SharePoint intranet rebuild boosts user adoption and collaboration

The brief

Janssen is a leading pharmaceutical company. The EMEA Medical Affairs function in Janssen provides scientific support to both internal teams and external customers. They collaborate extensively on writing scientific knowledge documents. To help them with this they put in place a SharePoint collaboration and knowledge portal.

After 3 years the SharePoint site had only enjoyed modest success with key areas unpopulated and unused. Following a referral by EMEA IT we were asked by the site sponsor to provide consultancy on reversing the poor levels of adoption of their intranet.

Our approach

Whilst many people had their own ideas as to why the intranet was struggling, we approached the project with fresh and open minds. One of our top SharePoint consultants designed a research project that included a deep dive into the analytics, a content audit, a stakeholder workshop and 25 one-on-one interviews with content owners and end users from across the EMEA region.

Our research uncovered a number of problems – many of which the team had not considered. These included usability issues, technical issues, content issues, inadequate training, and almost non-existent governance. Together these issues had led to a huge lack of trust in the content held on the site.

We put in place a three-pronged plan to address the issues: first, rebuilding the core knowledge and collaboration section of the site to make the user experience more intuitive; second, putting in place a robust SharePoint governance framework aimed at driving up adoption and sustaining high levels of usage; and third, carrying out a SharePoint rebrand to send a strong signal that the site had changed.

The result

With a limited budget and a tight timeline we relaunched the site after two months. As set out in our governance plan we worked closely with the network of 25 content owners. We briefed, motivated and supported them to get their latest and greatest content onto the site. We’ve stayed in touch with the site owner and have delivered ongoing analytics post launch. We have found that:

The amount of scientific documents on the site doubled in one month after launch.
9 months later the site has seen the number of documents shared increase to 1762 – an increase of 375% since the launch date.
Year-on-year the site has enjoyed a 20% increase in users and a 30% increase in user sessions.
With such a pronounced and sustained increase in usage and adoption we have been invited to build a similar site on Office365 for Janssen Asia Pacific.

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