Intranet Upgrades: Milestones or Millstones?
Paul Chin
(www.paulchinonline.com)
11/17/2006
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If you follow the news you've probably been hearing the term "cut and run" a lot. It's an expression that has come to mean a cowardly retreat. Stripping it of its negative connotation -- a term originating in nautical usage meaning to cut the anchor line and run the ship downwind -- the term simply means to withdraw.
To many, however, withdrawing may seem counterproductive. Perhaps, through the misguided pressures of having to succeed and advance in our careers, we've been conditioned to believe that any form of withdrawal as a sign of weakness and failure. In a corporate environment -- where these pressures are compounded by the need to prove ourselves to our superiors -- anything short of forging ahead seem unacceptable.
But there's a difference between persistence in achieving a goal and stubbornly going forward when there's little-to-no chance of success.
Major intranet upgrades involving multiple departments, sub-sites, and timetables requires a careful balance of accomplishing what you
hope to in a given time and the user community's expectations. When you end up trying to do too much at once, upgrades can easily become a detriment to progress. Sometimes we need to take a step back in order to advance.
Interconnection of Intranet Components
There's a tremendous amount of interconnectivity within an intranet -- not only in terms of technology and functionality, but also with all the developers, designers, and content owners tasked with building and managing the system. All of this interconnectivity is to make an intranet appear as one seamless whole rather than a cut-and-pasted collage of departmental sites and systems. With this interconnectivity, however, it can sometimes get a bit tricky to make a major change to one intranet component without it affecting another component in some form or another.
Upgrading is a fact of system life. But, in order to ensure that some intranet upgrades don't end up bottlenecking system progress, intranet managers need to understand the inter-dependency of deliverables and their effects on schedules -- all the while staying in tune with users' expectations. Major programmatic changes need to go through the whole process of development, testing, user testing, and deployment. Attempting to tackle too much at once can delay the entire chain of planned upgrades.
A Gentle Balancing Act
The software industry is always trying to convince us that we, as consumers, must have the latest and greatest. Software vendors try to pack their products with so much that release dates are constantly pushed back -- sometimes by months or years. When was the last time a major revision of Microsoft Windows was actually released on the originally announced launch
date? How often can release dates be changed before users simply stop listening or lose interest?
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