Comprehensive field guide
Employee Intranets Field Guide
Employee Intranets Field Guide organizes the decisions that matter for organizations centralizing policies, forms, training, announcements, and internal workflows: the current workflow, ownership, implementation choices, rollout risk, and acceptance evidence.
Working artifact
Employee Intranets rollout scorecard
Use the scorecard to keep each phase tied to an operating outcome rather than a list of completed tasks.
| Phase | Required outcome | Proof before proceeding |
|---|---|---|
| Phase 1: Employee home pages and announcements | Reduce or resolve employees cannot find the current policy | Verified result involving single-sign-on and access planning |
| Phase 2: Policy, form, and document libraries | Reduce or resolve important updates disappear in email | Verified result involving searchable content architecture |
| Phase 3: Department and staff directories | Reduce or resolve departments maintain conflicting documents | Verified result involving role and department permissions |
Read the situation before naming the solution
Employees cannot find the current policy. Confirm who encounters it, where it occurs, and what changed before it appeared. Then distinguish the visible symptom from dependencies such as single-sign-on and access planning.
- Employees cannot find the current policy
- Important updates disappear in email
- Departments maintain conflicting documents
Protect the current state
For Employee Portal & Intranet Development, confirm account ownership, current exports or backups, recovery options, and recent changes before touching production. Preserve exact errors and timestamps that may disappear after a restart or update.
- Access owner
- Current backup
- Restore method
- Change history
Define the smallest useful result
Frame the first scope around employee home pages and announcements and one observable acceptance journey. Treat policy, form, and document libraries as a later phase unless the evidence shows it is a true dependency.
- Employee home pages and announcements
- Policy, form, and document libraries
- Department and staff directories
Compare repair, extension, and replacement
Repair fits when the core remains sound. Extension fits when the boundary around single-sign-on and access planning is understood. Replacement fits when ownership, architecture, or operating risk prevents a responsible change.
- Time to value
- Data risk
- Reversibility
- Maintenance ownership
Plan implementation and launch
Sequence work around searchable content architecture. Protect the people affected by “Employees cannot find the current policy,” and define the point where rollback is safer than continuing.
- Searchable content architecture
- Role and department permissions
- Forms, approvals, and notifications
Verify and hand off
Repeat the original journey, test a nearby failure, and document the result. A successful handoff leaves organizations centralizing policies, forms, training, announcements, and internal workflows able to understand what changed, who owns it, and what happens next.
- Acceptance evidence
- Current documentation
- Monitoring owner
- Prioritized next step