Social intranet on SharePoint Online for Office 365

Using social techniques and Office 365 to help drive a massive culture change

The brief

Nuffield Health wanted our help to launch a truly social and open intranet on Office 365 that would help drive a massive culture change in the organisation:

The sponsor and other board members were clear what their objectives were but needed them to be translated and articulated into an intranet vision and strategy.
They were also clear that they wanted a social intranet: they wanted to promote trust, respect for expertise, openness and passion for healthcare.
Our brief was to provide an engaging vision document and follow through with detailed requirements, wireframes and designs to pass to their development partner.

Our approach

Our SharePoint consultancy took a top down and bottom up approach to the project, listening carefully to what senior managers were looking for but also reaching out to employees across the many gyms and hospitals in the UK:

To set the vision we interviewed each member of the management board and tested some of their ideas with staff across the business.
Our SharePoint consultants developed polished concept designs to illustrate the vision and in particular show how staff contributions and networking were a key feature of the intranet.
Once signed-off the vision was communicated broadly across Nuffield Health to help drive enthusiasm for the next phase: UX design and requirements.

The result

Our SharePoint consultancy delivered comprehensive, detailed wireframes and written requirements and a modern vibrant design template to be applied to SharePoint 2013:

We came up with some innovative features including a co-creation tool, a fun recognition tool and an algorithm to encourage contributions through social reputation.
Because we had to target social tools to a broad audience with varying levels of PC literacy and limited PC access time it was important for us to keep ease-of-use top of mind. We stripped back SharePoint functionality to provide elegant and simple interfaces that even our grandmothers could use.
Because we weren’t doing the development ourselves it was imperative that we delivered detailed requirements. Thanks to our SharePoint expertise we were able to suggest requirements that we knew were feasible on SharePoint.