Feature

posted 15 Dec 2005 in Volume 8 Issue 7

Case study: Portal culture

How to connect to your audience if you really want to deliver the full potential of your portal.

By Jane McKay, PricewaterhouseCoopers

PricewaterhouseCoopers (pwC) provides industry-focused assurance, tax and advisory services for public and private clients.

Its 14,850 partners and staff in the UK have had access to an internal (business-to-employee) portal since December 2002. Although a significant step towards capturing and sharing knowledge and information across the business, it was not being used to its full potential and was viewed primarily as a place to undertake key transactions, such as submitting timesheets and expenses claims.

In 2004, the Portal Office – the team responsible for managing the portal – refocused their efforts to take a more proactive stance in understanding how the portal featured in the working lives of PwC partners and staff, while raising awareness of how to get the best out of the system. By doing this, we hoped to evolve the portal from a technological deployment to a tool that would become embedded in the culture of the organisation.

To have any hope of making this transition, we needed to understand how our people worked and how they viewed and used the portal.

What followed was the commissioning of a research study and the roll-out of an extensive training and change programme.

This is the story of that journey and the lessons we learnt along the way.

The promise of portals

In early 2000, the sales pitch was about enterprise portals offering real value. They would create an efficient, intuitive and appealing environment for information gathering, collaboration and task-oriented applications. They would remove old problems, perform tasks better and do new things. On this promise, the PwC portal was launched in December 2002.

All change

In 2004, the focus changed to wanting a greater understanding of how the portal was currently being used/viewed and how people wanted to use it, so we could set the direction of the portal over the next few years. Usability, training and education became key priorities.

In May 2004, an external research consultancy was commissioned to identify the barriers that existed to positioning the portal as a central-firm resource and to investigate issues around: access and usability; delivery of timely and relevant information; and, having an engaging user experience.

The research would examine four key areas to assist the Portal Office in driving the portal forward:

What motivates our audience to use the portal?
What content and functionality do they find valuable?
How do they navigate the portal?
How can we improve usability?

The approach taken was:

Desk research – examination of qualitative and quantitative portal data sources, to be fed into other project documentation;
Ethnographic script, interview and forum-guide preparation – the preparation of an ethnographic script and interview guide that would shape the core fieldwork;
Ethnography and in-depth interviews – fieldwork covering a cross section of teams in London and Birmingham (three-day courses and two days fieldwork). This included 16 half-day observations, 16 in-depth interviews and five lunchtime-staff forums discussing the portal, with a total of 30 staff;
Usability evaluation of the portal – 18 one-on-one sessions with a cross section of portal users, focusing on navigation and usability issues.

The research was carried out over two months and the findings were presented to all major stakeholders in the portal project in July 2004.

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Box one

What is ethnography?
“Originating within anthropology, ethnography is an invaluable research method, used ever more frequently within commercial environments. Ethnography is a way of doing research – a method. It is also a product – an ethnography is a specific type of account of cultural and social life.

Ethnographic research involves participating in, and observing, people’s lives and social contexts. In an academic context, such fieldwork is long term. In applied settings ethnography is more ‘rapid’.

Ethnography is about making sense of social and cultural life and uncovering the forces that animate people’s worlds.”

Source: http://www.ideasbazaar.com/

What is usability?
“Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The word ‘usability’ also refers to methods for improving ease of use during the design process.”

Source: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/

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What did we learn?

People did not have time to explore and ‘play’. Most of their time was billable and precious in a business such as PwC. However, exploration helped users find useful, value-adding content and resources.

Compliance often triumphs over success
Successful IT implementations were not expected and users did not expect to be consulted. Therefore, first impressions counted and became reality. Initial exposure to systems like the portal acted as benchmarks that were fed into the rumour mill. Bad experiences became amplified. If you lose trust in the beginning, it is hard to build it back up: “Part of me has been discouraged from using the portal by loose talk.”

Change fatigue is a reality
There was a feeling of change and information overload, with the view that change was not communicated effectively. People felt it was another system they would have to get used to and, just as they got comfortable with it, someone was going to come along and replace it anyway: “We’ve had a zillion new systems over the years, and a lot have gone by the board.”

