In the fourth session of the day, and the final presentation before lunch at Intranets2011, Matthew C. Clarke talked about the importance of change management in intranet projects.

Key points:
– Why do so many intranet projects fail? Matthew asked whether attendees have change management resource on Intranet teams – few said yes.
– … What would failure mean? It was ill-conceived. The design of the project didn’t meet the goal. Or the implementation didn’t meet the design. Or the project was never delivered due to non-technical reasons. Or they fail to deliver benefits / a return. Or poor usage.
– … Matthew says there are two primary reasons – (a) the Intranet is seen as a technical project, and (b) it doesn’t become part of the way the organization works.
– What is change management? There are three domains of change – technical, organizational, and individual.
– What you should do – eight verbs. The eight practicals / principles:
– … (1) reverse your thinking – change management is critical, and the intranet can be a tool for organizational change.
– … (2) seek senior sponsorship – there’s a difference though between a “patron” and a “champion.” For more, see Chrissy Burns on Executive Support (and Peter Richards has a session this afternoon on this). Sell the business value.
– … (3) Maximize employee participation – get them involved during the process. But it has to be authentic engagement.
– … (4) Increase the appetite for change. Engagement (per #3) can do this.
– … (5) Design for change – you need to plan for this, and make it possible. Eg., by not tightly linking information architecture to navigation approaches.
– … (6) Write a Communications Plan.
– … (7) Test user reactions and usefulness. “Usable does not imply useful or used.”
– … (8) Generate a critical mass of users.

And finally – lighten up a bit! Don’t be so serious!

There was a lot of complementary thinking and approaches in Matthew’s presentation with my book, User Adoption Strategies.