Planning artifact
An employee portal succeeds when people can find a current answer, complete an authorized task, understand ownership, and recover when something goes wrong. Score each dimension from 0 to 3, attach evidence, and use the weakest dimension to shape discovery.
| Score | Meaning | Evidence expected |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Unknown | No named owner, audience, inventory, decision, or test. |
| 1 | Assumed | A plausible answer exists but has not been verified with users or system owners. |
| 2 | Defined | The rule, owner, source, and desired behavior are documented. |
| 3 | Testable | Representative users, content, permissions, integrations, and acceptance evidence are available. |
List employee groups, locations, devices, languages, accessibility needs, employment states, and the recurring questions or actions the portal must support. Score 3 only when representative users can validate priorities and wording.
Inventory policies, forms, benefits, training, contacts, announcements, procedures, and departmental material. For each content family, name the authoritative source, publisher, reviewer, effective date, review cycle, archive rule, and emergency correction route.
Define navigation, search vocabulary, synonyms, audience targeting, metadata, stale-content handling, and the zero-result recovery path. Test real questions such as “How do I change direct deposit?” rather than only exact document titles.
Map sign-in, multi-factor requirements, role and group sources, contractors, new hires, departures, managers, sensitive content, delegated publishing, and access review. A platform feature list is not a permission model.
Separate information from action. Identify requests, approvals, acknowledgements, uploads, status tracking, reminders, escalations, notifications, service levels, audit needs, and the system that owns the final record.
Document HRIS, identity, payroll, learning, document, ticketing, calendar, directory, analytics, and communication boundaries. Record direction, frequency, failure state, retry, reconciliation, data minimization, and support ownership for every connection.
Name the product owner, technical owner, publishing owners, support route, analytics reviewer, privacy and security reviewers, release authority, incident path, backup or export plan, and what happens when a department stops maintaining content.
Create acceptance checks for representative users, keyboard and screen-reader paths, mobile layouts, search tasks, permission boundaries, workflow completion, integration failure, content freshness, analytics events, support handoff, and rollback.
From score to scope
Faith Forge Labs can help turn the scorecard, representative tasks, systems, and ownership boundaries into an intranet delivery plan with verifiable stages.