Interact Software

"Wheatley Group's vision for their new intranet would be an easy to access, easy to use, central point for all information requirements, with a powerful search facility that would enable people to find what they needed quickly. The Problem Wheatley Group previously GHA’s old intranet, ‘GHAnet’ was built in Dreamweaver and it was so difficult to create pages in that it fell to one person, an often overwhelming task. Over time, with neglect and an inability to search, catalogue or delete out of date content, it became nothing more than a ‘dumping ground’ where 10,000’s of documents came to die. Beyond the problems they had building and maintaining the old intranet, it had numerous problems for the end users. It was flat, uninspiring, tricky to navigate and utterly failed to engage them. For Wheatley Group, the need to give their staff a voice was an urgent problem. Opportunities to spread best practice and solve problems quickly were being missed, vital information was being lost in a morass of documents and finding contact details for the right person, especially those with key responsibilities was difficult if not impossible, which wasted huge amounts of time and lead to increasing internal frustration. Goals Wheatley Group’s vision for their new intranet would be an easy to access, easy to use, central point for all information requirements, with a powerful search facility that would enable people to find what they needed quickly. They also wanted to offer a fun, friendly and engaging environment for their staff to share knowledge, communicate and collaborate. The previous intranet had a few useful tools but the usability was poor and visually it was flat and bland. We had to do something different to excite people, make it fun, easier to use and also store data in a useful and more manageable way. They were looking to save time and effort across many different departments, most notably HR, who needed to be released from answering the same questions over and over again and streamline their processes. This would then have the knock on effect off giving managers more time by making their paperwork more efficient. Building Holmes was not easy. It was a very steep learning curve and it continues to be a challenge to make sure the intranet is as good as it can be but I know I have the team at Interact to help me, to get me unstuck, to inspire me and to show me new, better ways of working. It’s been a brilliant experience."