As promised, I’m following up on Susan Ali's blog from last month ‘Strategy to implementation to continuous improvement’. Susan described a process we went through over the last couple of years. During our strategic planning day, we identified a need to improve how we communicate with the rest of the University. We later decided that the solution was to create a SharePoint comms site to act as a central resource for ‘all things continuous improvement’. This was a big task that took a while, but we were all proud of the result. However, there’s always room for improvement so let’s take the training pages as an example of how the site evolved.
Susan did a great job putting the training pages together in a clear, interesting and thoughtful way which prioritised and met the needs of the reader. Focusing on the reader was absolutely the correct approach, but what it did create, as Susan said, was the requirement for any updates to be made in multiple places.
Generally, when we analyse any process, one of the things that we’re try to do is eliminate duplicated effort and save time without negatively impacting quality. In this case, we’d look to reduce the time spent updating the SharePoint site without reducing utility to the reader.
As is so often the case with Power Platform solutions, once you’ve found a method and applied it in one area it can be reapplied elsewhere and that’s what we did here. When I was publishing our back catalogue of blogs to the comms site, I used site page metadata to present them in a, hopefully, reader friendly format.
First, we agreed a set of ‘Tier One’ and ‘Tier Two’ categories that seemed appropriate to how users see our service. Then we mapped our blogs onto the categories which allowed us to use ‘highlighted content’ webparts on SharePoint to pull together blogs by category.
You can see the results on our blog page.
To reduce time spent updating training pages, we extended this method to include training. We created a page per training course and mapped them onto the same categories. This allowed us to create a central training page which again used ‘highlighted content’ webparts to display them by category. This meant that if information about a training needed to be updated, it only had to be changed in one place, its own individual page, not every page on which it appears.
You can see the results on our training navigation page.
Further extending the use of these consistent categories to events, case studies and other resources on the site also allowed us to bring together relevant content. For example, on each individual training page we are able to highlight upcoming dates for that training, and relevant blogs and case studies.
No doubt at some point we’ll find another way to improve how we do this, otherwise we couldn’t call ourselves Continuous Improvement.
Susan G
For my tuppence worth, I’m the person who makes updates to all our information. Susan has the vision of what we want to share, and Jacquelyn has the expertise to implement it in the most effective way. These changes have made my job much easier as one edit now updates everything that requires an update. It also removes the risk of human (well, my) error, as I can no longer update three places and forget the fourth.
