Who has benefited from the new intranet?

Lots of CLCH benefit from the new intranet, clinical and non clinical CLCH employees, from communications, transformation and quality to clinical team administrators. Outsourced consultants in areas such as IT and HR also make use of the intranet. 

What where the issues with the previous hub?

It was only accessible via VPN. This caused no issues when logging in from within the network, but accessing the system remotely required a link to a remote desktop, which was frustrating for anyone not in in the office.

Staff had fedback that the layout of the previous hub was very difficult to navigate. Research revealed that staff felt that all the necessary information was there somewhere, but knowing where to find it only came with experience. This was not an issue for long-serving members of staff, but newer arrival.

A lot of workarounds on the old site were created on the site to try and provide teams with what they needed, but this in itself made it more difficult to find things. A particularly thorny problem was the alphabetical policy directory. Some teams attached prefixes to the beginning of the document name, which meant the item was then not in alphabetical order, and you had to know which team managed it in order to find it.

In some instances, multiple teams are responsible for managing different elements of a system. The challenging layout meant that key information, documents and systems – which should logically be together – had become separated. Overall, the site contained too much content, some of which was outdated.

How has the experience been improved for Trust members?

The new intranet uses an ADFS server. All staff are added to the organisation’s Active Directory, and they can access the system quickly from anywhere.

To address the issues of layout and organisation, exercises were carried out with 130 end-users to identify the information, documents and systems that belong together. As a result, teams became subservient to themes. With the topic of a section now more important than the team that owns it, every theme was allocated a profile page containing all the relevant information, including details of the team(s) responsible for it.

Seminars were held with content managers to retrain them in writing compelling and engaging content, with the ethos being: “Don’t write what you want to say, write what users want to read”. The content itself is now more manageable, with an alert advising anyone using the system that information has reached an expiry date, to ensure that all information is always up to date.

A lot of attention has gone into the different ways that people search for content: by title, abbreviation, system or the responsible team; via the global search option, the various profiles, or the reorganised A-Z library that can be filtered by category. However they go about it, the information can be found.

How has this helped the Trust?

With content now much easier to upload, the senior leadership team are able to communicate with all Trust members using channels such as webinars, that staff members can interact with.

The new system has opened up communication, and ensured that staff remain engaged and up to date. It is now much easier to communicate out from the centre, and to receive feedback from staff.