Piloting SharePoint 2013 at the UK's National Audit Office
Jinfo Blog

By Sarah Dillingham

Abstract

In a case study on the National Audit Office's introduction of SharePoint 2013, Sarah Dillingham interviews the NAO's intranet manager, Patrick Callaghan, to find out how the organisation is encouraging SharePoint's adoption through early adopters and targeted training sessions.

Item

Patrick Callaghan is intranet manager at the UK's National Audit Office (NAO). The NAO scrutinises public spending on behalf of Parliament.

The NAO is piloting SharePoint 2013 social functionality as part of a wider programme to integrate SharePoint EDRMS, MySite, intranet, team sites and social.

Collaboration

"We are trying to understand whether NAO users are ready to collaborate through social functionality," Patrick explains.

"The biggest change is the introduction of the newsfeed which offers #hashtags and @ to reference people. We've had nothing like that before, although we do have intranet discussion boards, and Yammer."

However, people started to use Yammer informally so nobody asked "How do I use this?" and "What's in this for me?".

"However, with Yammer there was a fear of an externally hosted product, plus the log in barrier," adds Patrick. "We've learnt from this experience. SharePoint is now integrated into our environment."

What's in it for Me?

The "What's in it for me" question is still there for NAO staff.

Patrick and his team counter this by saying: "The answer is that there may be conversations going on that you will miss out on if you don't engage.

"We encourage senior staff to say 'we are only going to say certain things through the newsfeed so if you don't subscribe you will miss it'."

Encouraging Use

"We understand that not everyone will post," adds Patrick, "But we do expect them to look, it's one of the channels that staff need to be aware of."

Like many organisations Patrick has found that the NAO users can be grouped into three:

• There are the keen early adopters
• A majority who will engage with some encouragement and support
• And a small group who are resistant.

Early Adopters

"Some of our experts have jumped right in and created blogs from queries generated in newsfeeds, publicising them with #, plus we've got appetite from non-pilot teams to roll out microblogging quickly," explains Patrick.

But he reports that others are genuinely "scared of this stuff – it feels unnatural".

Short and Sweet Training Sessions

To counter the fear of the new, NAO has developed "15 in 15" sessions where "we just ask people to try SharePoint and tell us what they think".

The "15 in 15" sessions are a short sharp training event, where users try 15 SharePoint features in 15 minutes in PechaKucha style.

They are popular, as is the online cake hunt where teams post clues on the newsfeed and team site, leading people to real life tasty treats. "It's a fun way of understanding the tool and getting momentum going," Patrick advises.

The NAO SharePoint collaboration pilot moves into roll out in summer 2014.

About Patrick Callaghan

Patrick Callaghan is intranet manager at the National Audit Office (NAO). He has been tinkering with intranets and internal social media channels for rather a long time. He started adult life in the late 1980s as a librarian but got over that quite quickly when computers started taking over the world. He hand-coded the first NAO website and intranet but reached the zenith of his coding powers in 1996 and then went into management. Patrick is currently leading a pilot deployment of SharePoint collaboration and social networking toolsets with a view to a full roll-out later in 2014. He is also leading a major project to improve intranet usability.

Editor's Note:

FreePint Subscribers can log in and read and share more in Sarah Dillingham's article SharePoint 2013 - Using Social Features Effectively.

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