Remarkable Organizations and Challenges, Fast Development, and Small Teams Define the 2021 Intranet Design Annual Winners

Each of the 2021 Intranet Design Annual winners, no matter the industry, blazed its own trail for how to support and communicate with employees during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, with the intranet at the center of these efforts.

One of our 10 Intranet Design Annual winners, Johnson & Johnson, produced a COVID-19 vaccine, an incredible accomplishment. This year the healthcare industry had a second winner, Commonwealth Care Alliance, Inc., which faced its own healthcare-related challenges in striving to support ailing clients and the workers who cared for them.

The utilities-and-natural-resources industry remains the one with the most winners — 36 (18%) since the contest began. This year’s top 10 includes 3 utility winners: Baker Hughes, ConocoPhillips, and Snam S.p.A. Needing to keep the grids running while communicating with many of the integral workers out in the field meant demanded an excellent intranet.

Also in this year’s top 10, Cathay Pacific Airlines represents the Transport and Tourism industry. It was especially interesting to see a case study of how an airline’s intranet helped an organization effectively communicate and cope as so many airlines struggled with travel-rules changes.  

Finance continues to be solidly represented and is the second most-winning industry in the history of the contest, with 30 winners (15%). The 2 winning financial organizations this year are Deutsche Vermögensberatung AG and The World Bank.

Technology is the third most-winning industry since the contest began, with 28 winners total (14%). The 2 winners representing this industry this year are Keysight Technologies and VMware, Inc.

The success of these industries is possibly related to their profitability and how much they invest in information technology. Indeed, our Design Annual top 5 winning industries were among the 10 most profitable industries of 2021, as identified by an IBISWorld report.

Rapid Development, Even Amidst a Global Pandemic

If quarantines and unplanned remote work negatively affected the speed of intranet creation, it certainly did not show in the reporting of this year’s winning design teams. All of the winners (and many other entrants) offered a completely new intranet section devoted to COVID-19-related resources, in addition to all the other areas the intranet covered. This year, teams took only between 6 and 36 months to create their winning designs.

The average time to complete this year’s intranets was 17 months (SD=9.3 months), similar to the averages from recent years. Since the start of the Intranet Design Annual, there’s been a downward trend in design-and-development times. Just one year and a quarter during the COVID-19 pandemic? Amazing!

When teams return to in-person work, will the time to create intranets remain the same? Some organizations have already begun to recognize the benefits, including cost savings, of working remotely and will likely remain remote. For those teams, will remote work without the pandemic-related stress and confinement issues, but with better-planned workspaces and a more regular cadence make the work go even faster? And if teams don’t also need to keep up with day-to-day pandemic-related intranet changes, could that accelerate their pace even more? It’s unclear whether this year’s teams were able to make all this happen so quickly because they were fueled by adrenaline and razor-sharp goals, but they did make it happen, during what was a very unique and difficult time. We can assume that teams have learned a lot about communication and remote collaboration this year and that they will bring those learnings to future projects. When they do, we will be watching and rooting for all of them.

If we compare how long it took winning intranet design teams to create their intranets across three seven-year periods (2001-2007, 2008-2014, and 2015-2021), we find that in the last seven years, the time taken to complete is lower than it was in the previous 14 years. From 2001 to 2007, winning teams typically required an average of 3.3 years to create their intranets; from 2008 to 2014, the average creation time was also 3.3 years. Beginning around 2014, however, the average time dropped to approximately 1.4 years — an average time that has held ever since.

Faster Intranet Projects for Many Reasons

In recent years, most winning teams have employed some form of the Agile development process. Eight of this year’s winners did, as did all 10 winners in both 2019 and 2020. Teams using Lean and Agile methods are known to deliver results fast.

Another reason for the fast development times is that the definition of redesign has changed. Today’s teams often launch redesigns even though they still plan to implement additional functionality in the immediate future.  Before Agile, teams would wait to launch the redesign until all or most features were implemented.

Another possible contributor to the increased speed of intranet projects is an emphasis on UX work throughout, from discovery to usability benchmarking. This year 3 intranet teams — Johnson & Johnson, VMware, and The World Bank — employed design-thinking methodology, compared with just 1 in 2020. Design thinking has not yet permeated intranet projects in the way Agile has, but it is starting to show up in these winning intranet projects, just as Agile did in around 2013. Better design work and upfront alignment across team member has been known improves team efficiency.

Finally, intranet projects have benefitted from larger teams.

