Peer to Peer Magazine

30 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | FALL 2016 content and format, negatively affecting user adoption and the overall user experience. Our staff had largely stopped using the portal altogether since they had to memorize specific "click paths" to find the information they needed. Leveraging Lean With business challenges identified and our new "SmartNet" intranet relaunch strategy defined, we turned to technology. The firm partnered closely with Handshake Soware to translate our business and communication vision into a new and improved SharePoint portal reality. In close coordination with our service partner, IT, KM, finance and firm leadership, we opted to leverage SharePoint 2013 as the architectural backbone of the firm's newly launched SmartNet intranet portal. Based on our mix of technology and process, PID leveraged Lean management and Agile development concepts and principles to iterate and evolve the portal solution based on user feedback and needs. The portal's tools and out-of-the box functionality proved to be the Geing Smart with a Lean and Agile Intranet Strategy CASE STUDIES perfect fit for our Lean, change-on-the-fly approach. For example, once our users provided feedback and feature preferences, we easily altered the look and feel and customized the portal pages without wasting time or requiring a massive recoding effort. With the SmartNet portal in place, we can quickly solicit user feedback and make tweaks and customizations to further enhance utility and usability. In further borrowing from Lean management techniques, the firm created a virtual kanban board (a work and workflow visualization tool) to track priorities for new portal features, glitches and fixes. Putting the Smart in SmartNet Developing categories based on what information users need and how they aim to use and collaborate with it is a big departure from previous portal versions that housed a mix of content with lile rhyme or reason. Our portal approach focused on three distinct content buckets based on how firm users categorize and visualize their content. Our main mission: Use a Lean management and Agile business approach to development, where the voices of the customers and their underlying needs drive innovations.

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