Intranet Introspection: The End Can Be Just the Beginning

Monday, April 10, 2017

An image of a road leading to a castle on the horizon.

Just over a week ago, I covered the importance of communication and preparation for your launch. Today I’ll cover the post-launch era of your Intranet project.

The End of the Project… Or is it?

Many think that your launch means that your project is over. However the truth is this is often just the beginning of your relationship with your vendor. Knowledge transfer, ongoing support, and post-launch improvements are highly important to the continual success of your project.

You're going to want to ensure your vendor offers post-launch support, ideally with some sort of service plan, and preferably one that can offer scalable options which will meet your needs. You're going to want to work with a vendor that can offer some degree of flexibility in its post-launch support.

Surprisingly enough many vendors don't offer any type of post-launch support. Some have a launch 'em and leave 'em policy. You’ll want to ensure your vendor will offer some type of guarantee for bugs and defects for some period of time. At Echidna we actually cover bugs or defects in the programming for the life of the product. Not all do, but you’ll want to have at least six months or a year for this type of coverage.

For other types of support, such as patches and security updates, small tweaks and improvements, for support on a critical issue, or just for questions to get answered, you’ll want some type of protection in place.

In my experience, it's not unreasonable for yearly support costs to be between five and 15 per cent of the overall budget of a project. It's important to plan for that and we recommend making that a part of ongoing budgets post-launch.

But where does that money go? It's all about risk mitigation. It's about having a vendor available to you if something goes wrong. It's about having resources at your disposal if something gets misaligned or worse. A support plan is a commitment for the vendor to be committed to you.

You solution should, by all rights, work smoothly. But when it comes to risk mitigation, we're not just talking about making sure the trains run on time. It's about having resources for tweaks, enhancements, and upgrades. It's not unusual, six months down the road, to find edge cases that aren't found until a certain seasonal stimulus or event prompts them to appear. Having a service contract can help you feel at ease.

In many ways, it's like insurance. Many people feel it's a waste of money -- until they run into something and need that support. Then, it's the best money they've ever spent.

A good vendor will not only have support resources available to you, but will also have set you up for success even before you reach launch to ensure that you staff is properly trained, comfortable with the content management system, and capable of handling the vast majority of the issues and functionality that you're likely going to experience in your day-to-day operations.

Ask your vendor to document everything, help with communications, and work with you to develop FAQ and help sections on your Intranet (or website) that can help users better understand the site's functionality.

Training and knowledge transfer are key for editors. And getting them up and running early in the process -- ideally in entering content for the live site -- can help them feel more comfortable and content at launch and long into the future. Having documentation and guides also helps you to be able to bring new people onto your team and have them up to speed fairly quickly to support your content needs.

And that’s basically it! I hope you enjoyed this six-part series on successful Intranet development. If you keep some of these things in mind before and during your next project you’ll be set up for success. If you have any questions or want to talk more about the benefits that Echidna-developed Intranets can bring to your organization, I’m always just a phone call or e-mail away!

Thanks for reading.