Background

Enhancing IT business communication

In modern organisations, effective communication between the IT department and the wider business is critical to operational success. However, many IT departments face challenges due to fragmented communication channels, inconsistent messaging, and a lack of clarity in how information flows across teams.

The projects objective was to streamline and simplify the myriad of existing communication channels, ensuring that messages are consistent, accessible, and relevant to all stakeholders.

Prior to this initiative, the IT department relied on a mix of emails, chat tools, intranet updates, team meetings, and ad-hoc announcements. While these channels were functional in isolation, their volume and lack of coordination often led to information overload, misunderstandings, and inefficiencies.

By consolidating and optimising these channels, the project sought to:

  1. Enhance Clarity – Reducing noise by centralising key updates and ensuring alignment in messaging.
  2. Boost Engagement – Creating more intuitive and user-friendly ways for the business to interact with IT.
  3. Improve Efficiency – Minimising redundant communication efforts and ensuring faster resolution of queries and issues.

This transformation required assessing the current state of IT communication, identifying pain points, and collaboratively designing a simplified, effective communication framework tailored to the organisation’s needs.

Skills

  • Service design
  • User research
  • UI/UX
  • SharePoint design and build

Deliverables

A revised service to enhance corporate communications across the business. This included;

  • Refreshed SharePoint templates
  • New information architecture
  • Creation of a portal to pull in child site updates
  • Revised Communication strategy

Outcomes

Articles views up by 400% with an increase of user engagement. As a result an increase of enquiries from the business due to the visibility of the work was achieved.

The higher engagement fostered meaningful discussions, allowing readers to gain diverse perspectives and insights on complex topics.

It also helped establish IT as thought leaders, boosting credibility and visibility across the business.

Research

To streamline IT communication, I created an empathy map to better understand how employees interact with the many existing channels. This map helped me capture user perspectives, combining feedback from surveys, interviews, and focus groups with an inventory of tools like emails, intranet updates, and chat platforms.

Employees shared what they see, hear, think, and feel when engaging with IT, highlighting pain points like confusion, overload, and inconsistency. The empathy map made it easier to identify key issues and focus on creating simpler, more user-friendly communication channels that meet the organisation’s needs.

Ideation

I pulled together a deck to present to the wider business with my research.

This included;

  • The types of communications we were sending out and where it was posted.
  • Who our users are (by establishing personas)
  • A deeper dive into the company intranet, with a breakdown of the information architecture and potential solutions
  • A refreshed set of wireframes to indicate changes to the structure of company intranet
  • A refreshed change to knowledgebase articles and a clear process of what needs to be posted where to avoid duplication and confusion.

Prototyping

I built a set of wireframes to prototype the user journey to help stakeholders understand the structure early on. This improves collaboration, ensuring everyone is aligned on the design concept. Wireframes also focus on user experience by mapping navigation and element placement, making it easier to identify and fix potential issues before development.

Implementation

The solution I delivered was an optimised SharePoint experience.

I redesigned existing IT sites to follow a revised structure which was simplified with a focus on delivering key news and updates. I also created two additional sites to improve key communication channels. One for application/software support and productivity help, and the other being a portal that collated key articles from across the portfolio of IT sites.

The portal also pulled in key onboarding information, so new starters had a ‘one-stop-shop’ for everything IT.

An additional feature I delivered was the ability to share updates using SharePoint. The existing process involved collating articles and links manually and creating an email in Outlook. Not only was this time consuming, but the emails often failed to meet accessibility standards. Now updates could be sent from the portal in minutes.

  • IT Portal

  • Connected Workplace microsite

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