had a dollar. Every time I heard that I could go on a long holiday. It's probably because the stage in life of its infancy is that people are now used to it.
A lot of departments want to overhaul and refresh and modernise, which is great. There's a lot of ownership, which we love to see. But, you know, sometimes aesthetics and user experience kind of fall by the wayside a little bit.
And we see a lot of flow-on effects like from that just such as broken links because they've restructured the documents folder or duplicated pages because they want to start from scratch rather than updating an existing page. So there's a bit of education there and then just general kind of maintenance from our end and hopefully as well from site managers. But yeah, that's definitely something that comes with having 3,000 editors, approvers and site managers on our intranet.
So some things that we have as safeguards. We have a governance document so it's currently getting updated but it's essentially our rule book. So things like how to decommission pages.
Do we delete them or do we change permissions? For example, we need to keep our retention policy in mind for those types of things. How to manage documents on the intranet. So we need to communicate to people that it shouldn't be a department file storage.
It needs to be the most up-to-date version only because everything is searchable and we need the most current version available so people aren't operationalising an old practice guide because that could be not great for police. We have style guides available so we have an intranet style guide which is very much tied to our branding style guide as well as a writing style guide that's offered by corporate comms. So for context our police members are taught a very specific operational way to write.
So everything is an acronym, surnames are in all caps, they use codes for everything. So the writing style guide is definitely something useful to make sure there is consistency in the style of writing on our intranet. And the help site, I've mentioned it a couple of times, it's a really useful resource.
We've got that fixed in the footer of every intranet page and it's really useful having resources around our accessibility requirements as well because that's something we need to adhere to. A nifty thing we did was create page templates that are stored centrally. With the help of our IT department we're able to sync these templates to every intranet site.
When a new page is created we can be assured that people are using the default template we've selected that we know is of good practice and ticks all of the brands and accessibility boxes. We've set one to default and each site can create their own template. It's important that we have our pre-approved ones set as the default as a key safeguard for us.
It's flexible and they can change it around quite a bit. We mentioned that in the pre-approved template as well that it is open to editing. It's not fixed but it has a lot of tips and tricks on the page for people to follow.
And then just ongoing support. We've got the team's channels for the editors and approvers who want to join. Anyone can join that one and we have a private channel for our site managers and here they can ask questions and be updated.
We've seen over the recent years that our internet has become quite autonomous. We can see this in the way that people jump on these channels and they have a community of editors and approvers to help answer. They don't rely on corporate comms to do that anymore.
We've seen a lot of being managed by subject matter experts. The operations and the knowledge is so vast that we couldn't possibly do it all. We're seeing the benefits of a decentralised internet and I think that's about it.
Hopefully I've rushed through that in good time. You've done an awesome job. What an amazing presentation.
I appreciate it. There's been a flurry of activity in the chat. I can see there's a heap of questions coming through.
Now, Sarah, there are a lot of questions here. So, if you do have some time to hang around after and sort of jump into the Q&A and sort of chat, respond to some of the more recent ones. I'm just going to work my way through.
Sure. And some of these, I think you've sort of addressed at certain points throughout the presentation, but will be good to sort of just to summarize and to wrap up. So, the stats are very compelling to give a sense of scale.
How do you get counts of things like pages, editors, et cetera? Oh, that's a good question. I think I had to do it quite manually, to be honest, when I did do it. Pages, I found easy to export from the site pages, but I think I've really had to do it probably site by site.
It was quite a while ago that I did it. But yeah, it was a bit of a manual exercise, and I've just kind of kept it in a spreadsheet since then and just kind of tweaked and updated it since then. So, there was a lot of upfront pain, but very useful now.
If there is a smarter and easier way to do it nowadays, then I'm all for it. But yeah, I had to kind of do it quite manually. Awesome.
Thanks, Sarah. If anyone has any other insights about that they'd like to drop in the chat, then please do go ahead. There's a lot of intrigue about the size of your team, Sarah.
How many are in your corporate comms team? There's eight. So, we're essentially an internal comms team, but we are not strictly or exclusively internal, because we also publish a podcast and a magazine. So, corporate comms is our name.
Got it. And let me just sort of scroll up to the next few questions. You have a huge intranet, of course.
Some of those summary slides give you a sense of the scale. So, how do you keep track of who is in those roles, you know, your site managers, approvers? I think you probably spoke through some of this, but how do you track all of these moving pieces and all of the roles and responsibilities? Yeah. I don't think there's a perfect science to it at the moment.
We definitely rely on the site managers to kind of help with the editors and the approvers lists. With the site managers list, it's obviously a lot easier, because there's fewer of them. And they know, hopefully by now, and we communicate during the audits, especially, that we need them to kind of keep us up to date if they move, which a lot of them do, to let us know, because they need to nominate someone else.
