Personalised and responsive SharePoint 2013 intranet

How we created an engaging platform for the Office of Rail Regulation

The brief

The Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) wanted to re-develop their intranet on SharePoint 2013 to better serve the needs of their staff across 6 UK locations. They wanted their new SharePoint intranet to be a more modern representation of their organisation and achieve the following objectives:

Create a SharePoint 2013 platform where consistent messages and information can be shared
Reinforce a positive company culture and facilitate employee engagement and the internal communication strategy
Allow office and non-office based staff to access relevant information whether on the move or at their desk.
Drive collaboration between offices.

Our approach

We needed to ensure the mobile context was built into the user experience from the outset. We consulted heavily with stakeholders and end users to ensure the information architecture was well structured and ran several workshops to understand the types of user journeys that would be required in a mobile context.

Through our early discovery work, our SharePoint consultants learned that the intranet should not be perceived as London-centric. They had conducted some insightful user research that pointed towards the intranet needing elements of personalisation based on job role and office location.

As with all of our SharePoint projects, our SharePoint experts start from the position of utilising mainly out-of-the-box components. However, we needed to create certain bespoke components for things like navigation and personalisation and were able to do this via front-end code, not impacting the SharePoint core.

The result

The site was delivered and launched in a 3-month timeframe. Our SharePoint consultancy worked hand-in-hand with the ORR intranet team and acted as a bridge between them and their outsourced IS provider.

End users are feeding back that they really like the new intranet and early data shows signs of much-increased engagement with corporate news and other content areas.