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The NucleusRedesigning Caltech’s Staff Intranet to Improve Functionality and User Experience

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“Since March 2018, we have had the opportunity to tell our story about our intranet redesign project at two industry conferences. The audience response to our presentation has made us realize that we have created a “best-in-class” intranet compared to many of our peers. Because of our recent presentations, we have already had three peer institutions reach out to us for a more in-depth demo of our site and to hear more about our lessons learned as they each begin to plan their own staff intranet redesign projects.”

Mark Longo - Director of Strategic InitiativesMay 2018

California Institute of Technology (Caltech)Office of Development and Institute Relations (DIR)

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Background

The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is a private doctorate-granting research university located in Pasadena, California. Known for its dedication to advancing natural science and engineering, Caltech is often ranked as one of the world’s top-ten universities. Caltech’s Office of Development and Institute Relations (DIR) is the centralized fundraising operation for the university and works to expand Caltech’s community of supporters while seeking financial resources to accelerate discovery and innovation to sustain Caltech’s scientific and educational excellence.

DIR has used an intranet built on Microsoft’s collaboration platform, SharePoint, as the main tool for communicating, sharing information, and collaborating among DIR colleagues. Originally launched in 2015, DIR’s intranet is named The Nucleus.

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The word “nucleus” means a central part about which other parts are grouped or gathered. This name reflects Caltech’s culture as a science-focused higher educational institution.

The Nucleus is used by everyone throughout DIR—from senior executives, to managers, to individual contributors. The team’s work encompasses the broadest definition of fundraising, engagement and outreach, alumni relations, public events, advancement communications, and business operations. Caltech is currently undertaking an ambitious fundraising campaign which requires constant communication and collaboration within DIR to be successful. This time of heightened fundraising activity requires an effective intranet that is accessible by DIR’s 127 team members from within the four offices on Caltech’s campus as well as remotely throughout the world while on business travel.

In 2016, a little over a year after the intranet’s launch, Caltech surveyed users to find out how they were using The Nucleus. A Request for Proposals was sent out to have an external vendor conduct an information architecture and user experience assessment of the intranet. After reviewing 14 proposals (and interviewing five finalists), Definity First was selected.

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Over the course of two days, Definity First interviewed more than two dozen users of The Nucleus to understand how DIR team members were using the site and how it might be improved based upon best practices. As a result of the assessment, Definity First provided DIR with a detailed report that contained the analysis as well as a list of recommendations for improvements.

To ensure greatest impact, The Nucleus content managers met, reviewed the recommendations, and voted on which of them should be prioritized as part of the 2017 refresh project. They also identified several activities that they could do in advance of the project kick-off to optimize the effectiveness of the implementation.

+ Caltech provided training for power users to address the knowledge skill gap in preparation for the redesign project.

+ They built their own knowledge base by reading several books and online blogs about staff intranets.

+ They revamped their metadata protocols so that information could be found in a manner that was more conducive to how they operate as an organization.

+ Most importantly, they developed their intranet strategy: a simple one-page bulleted outline of goals and principles for the new site, to guide the content managers in their daily activities and decisions.

The strategic objectives of the intranet were:

+ Primary source of information about processes and people + Constantly evolving + Useful + Consistently accurate + A reliable source of information + Trusted

All of this activity occurred before the redesign work began, which commenced in June 2017. For the next five-and-a-half months, DIR partnered with Definity First and Caltech’s central IT team to achieve the goal of redesigning the staff intranet to improve its functionality and the user experience.

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The redesign work schedule involved four steps:

+ Functional Analysis and Specification Definity First analyzed the business requirements at a detailed level through a series of interviews and intranet audits and generated specification documents describing both technical and functional features to be implemented.

+ Templates Design Definity First’s Creative team designed brand new page templates and widgets that provided all the required functionality and enhanced the user experience. The updated design reflected the evolved Institute branding and created a cleaner, more modern look and feel, up to the standards of other websites the Nucleus users interact with.

+ Development and Quality Assurance Definity First’s Web Engineering team worked on the creation and development of components and software products to be implemented in the 2.0 version. The QA team tested each one of the components and the interface of the intranet to assure the quality of the deliverables, both functional and aesthetic. Definity First used Scrum Methodology and made partial deliveries making it easier for the Caltech team to focus on specific functionality ensuring each one of the elements were fully tested and approved before being released to production.

+ Acceptance Testing The Caltech team—consisting of larger content managers group—tested the product to verify that it met the agreed upon specifications.

Once the work above was completed, Definity First migrated the current site and all its information to the new designs. For the next five weeks, Caltech had two parallel instances of The Nucleus. Version 1.0—the old site—was still operational for all DIR users. The new site—version 2.0—was accessible to content managers so that they could clean up their migrated pages, add new content, remove outdated information, and re-tag metadata on documents using the new protocols. Later, a second “delta” migration occurred, updating version 2.0 with any new materials that may have been added to the first iteration since the original migration date.

