Inside.Barnardo’s: The intranet without walls
When I joined the Digital team at Barnardo’s in October 2017, the intranet — or B-hive, as it was known — was so full of information it had become hard to use and unsustainable to manage.
To find basic but important information, such as how to book annual leave, and what to do if they were too sick to work, staff would have to sift through over 5000 pages of content using an unhelpful search function that struggled to offer any relevant information.
To make matters worse, not everyone in the charity could access B-hive. We’re a charity that relies on the support of our amazing volunteers, but because you need a login to access B-hive, volunteers — who don’t have network access — often felt kept in the dark when it came to news and updates of Barnardo’s work.
Although it was only a few years old, using, managing, and maintaining B-hive had become a frustrating and unrewarding experience. There was no question that we could simply ‘clean up’ the existing intranet: the platform it was hosted on had become outdated and expensive to maintain.
We needed a new intranet; one that was efficient, accessible and designed with the user in mind. And, as a charity reliant on the donations of our supporters, we needed to do it as quickly and affordably as possible.
Building our team
My first task on joining the Barnardo’s Digital team was to put in place some milestones and start to manage the technical development of the new intranet, being handled by a third party. We assembled a team of content designers who worked to the brief developed by the product owner in the discovery phase of development.
The discovery report outlined a number of key objectives for the new intranet, but it was clear that we had one key issue to overcome if the new platform was to succeed: the new Barnardo’s intranet had to be accessible to everybody, or it wouldn’t work for our organisation. We decided we had to think openly about where necessary security ended and unnecessary secrecy began.
An intranet without walls
An intranet without walls, or an open intranet is just a website that anyone can see. You don’t have the be on an organisation’s network to access it, so if you know the web URL you can use it.
Inside.Barnardo’s is an open intranet.
It’s a bold move to open up the insides of your charity for everyone to walk around and look at. But we believe that by being transparent about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, we can remain accountable for the decisions we make that impact the lives of the children and young people in our care.
Of course there are risks: during the discovery phase of the project, we identified a small but significant amount of confidential information that we need to make available to staff, but which could present a security risk if it were to be available for public consumption.
There will be still more content that, whilst we want to publish it on the intranet, may be of a more confidential nature (such as pay grades and information security policies).
We needed to make sure that this type of content was available to those in Barnardo’s who needed it, but was not accessible to anyone who might use it for illegal or malicious purposes.
Our solution was to put any sensitive or confidential content within an internal document management system that requires a network login for access: External users without a network login will not be able to see this content. In order to further protect this content, our team of developers created a tool that hides the URL of these systems so they are at less risk of being breached by hackers.
Doing it differently
Inside.Barnardo’s wasn’t delivered overnight: the Alpha and Beta phases of the project alone took 18 months to complete. That’s perhaps longer than it should (or at least than many would think it should) take, but Inside.Barnardo’s represents more than a technological change in our charity.
We’re on a mission to make everything we do as transparent as possible, and that means adjusting our culture to new ways and processes.
In a bid to make our entire charity more efficient and accessible, our content designers performed detailed content audits and worked closely with stakeholders across the business to understand the relevance and requirements of the content. We worked to industry best practice when designing content so that it was as clear and concise as possible. We have created pages that are easy to search for and tell you exactly what you need to know about life inside Barnardo’s.
It’s also optimised for mobile and tablet, so wherever our people are when they need us, they can feel connected, whatever device they’re using.
We launched Inside.Barnardo’s in March 2019 with just 250 pages of clear, concise and high quality information — a fraction of the previously unwieldy 5000. Our determination to create an intranet that is easy to use and free of clutter forced us to be really critical about how much information our people really need to see, and how much of it is unnecessary filler: it turned out there was a lot we could justify simply not publishing. We’re really proud of that achievement and the impact it will have on the user’s experience.
Of course we expect the amount of content on the site to grow again over time, but we’ve worked openly and collaboratively with our colleagues to ensure the quality of the content that’s gone live, and there’s now effective governance in place to ensure this platform remains efficient and manageable in years to come.
Keep it static: a new Workplace dynamic
A huge difference to the expected size and growth of Inside.Barnardo’s has been made by a decision early on to focus on featuring only static content on our intranet.
During the discovery phase of development, it became clear that the system was clogged with years’ worth of outdated, redundant content focused on internal news and updates. We needed to prevent this from happening again on the new platform.
We researched the issue and the solution came to us in a tool that many of us use every day in our personal lives: social media. We decided to trial Workplace by Facebook as a way of keeping everyone in Barnardo’s connected and up to date with the charity and with each other. It was an elegant solution: staff and volunteers could log in to Workplace to access up-to-date support and information, leaving Inside.Barnardo’s free to act as the central hub for ‘static’ information and policy documents.
How has it gone?
Since the launch of Inside.Barnardo’s we’re really pleased with the positive feedback we’ve received. Within the first few days of launch, 78% of colleagues said they were able to find the information they were looking for, compared to a 24% satisfaction rate with B-hive. While we’re over the moon with this, we know there are still further improvements to make it even better, and more content is being refined daily.
A change for good
Changing anything in a large organisation is tough, but when you’re making changes to something that is used by staff every day (like the intranet) it will raise a lot of challenges, like training staff to use the new content management system, and concerns over whether content owners like the changes we propose. And of course, we’re watching for any technical issues within the secure content environment, but I’ve asked myself how people will feel about the change to what they normally see. The feedback so far assures us that what we’ve created will be considered by our users a welcome improvement on B-hive.
I feel our open and collaborative approach in developing Inside.Barnardo’s equips us as a team — and as a charity — to overcome any challenges in an open and positive way; something we’ll need to get more and more used to as Barnardo’s transforms into a digital-first charity over the coming years.
If we can do it…
Is an open intranet built with transparent processes the future for Barnardo’s and other organisations? In my opinion, yes: as long as it’s driven by user need. We may not be the first to do this, but I hope our blazing a trail will embolden other organisations to make their intranets open and accessible, and we’re excited to help others follow our lead with the findings from our experiences.
For now though, we’re continuing to make iterative improvements to our new platform, so we’re keen to encourage our staff and volunteers to keep using Inside.Barnardo’s and providing the feedback that allows us to make it even better.
Chris is a Delivery Manager in the Barnardo’s Digital & Technology team. To get the latest updates from the Barnardo’s Digital team, subscribe to blog.barnar.do on Medium, and follow #FutureBarnardos on Twitter.
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