Managing Change

I have a new job - a 6 month Project Management position implementing a new Internet and Intranet for the Tasmanian Department of Education. My previous role in state-wide strategic planning and implementation of eLearning came to an end as new priorities were set due to budget constraints.

Current DoE Website

The Internet-Intranet project has already been running for 9 months and has implementation deadlines of 31st July for the Internet and mid-December 2012 for the Intranet.

Why are we building a new Internet-Intranet? Two key issues are:

• Difficulty locating information and services through searching or browsing
• Lack of information currency and expectations for faster online publishing

What are the features of the new Internet?

• Navigation, content and access to services will reflect the needs of our principal user groups of parents and carers, students, community partnerships, government and business, and the general public.
• Content management, access rights and web services will be delivered on SharePoint 2010 rather than the current MySource Matrix.

What are the current challenges?

• 100s of documents and web pages that no longer meet the needs of intended audiences or organisational priorities - and too many dead links. The current website has over 1,200 web pages and several hundred documents.
• A web structure and publishing culture that strongly mirrors the products and services of organisational units rather than being driven by end-user needs.
• National web accessibility guidelines, the rapid increase in mobile device access and the rise of social media.

Having been an end-user of the DoE website for over 15 years I'm looking forward to working with various teams to help shape its next incarnation. As an admin user of SharePoint 2003 and 2007 I'm also interested to see what SharePoint 2010 has to offer.