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Key Features

The Nucleus 2.0 is designed to help DIR staff to:

+ Collaborate + Communicate + Know what’s going on + Access the tools needed to do their jobs + Celebrate achievements.

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Collaboration:Users can connect and collaborate with other users. They can use the DIRectory on The Nucleus to find a colleague who can support them on a task or project. Through SharePoint integration with OneDrive, users can collaborate on projects and their associated work products. Teams use libraries to store and maintain their documents and calendars for transparent tracking of events and appointments.

Communication:The Nucleus serves as a “hub” for sharing the latest campaign news, information, and resources with the entire DIR team. All DIR members receive top-down communications from the Vice President through his posts on The Nucleus. Users also receive communications about the Institute, DIR, units, and projects.

Information:The Nucleus is the “go to” place for finding information to perform your job successfully. The built out “resources” section includes pages that are specific to user types (e.g., development officers, event planners, etc.). Users are now able to find information relating to their role. Users seeking out a policy or procedure can find the most current information. Users wanting to further their professional development of our industry can find the

latest benchmarking information, archived webinars, and industry links (publications; associations and communities of practice; listservs, forums and discussion groups; blogs of interest; infographics; and RSS feeds) all in one central location.

Business Processes: Uses can know what’s going on by viewing the consolidated calendar on The Nucleus. Workflows and forms help team members do their job better. Users can reserve a golf cart to drive a donor around campus using the “golf cart reservation system”. Development officers closing major gifts can use the gift agreement request form to begin documenting the donors’ generosity to Caltech. Complex checklists of tasks required to record a planned gift are transparent and accessible by corresponding teams. The Nucleus is a portal for users to access all their essential tools, applications, and platforms from one central place.

Celebration: The Nucleus is a place to celebrate milestones and achievements. New hires are introduced and virtually welcomed. Users can “raise their voices” through liking articles and adding comments. Fundraising and campaign milestones are accessible to all by viewing our accountability reports housed on the intranet.

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Below is a list of the key features of The Nucleus 2.0:

+ Announcements (What’s New?) + Calendars + My Apps + My Links + Units + Campaign Central + Resources

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Insights

The Nucleus 2.0 seamlessly combines the aesthetics of an external website with the functionality of the SharePoint platform.

A central library that is carefully curated and populated with metadata by content managers provides the team with great flexibility to construct content queries throughout the site, reducing redundancies of uploading files in various libraries or maintaining multiple calendars while increasing the variety of ways that information is shared and displayed on the intranet.

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The Nucleus 2.0 empowers users, allowing them to customize links they want to see and use, and view all or selected calendars. It has a clean, contemporary, streamlined look and feel. One unique element of the site is its use of icons to identify applications, teams and units. These icons are seen on unit home pages, calendar entries, and with news announcements.

At Caltech, collaboration is a hallmark of the work undertaken by their faculty, students and researchers. No great scientific discovery has ever been found as the result of just one individual. Collaboration is key, and this notion has transferred over to DIR’s management of the staff intranet. There is no single person within DIR who manages The Nucleus; rather, a core team made up of representatives of different units oversees the implementation of the intranet strategy. A larger group of content managers are empowered to continue to make their team’s pages even better. Because of the refresh project, DIR now has shared ownership by the content managers. A deeper ownership now exists from a more diverse team.

The content managers, and the teams that they represent, are very active and share news and relevant information with everyone throughout DIR. The content managers ensure that the site is consistent with the newly defined strategy for The Nucleus. In a relatively short period of time, The Nucleus is recognized internally as the single place where information about and for DIR, its units, and team members is located.

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Impact

The launch of the staff intranet served as a cultural milestone for DIR: it has begun to change how they conduct business, collaborate, and consume information. In particular, The Nucleus 2.0 solved five significant challenges that they experienced with the first iteration of the staff intranet:

+ Inconsistent look and feel throughout the site In version 1.0, content managers built creative team and unit pages, often looking quite different from one another and making it difficult to find information quickly. The introduction of standardized page elements and standardized fonts across all web parts have ensured improved consistency across the site and have greatly improved the overall user experience.

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+ Challenges in navigation for users Users weren’t quite sure where they were on the site or where to find specific information. To combat this issue, trail navigation was added to all pages: the breadcrumbs on the top of the page have vastly improved page navigation for users. Also, Caltech further built out the resources pages to include resources for various groups of employees (e.g., new hires, development officers, event planners) that weren’t tied down specifically to the organization chart. In addition, redundancies were built as users consume information in various ways.

