Department of Conservation

Intranet Personas

About the client

The Department of Conservation (DOC) promotes and actively manages the conservation of New Zealand’s natural and historic heritage. With close to 2,000 staff across the country, DOC’s activities range across more than 85 million hectares of land as well as marine reserves, islands and special mammal habitats.
DOC is a national body, with a national office in Wellington and 49 area offices organised into 12 conservancies that are spread across NZ.

The scenario

DOC’s intranet is a key source of information for staff, with over 11,000 pages of content designed to support the delivery of conservation work across NZ.
In early 2011, DOC recognised that in order for the intranet to support staff and connect them with the information needed to do their work they needed to support the 100 specialist content writers in becoming more in tune with the staff they were writing for.
As part of the intranet redevelopment project, DOC asked Optimal Usability to develop a set of staff personas.

“Optimal has a long history of working with DOC on our intranet and website. We recently asked Ruth and Julie to help us to develop a set of personas to be used by the intranet and internal communication teams. They were quick to understand our requirements and available and willing (!) to kick off and deliver the project within 2 weeks of making contact with them. It’s great to work with a team who willingly share their knowledge and expertise and who dealt with a large number of our staff at all levels of the organisation in such an engaging and professional manner. The personas were delivered on time and to budget and we are delighted with the results.”

Pamela Minnoch, Intranet Team, – Department of Conservation, Te Papa Atawhai

Our approach

We worked collaboratively with the DOC project team to find out more about what motivates staff, how they carry out their work, and what their intranet use, needs and wants are. This involved:

• Gaining an understanding of business objectives and desires by interviewing key staff.
• Analysing strategy and survey documentation.
• Facilitating workshops with key stakeholders within DOC to gain insight into their view of the organisation, and their perspectives of key staff user groups and what’s important to them.
• Interviewing staff from around the country to gain insight into how they use the intranet, and their attitudes and motivations towards it.
• Facilitating an analysis workshop where we collaboratively developed five key staff types, and determined the goals, motivations and behaviours that made them different from one another.
• Writing the story of each key staff type – the skeleton personas – and validating these with DOC staff.
• Developing guidelines for writing for each persona.

Outcomes

Optimal Usability helped DOC to:

• Get a better understanding of what staff want from the intranet, and how to communicate with them.
• Bring staff closer to the content writers by putting a face, name and story to five key staff types.