Interview with T-Systems MMS: how to launch a social intranet using lean approaches

Kevin Hähnlein, digital workplace consultant at T-Systems Multimedia Solutions, supports customers with the introduction of a digital workplace and, in addition to the lean workplace method, has extensive experience in the areas of conversational interfaces and enterprise messaging. 

What are the greatest challenges when launching a social intranet?

One problem teams face when launching a social intranet is that many think they know what kind of social intranet their company needs. In the process, they often make sure that the social intranet is state-of-the-art and offers the same features as a private social network. Content should be easy to share and users should be able to interact with it. This can easily lead to a mismatch between enabled social features and the company’s current corporate culture, however. A major challenge is therefore recognizing how many social features are a good fit with the current culture. Another organization’s successful experience with a social intranet, however, usually doesn’t guarantee success. After all, just because a company has successfully implemented a specific social intranet doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the right one for my company. 

 In summary, the culture and the configuration must fit together. Unfortunately, you can’t figure this out by drawing up a list of what the company currently has, what the new solution must offer, and what would be nice to have, but in the best case need to figure it out using a lean approach. 

A “lean” approach to a social intranet – can you elaborate?

The lean approach to launching a social intranet is based on the idea of a lean startup and uses what’s known as a Minimal Viable Pilot (MVP). In the process, a greatly simplified version of the social intranet is launched that contains only a few basic features of the later full version and can be tested by users at an early stage. COYO, for example, is ideal for this thanks to its availability from the cloud. The approach is generally divided into two phases:

In the first phase of the lean approach, we forms focus groups made up of employees from different departments at all hierarchical levels. During this phase, we can identify power users and later influencers, for example. Working with us, these groups compile a list of software requirements in workshops, which is then used to develop an MVP. Getting the employees involved allows us to not only refer to the technical and functional requirements they have defined, but also determine how mature the corporate culture is. This means we can quickly identify whether the company already has a “liking and sharing culture” or whether employees aren’t yet ready for it.

“We can quickly identify whether the company already has a ’liking and sharing culture’.”

In the second phase, small pilot groups will use the MVP to test the requirements previously developed in the workshops. In this process, we want the test users to test the use cases developed in the focus groups, e.g. “How easy is it to create a blog post?”, on different platforms in order to be able to compare the technologies.

It is extremely important to include members of the focus groups in the pilot groups, so that they can directly test the implementation of the requirements they themselves previously identified. In our previous projects at larger SMEs, between 100-200 people normally participate over a period of three to four weeks.

This approach has several advantages. Compared to the traditional waterfall approach, in which the entire project is planned step by step, we deliberately avoid drawing up specifications or rough concepts. Instead, the later users – the company’s employees – are directly involved. Employee involvement is the main strength of the lean approach to launching a social intranet. In the end, they aren’t simply presented a finished product, but can actively participate in its design.

Isn’t a lean approach risky compared to the traditional approach?

It goes without saying that there are also risks with the lean method. For example, it’s possible to forget an important stakeholder group. However, this is outweighed by the speed advantage of the MVP method, since a tool is directly available to employees for testing. In addition, the employees are always guided through the entire process. At the end of the MVP phase, other groups, such as the company’s IT department, will also be more closely involved in this process in order to examine special requirements with regard to data security. 

Although the launch can still be implemented in the form of a big bang, qualitative and quantitative user feedback guarantees that the social intranet being introduced meets the user requirements and corporate culture.

At T-Systems MMS, you are increasingly relying on your own lean approach. Which clients have you already used this approach with to launch social intranet solutions?

We use our approach not only for social intranet solutions, but also for the digital workplaces, for example.

When it comes to social intranet solutions, we have already successfully implemented our method at several German companies in the chemical, automotive, and banking industries.