Mismatch between the language used by people and the portal
This resulted in navigational and information-retrieval difficulties. We tried to be aspirational with the portal by representing the organisation of tomorrow, however, users were working ‘today’ and wanted to see that language represented – otherwise they had difficulty relating to it.

Lotus Notes seen as having inherent flexibility and personalisation
This was localised – there was a cottage industry of database creation and sharing among small teams. Lotus Notes was ‘owned’ by individuals, while the portal was seen as someone else’s property. There was such a strong affinity with the application that when the portal came along it was immediately seen as a rival.

Functionality and usability

Overall, the portal was seen as having lots of potential. It was perceived as useful, but rigid and sometimes frustrating. It was viewed for urgent information needs only, not for general browsing or exploration. The perceived lack of training deflected the issue onto ‘where is it?’ rather than the quality of the content. It was seen as easier/quicker to ask someone else, go directly to a database or access the web.

There was low awareness of large areas of the portal – many ‘grey’ areas. These included a user’s own business-area content. Users did not necessarily structure portal information in line with the design model. The size of the portal acted as a barrier to exploration.

The portal’s search function was not effective and most users were browsing to avoid using it. Browsing was a hit and miss affair, with little learning taking place. The site map was rarely used, as most users did not know about it.

The home page was possibly the most important area in making the portal relevant to users and saving them time. However, it was regarded as having variable usefulness and no broad appeal.

Few users had personalised their system. This was linked to the issue of low awareness of content and, also, time. A few competent users had pushed unwanted content down the page. Others that did not know how to do this were constantly faced by unwanted content, with their own, important content at the foot of the page. This added to the perception that the firm pushed what it thought was important, rather than objects of personal interest – ‘my stuff’.

Putting it into practice

Some cosmetic changes could be tested and implemented quickly, while others required more time and effort. The reality was that there was no such thing as a quick fix for the majority of the research findings.

Short-term solutions (one to three months)
Visual clues were improved to highlight the personalisation features of the portal. Navigation was brought into alignment to help users understand where they were on the site. The site map was redesigned and given increased prominence, to help users find content easily and understand the portal structure.

Mid-term solutions (three to six months)
Portal reliability was improved, which included the speed at which pages were loading. Search was enhanced to give greater relevancy of results, a clearer interface and the ability to filter results by source.

Long-term solutions (six months onwards)

The home page does not immediately answer the ‘who, what, when, where and how’ of the portal from the user’s perspective. We need to understand the role of the home page and look at making it more relevant to the user, based on their business area;
Reduce the quantity of material on the portal and improve the layout. The huge quantity of content, plus search and navigation difficulties, makes finding relevant information difficult;
Understand how better profiling could help surface content more effectively. Work with communities to understand how the portal could support them and help with collaboration;
Understand what relationship the portal should have with Lotus Notes.

While the research was being undertaken and the findings collated, plans were in place to launch a formal user-education programme to help people get the best from the portal. The timing of the research allowed us to shape the training around the findings to drive its focus.

Teaching a man to fish

When the portal was launched there was very little in the way of any formal user education given to users. A few ‘stay and play’ sessions were offered by the portal office, for those keen to understand more. Otherwise, each business area took responsibility for the training it ran, which resulted in some areas receiving none. The Portal Management Board, the body governing the portal, identified the need for a post-launch portal-training initiative. An office-by-office approach was proposed. Pilots that were undertaken identified that a successful training programme was one that delivered solutions to many different audiences and was likely to include:

Group workshops;
Secretarial workshops;
One-to-one coaching sessions for partners and directors.

The training would ensure that our people were able to: easily access and exploit relevant content and tools; reduce the time spent looking for content and tools; and, ultimately, reduce wasted efforts and levels of frustration.

A business case was put together to deliver a two-phase training roadshow. Phase one travelled to all regional offices from July to December 2004, while phase two covered all London offices between January to July 2005.

Two full-time external trainers were hired to facilitate this. Efforts had been undertaken to recruit internally, but people would not commit to the time required. However, recruiting externally turned out to be a very successful move, as we hired two very experienced trainers. An intensive two week ‘train the trainer’ programme ensured that they were up to speed on PwC and the portal.

Training was rolled out to the regional offices first, as this was where the appetite for portal training was most vocal. The training consisted of one-to-one coaching for the senior members of the business, as well as group and secretarial workshops. Coaching and workshops ran for one hour and were ‘hands-on’ to ensure a more interactive approach.