Repeat Winners

In most years, all of our Design Annual winners are first-time winners. It’s rare and also exciting when the same organization comes back and wins the contest again. This year we had not one, but two, repeat winners: ConocoPhillips, that also won in 2015, and The World Bank, that won nearly two decades ago, in 2002.

Teams that possess the awareness of how and when to change their award-winning intranet design and the ability to make those changes in remarkable ways are both praiseworthy and awe inspiring. Kudos to these teams and the leaders who support them!

Organization Size

The organization size of this year’s winners ranged from small (1,400 employees at Commonwealth Care Alliance) to large (135,000 at Johnson & Johnson). Since 2001, there have been 210 winning organizations, and the size of those organizations has varied greatly, anywhere between 12 and 1,400,000 employees.

Core Teams

This year’s winning team had, on average, 17 members, but team size this year ranged from as few as eight (at both Commonwealth Care Alliance and Keysight Technologies, Inc) to as many as 34 at Johnson & Johnson. These numbers reflect the size of the core intranet team, which comprised internal and external staff and full- and part-time employees. The numbers do not include extended team members, such as content authors or people working on short-term projects.

It’s possible that organizations have devoted more resources to intranet teams in recent years — a positive development.

If we compare the average team size across three 7-year periods, we find that between 2001 and 2007 teams tended to be small and understaffed, with an average size of 8 people. Average team size doubled (16 members) in the 2008 – 2014 period and remained at a similar level (17 people) between 2015 – 2021.

Each Team Employed Outside Help

This year all 10 winners brought in outside agencies and consultants to help create their winning designs. Great teams often look outside their own organization to supercharge their ideas and to see their goals though an outsider’s lens. This external perspective helps teams notice or better understand issues they may be too close to and expand their vision beyond day-to-day thinking.

The presence of numerous outside vendors also speaks to the many complexities faced by today’s intranet teams. There’s little chance that a small team provide the full array of skills needed at the expert level and have the time required to make an excellent design.

The most significant outside help was provided in the following areas:

1. Platform consulting and development: When using any platform — such as SharePoint, Akumina, or Unily — intranet teams looked to the platform developers for expertise. This involvement was especially appreciated when the intranet involved custom solutions that usually warranted special attention upon any platform updates. More specifically, the following are some of the platform-related services outside consultants provided to this year’s winners:

• Platform training
• Development and consulting about platform development
• Ongoing platform consulting, support, and service
• Product updates
• Out-of-the-box site or turnkey intranet and knowledgebase solutions
• Custom-functionality building: Design and development for features not included in the out-of-the-box product

2. UX design and research: To ensure they were conducting sound research, building a solid information architecture, and coming up with creative solutions, teams partnered with outside UX researchers for guidance. More specifically, the following are some of the user-research-related tasks performed by outside consultants:

• Conducted discovery and exploration research
• Planned and facilitate focus groups
• Facilitated user testing
• Conducted card-sorting exercises with relevant user groups
• Conducted user interviews
• Facilitated workshops
• Turned insights into requirements

3. Engineering and integration: The abundance of tools and backend services used by this year’s winning intranets required much engineering work to ensure that the integration with the intranet was smooth and effective. Some of the software-engineering work performed by outside consultants included:

• Implementation
• Development, for both the redesign and current design
• Mobile-app development
• Development of a push service for a mobile app
• Developed integrations with other tools

4. Design: UX-design resources are not always represented as a full-time UX skill on intranet teams. Some of the design-related tasks that outside consultants provided include:

• Helped define high-level visual-design direction and strategy for extending the established web visual standards to the intranet
• Created early visuals for various areas, such as the homepage
• Developed the concept, layouts, and graphic design, and the HTML frontend
• Designed the framework for new intranet
• Defined IA, top-level page designs, and strategy for extending the IA across the rest of the intranet and integrating with the content-management system
• Created the interaction and visual design for the redesign and current design
• Created the mobile-app design

5. Marketing: Like UX, marketing is not always fully represented on in-house intranet teams, but winning teams realized where they have a need and fill it with outside help. This year they did activities such as:

• Planned launch activities
• Created campaign material in support of the launch

Consulting Partners

Each winning team and their consulting partners worked together to create the wonderful designs showcased in this report. These teams are:

• Baker Hughes with Unily
• Cathay Pacific with Kindred, Havas, and Unily
• Commonwealth Care Alliance with Gotham Research Group
• ConocoPhillips with Akumina and Avanade
• DVAG with workai, Compeople, and Kom4tech
• Johnson & Johnson with Unily
• Keysight Technologies with Attollo
• Snam with BITMAMA Reply and Cluster Reply
• VMware with GoToMedia
• The World Bank with EightShapes

More details on the collaboration between in-house teams and outside firms can be found in each company’s case study.

