One of the more notable projects I have been on was a portal design project. The customer wanted to use SharePoint to drastically improve the productivity, effectiveness, and reach of everyone in their health system. Their goal was to deploy an intranet based on great technology to do this.
During one of the interviews, a request was made for a feature to allow the user to select whether they want to stay on the portal or simply sign on to the network and close the portal. I was puzzled by this. They were spending a substantial amount of dough to provide the infrastructure and plumbing to enable every employee to more readily find information, view scorecards showing their team’s performance, and collaborate in new and unique ways. This portal minimizes the dependency on email and served as the launch pad to higher productivity.
Yet, the customer wanted the ability to sign on and immediately shutdown the portal. This is a recipe for mediocrity. This reveals a sore understanding of change control.
The technology for this project was really quite simple. SharePoint supports a huge amount of functionality and enables tons of self-service tasks. Yet their vision wouldn’t have gotten them there.
To be successful, everyone needed to understand this was a change management project. They need to stop looking for marginal change when radical change was what it would take.
Portal technologies are designed to provide all or most of the tools we need to run our business. Scorecards show progress. Tasks and alerts show action items. Calendars show upcoming events. ALL of this is a one-page snapshot of how we spend most of the time at our desk. ALL of this can be migrated from a push-enabled email to a pull-enabled portal.
It is time for real change.
