7,000 people work for the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, improving the lives of 4.5 million Belgians. To communicate between them, there is the intranet, which we helped reinvent by developing the platform.
If you're a French speaker in Wallonia or Brussels, like 4.5 million Belgians, the FWB is directly involved in your life. Because you are one of its 100,000 teachers. You have a child in compulsory education. You're going to see a film in the cinema or an exhibition in one of the FWB's 82 museums.
You're one of the 650,000 members of a sports club. You watch a program on RTBF... The FWB also manages fundamental services such as youth aid (more than 40,000 young people in care), scientific research and houses of justice.
Your mission,
if you accept it…
- Etnic, the FWB's IT partner: "The FWB is made up of 7,000 employees who have very different profiles and needs and who have been using one tool for many years.”.
- Us : “We're going to work in co-creation with the teams to take into account the specificities of each one.”.
Can you imagine the coordination it takes to put such a range of skills and people to music? The first thing we learned during our assignments was that the various departments of a large company need to communicate smoothly. And we've made internal communication tools one of our specialties! First step: switch from JAVA to PHP and Drupal, much more attractive and less costly to implement and maintain.
It's all in the method...
To achieve such a change, we had to be methodical. Meet, talk, understand and, as a sine qua non, co-create with Etnic. Take into account the range of professions, their specificities and the complexity of the organization. It's not easy, but it can be done!
Resistance to change was a real barrier, as was the scale of the organization. We had to define a technical and organizational strategy impacting thousands of workers, with a single priority: to simplify the user experience and make it as engaging as possible.
And to make this new tool live and evolve, assign roles and train editors, contributors and managers.
The technical constraint wasn't an issue for us. Because switching from JAVA to Drupal opened the doors to a new world: a bespoke universe, more engaging, faster to develop and easier to maintain.
... and in the phasing.
The scale of the project called for a phased approach, so that we could proceed smoothly. With the gradual involvement of users and project managers, and extensive testing.
This transitional period enabled us to refine the specifications and level of ambition for each feature, define a matrix of roles and responsibilities, identify sponsors and set up governance principles adapted to this type of project, and organize knowledge transfer.
A first phase led to the opening of the site to 80 contributors and training for content managers as well as the Communications Department. A second phase involved putting the intranet site online and opening it to 7,000 employees.