Picking up on the research findings, the training focused on:

How to navigate around the portal and help that existed (the site map);
How to personalise. We knew that less than five per cent of research respondents had taken the time to personalise their portal. However, those that had experienced more relevant interactions with it;
Raising awareness of the range of content and tools available to reduce ‘grey areas’.

Feedback indicated that the workshops and one-to-one coaching gave people a proper chance to explore. They took time out to ‘play’ with the portal, which they would not normally have considered. They started to find out about the wide range of resources available to them and also heard the experiences of others who were using it.

Participants personalised their portal as they went along and left the training with the view that the portal was immediately more relevant to them. People started to take ownership of the portal and to view it as more applicable to them – as something they could configure to meet their needs. The site map helped to show the portal’s organisational structure and allowed people to understand the range of content and tools available to them. As key tools and resources were identified, the portal began to be seen as ‘more than just time and expenses’. People started to understand how the portal could support them in their daily working lives.

By the end of twelve months of training, some 35 offices had been visited and over 4,000 people had been trained in 500 workshops and 300 one-to-one coaching sessions.

We saw a 25 per cent increase in the use of the portal within two months of the training being rolled out. This level of usage has been sustained and now stands at 85 per cent of the PwC population accessing the portal on a weekly basis and 99 per cent on a monthly basis.

Portal training has now been built into the induction process at PwC and an e-learning tutorial has been devised to serve as a refresher on the key areas of the portal. Regular workshops and one-to-one coaching sessions are still being run to ensure that people can get the best from the portal.

Walk the talk

Over the past twelve months, the following valuable lessons have been learnt.

Connect and get closer to your audience

User satisfaction comes from understanding your audience. You need to understand their real, not perceived, needs;
Don’t rely on a few key people to decide what is best for the majority;
The only way you are going to make it relevant is to make decisions from a user perspective. Understand how people work today and how they would like to work tomorrow;
It is much easier to build something relevant if you understand the context people operate within and create a realistic timeframe to achieve your vision.
Ensure you have detailed change management and communication plans in place;
Don’t assume an information-hungry audience will drive self-service;
Your users need to be involved and they need to know ‘what’s in it for me’;
You should also get buy in from agents of change. Think about what your communications say and ensure they don’t promise something that isn’t the reality.

Don’t underestimate the amount of user education needed
This is best summed up in another of our user comments: “Almost everything I learnt was new. It was a good idea to have these workshops – I had felt previously that the portal was just thrown at us with no particular guidance or help as to what it was for or how to use it.”

Having smart people does not necessarily mean they will know how to use the portal/intranet. If no one is taking control then do something about it and give it the necessary attention, resource and budget. Don’t develop training plans in isolation; understand the contextual issues. Too often, we are given tools that become hindrances because we do not know why and how to use them.

The research results and training feedback have been invaluable in positioning the portal within PwC. Not only have the findings helped shape our direction, we have used them with key stakeholders for funding on our initiatives and to drive home the reality of the situation when technology takes the lead. Understanding our users lies at the heart of what we do with the portal and we are refocusing our efforts from being seen as IT, to working closely with the business. We still rely on our IT resources to support us, however, we never forget that the technology is the enabler and we need to make it work for us.

One of our research participants sums up the approach we are taking and what we would like the end result to be: “The portal is good to have. It needs to get to the stage where I’m thinking ‘I’m not doing my job properly because I’m not accessing the portal’.”

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Box two:

Post-workshop user comments

“The sheer scope of the portal is its main strength, but also the thing that puts people off most. Being able to navigate it efficiently without getting lost or being put off is the main advantage this course brings.”

“Before this workshop I only used a small amount of the portal. I now have more knowledge of the areas I was using and have learnt about many new areas which will be useful to me.”

“I have only really used the portal to input my time and expenses sheet in the past – but now I know there is more to discover!”

“You have actually asked me what I do, what I need and how I work everyday – and then how the portal fits in with this. We should be doing that all the time.”

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Jane McKay is portal training and communications manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers. She can be contacted at jane.x.mckay@uk.pwc.com

This article was first published in ei magazine, October 2005.