We’re counting down to Christmas with a stocking-filler tip every day.
In one of our early consulting projects the brief was to gather business and user requirements and put together a strategy for a new intranet. No problem! That’s bread and butter for ClearBox.
As the project evolved we were asked to gather more and more data – workshops, surveys, interviews, contextual inquiry… every set of results led to a request to gather more.
Sometimes you need to do this for political reasons, but eventually we said, “Really, we have enough now to know what the main problems are, it would be better to start making improvements and get feedback”.
So we worked with the client on the analysis, agreed the priorities, put together a strategy, consulted on the strategy, presented it to a working group and then a bigger steering group until eventually it became clear that they weren’t going to make a decision about the strategy at all. In fact it turned out that two years earlier they’d done a very similar exercise with similar recommendations, but at the end concluded they couldn’t make changes until they had… more data!
The issue really was that the people we were working with were unwilling to take responsibility for the decision. Gathering data became a displacement activity like tidying your email when you should be writing a report. Now I look more closely at the leadership angle and test the waters early about decisions that are likely to come up. Because intranet strategy needs leaders, not just managers.
If you liked this topic, there’s more in ‘7 things I learnt about intranets the hard way‘.
Intranet politics vs data – http://t.co/o57sn8OR6T #decisions #intranetadvent #cartoon
— ClearBox Consulting (@ClearBoxTeam) December 14, 2014
Check #intranetadvent for a fresh idea each day.