+ Lack of clarity and duplication of calendar entries Calendars in version 1.0 were quite problematic, as they did not connect (or roll-up properly) with one another. Content managers and users often had to enter calendar entries on multiple calendars. For the refresh project, it was important to improve the clarity and user experience when browsing calendars. The new custom, enhanced calendar experience avoids the limitations of SharePoint’s out-of-the-box calendar experience. Users can now quickly and easily glance or dig into details for all calendars. Users can quickly identify source calendars by the icon associated with the team. Most importantly, all calendars now properly roll-up to one consolidated calendar.

+ Ineffective search functionality The biggest complaint from users in version 1.0 was that they could not easily find things using the search feature. For version 2.0, the out-of-the-box document preview was kept, but more refiner options were introduced that relied on document metadata and tagging. As part of the content migration, the metadata protocols were completely revamped so that information could be found in a manner that was more conducive to how they operate as an organization. While this task was laborious and tedious, it has turned DIR’s search functionality into one of the new site’s greatest (and most used) sections.

+ Broken responsive design While version 1.0 was intended to have responsive design, it never worked the way that it was originally envisioned. Nucleus 2.0 was implemented with a properly responsive design allowing staff who travel frequently to access all information on the go, via their smart phone or tablet. Mobile access to the intranet allows users to be more agile and responsive when they are not at their desktops.

Evidence of Impact

The Nucleus 2.0 is designed to help users embrace its staff intranet and for DIR to become more efficient and agile in solving business problems. Examples that support this fact include:

1. All Staff Emails DIR staff were inundated with a lot of daily emails for important campaign and business operations information. Solution: The prolific use of announcements on The Nucleus, in particular at the unit level, has transformed the way users receive important information and has reduced the number of All Staff emails sent.

2. Time Savings Improved search result pages with refiners that help users pinpoint the document or page they are looking for save people time.

3. Adoption and Usage From December 2017 (the first full month following the launch of The Nucleus 2.0) to April 2018, the monthly number of hits on the intranet has increased by 147% (from 5,448 to 13,472) and the monthly number of unique users accessing the site has increased by 36% (from 973 to 1,328). This statistic shows that DIR has fully embraced The Nucleus 2.0 and is utilizing the intranet more robustly each and every day—including weekends!

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Lessons learned and advice for others from

“We have gained a lot of knowledge by undertaking this intranet redesign project. Our lessons learned focus in four key categories:

01. RESOURCES

+ The exercise we did prior to the start of the project in evaluating and prioritizing what we could accomplish given our resource limitations helped us maximize our impact and return on investment.

+ Investing time and effort up front prior to embarking on your redesign project will pay off huge dividends. In our case, we focused this investment on strategy planning, learning/training, communication, and diligent requirements gathering.

+ Having parallel entry—old site/new site—greatly enhanced testing and learning. + Having access to two monitors to compare migrated data with the old site sped up

the process of reviewing the new site. + The partnership with our vendor (Definity First) and with Caltech’s central IT team

was absolutely critical to the success of our project.

02. KNOWLEDGE / SKILLS

+ The formal training we provided our super users was fundamental to thinking about what we could achieve with our redesigned site. In addition, it helped us communicate better with our vendor as we were now speaking with them with increased knowledge of the power of the SharePoint platform.

+ It is important to further your learning and intellectual curiosity.

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03. DESIGN / USER EXPERIENCE

+ Design with the “least frequent user” in mind. That means building in redundant navigation on your site because users consume information differently.

+ Visuals are critical to enhancing the user experience—everything from having a staff photo directory, to fonts, icons, colors, and other images is important to designing an appealing intranet.

+ It is important to frequently refresh banners and announcements to make your site feel relevant and up-to-date. Make it easy for your content managers to update these critical elements.

+ Help your users find their way throughout your intranet so that they don’t get lost. To combat this issue, add trail navigation to all of your pages: these breadcrumbs on the top of the page will vastly improve page navigation for users.

+ Ensure that your staff intranet has a working responsive design: mobile access to intranet allows users to be more agile and responsive when not at their desktops.

04. ADOPTION

+ Strong support and leadership from our project sponsor was key to the success of this project. Not only did the sponsor communicate (up and down), but she continuously demonstrated in meetings and daily interactions how she uses the intranet (and that takes courage. And challenges us to make sure things are updated!). She also continues to reinforce (down and up) the expectation and rule: “if it’s not on the Nucleus, it didn’t happen”.

+ Foster increased pride and ownership by all teams, not just the core project team. + Empower content managers, educate and involve them in your redesign project. + Give away promotional items to your users, such as mousepads or screen

cleaners. Hold “photo days” when all users are invited to stop by and have a professional picture taken and uploaded to their profile page on the intranet.

+ Most importantly, have fun!”

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Thank you! By Christina Kaneychristina.kaney@definityfirst.com