Intranet Team Size Relative to Number of Employees

We also consider team size relative to organization size. Intranet teams are unique in that a few individuals can have a huge impact on many people at an organization. For example, the Baker Hughes team had ten people supporting 58,000 users.

As an averaged percentage, this year’s teams were 0.2% of the company size. That is, for every 1,000 employees, 2 worked on the intranet team.

To further explore the relationship between organization and team sizes, we compared team size to company size over the past 11 Intranet Design Annuals. In this analysis we found that the winning intranets have a similar intranet-support ratio (percentage of employees that work on the intranet team).

The rather complex formula below summarizes the relationship between team size and organization size for winning Intranet Design Annual teams. The intranet support ratio formula is:

That is, you take the number of employees N that the intranet supports and raise it to the power of -0.923. Then, multiply the resulting number by 6.606 to get the expected intranet-support ratio. This ratio, multiplied by the number of employees, results in a team size. (The equation explains 88% of the variability in intranet support ratios.)

As complex at this equation is, in practice, it breaks down simply to team sizes of 9–18 people as follows:

These numbers are likely on the small side because the teams often enlist agency support. In fact, all of this year’s winning companies used at least one outside agency, and Deutsche Vermögensberatung AG relied on as many as three. Small teams, with outside support, can get the job done. For example, this year just 8 core team members at both Commonwealth Care Alliance and Keysight Technologies created winning designs. On the other hand, Johnson & Johnson had 34 members in the core team, which is not that huge given that the organization has 135K employees.

We do not recommend having very small intranet teams. Teams may need more people depending on the circumstances, including the technology’s flexibility, power, ease of use and the team’s familiarity with it.

These numbers are simply a suggested minimum team size.

Majority of This Year’s Winners from US

It’s not clear how the COVID-19 pandemic affected this year’s contest entries since different countries struggled most with COVID-19 at different times. Asia and Europe were hit hard with virus before the US. This variability might have affected each region’s number and quality of designs. With that in mind, we adjusted this year’s due date for contest entries to accommodate the shifting nature of organizations’ pandemic challenges. Despite such a difficult year, it was heartening to review so many good designs from around the world.

Of the 10 winning teams, seven hail from the US, which has always had a strong presence, supplying almost half (102 out of 210) of the total winners since the contest began in 2001. This year’s US winners include:

• Baker Hughes (US), a leading energy-technology company
• Commonwealth Care Alliance, Inc. (US), a not-for-profit, community-based healthcare organization
• ConocoPhillips (US), one of the world’s largest independent energy- exploration-and-production (E&P) companies
• Johnson & Johnson (US), the world’s largest and most broadly based healthcare company
• Keysight Technologies, Inc. (US), is the world's leading electronic-measurement company
• VMware, Inc. (US), a publicly traded software company that provides cloud computing, app modernization, networking, security, and digital workspace and virtualization software and services
• The World Bank (US), a unique global partnership with 189 countries, fighting poverty worldwide through sustainable solutions

China supplied its first winning entry with Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd., the flag carrier of Hong Kong, possibly an indication of the ever-growing strength of the Chinese economy. Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd is one of the world’s largest international airlines with scheduled passenger and cargo services to more than 190 destinations in more than 60 countries.

The other two non-US winners were from Germany and Italy, which have had 9 and 5 total wins, respectively, in the history of the contest. These winners are:

• Deutsche Vermögensberatung AG (DVAG), Germany’s largest financial consultancy
• Snam S.p.A. (Italy), one of the world’s leading energy-infrastructure operators

Conclusion

Intranets teams of 2021 were small but, amidst unimaginable challenges, produced their designs effectively and quickly. Outside consultants were a great help on projects, doing everything from development to user research. The finance, technology, and utilities industries continue to lead in creating intranets that enhance productivity, communication, and collaboration in the digital workplace. And, amidst many obstacles, pain, and stress the pandemic created, winning intranet teams were able to do their part, helping to keep employees apprised and the world spinning.

Note about the contest: Our Intranet Design Annual has been published in early January for the past 20 years. This year, however, we moved the deadline for contest submissions out by a few months to accommodate teams in getting their entries together. This delayed submission deadline pushed our report writing out also — thus the April publication date. We are working on the schedule for the 2022 contest. Please check this call for entries page for updates for the entry deadline.