I tend to do, because my role is more focused on the channels, I tend to do quite a, just a general sweep of sites, and can see, you know, on the lists if their field has changed. So, if their department field doesn't match up with the site that they're on anymore, it's pretty obvious that they've moved. And I'll generally remove them, which is pretty brutal.
But yeah, just keeping it clean that way and relying on the site managers. Awesome. And I think there's a lot of praise for having the Teams channel set up to have those ongoing discussions with everyone who's managing the internet at the moment.
What would be some of the typical questions or problems that your site managers would have that they might share in that channel? It varies, actually. So, excuse me, the knowledge across the site managers actually vary too. So, we still get a lot of similar questions from our site managers that maybe some approvers and editors are asking us as well, which just means our education pieces probably need to be a bit better.
And then there are some that are obviously across every detail and a lot more familiar with the processes. A lot of common questions that we get from editors and approvers, I think a really common one is publishing. They kind of have just missed a step and not added a page approver to the page details and wonder why the approval flow has kind of gone off into the ether.
With site managers, it's probably a little bit more varied and random. There's probably less consistency. But yeah, I can't really think of, and a lot of them kind of ask on behalf of editors and approvers as well.
So, sometimes we get a little bit more of kind of the basic level questions from the site managers. But it's good that there's a place there to have that discussion and also so that knowledge is captured as well over time. Now, for your decentralized ownership model, was this introduced when the internet was first implemented or is this something that's been done retrospectively? I think, I'm not sure if it was done deliberately when it was set up.
I wasn't here for that. I mean, we always had a site managers list. So, I suppose it was, but there was probably less emphasis or importance placed on those roles.
And we've kind of built it up and defined them as the corporate comms team. I think when I came into the role, it was to kind of help with the, initially to help with the management and tidy up and optimization of our intranet. And yeah, a lot of that was really, you know, we very quickly realized that we needed some representatives for each site to help us.
So, it was there, but it was not optimized. And so, that's what we've been doing over the past few years. Got it.
There's also this kind of a broad question. I know you kind of covered this at a high level, but how do you run your audits? Yes. So, we obviously have the permissions lists on all of the sites and that is the most up-to-date kind of list that represents all of our site managers, but we also keep a list separately as well.
And we will obviously match them up, but we'll basically just send out an email to each site manager, you know, by each site, I should say. So, all the site managers of one site and another. So, we send them separately because they've got site-specific links within them.
And just so it's not a big spam email. And it just kind of, yeah, so a lot of the communication is by that email. So, we've got it on record.
And that's where we include the roles and responsibilities, the links to the help sites, information on the upcoming training, and yeah, just a couple of other updates and reminders. But we'll also obviously mention it in the Teams channel as well that this is coming. And there's a bit of crossover between the two, but yeah, old-fashioned email for the audit, really.
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's all okay.
And I'm just having a look at, because we do have a heap more questions here and I know we've only got a few more minutes left. I have a, this is probably quite a big question. Do people use SharePoint for Teams collaboration in addition to the intranet? So, how do you distinguish between intranet and Teams SharePoint sites? Do you have guidelines to help people decide on where to share that information? Is that something that you look after, Sarah? Yeah, we don't.
So, we are purely the intranet as a platform and then our IT department or DSSD, they're called. They, because they're the SharePoint product owners and SharePoint admins, they will look after anything related to kind of team collab sites. We do sometimes get some confusion from people.
They'll send us emails wanting help with a team site and we have to kind of just let them know. They may not even be aware that it's not an intranet site. There's obviously some kind of visual identification, like assets involved with the intranet, like we've got a mega menu and certain header and footer that really distinguishes the intranet from any other SharePoint site.
But sometimes, if they miss it, we just need to remind them that it's a SharePoint site and if they need help around that, they need to speak to IT. Okay, but let's squeeze in one more last question for you, Sarah. Are you full site administrate, are you full site administrators or does your IT department control most of that due to permissions that flow through M365 products? Maybe like the relationship between comms and IT, maybe if you'd like to share a little bit about that.
Yeah, so our IT department is being the full admin and product owner. They have full control and we raise tickets with them all the time. They are very supportive of us, we work very closely together.
We are site admins or site owners, so we have control of the site, but there are certain tenant levels and settings that they have set that we can't change, we don't have access to those. But things like the need for web parts and user experience, anything around the user experience, IT is not across that, that's us, so we'll kind of bring that need to them and work with them around a solution. Amazing.
Now, thank you so much again, Sarah, we really appreciate you sharing your insights and answers to all of those questions. There are several more questions in the Q&A, so if you have some time, if you can jump into the Q&A and just provide a few quick responses, people are very intrigued. So if we can all give Sarah another round of applause using some of the little reactions, that would be amazing.
Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.
Meet the speaker:
Sarah Larsen
Marketing and Communications Leader
Victoria Police
