Non-Profit Intranet Design and Build
The Organization: Vancouver Island Regional Library (VIRL) is the fourth largest library system in British Columbia. VIRL serves over 430,000 people on Vancouver Island, Haida Gwaii and the Central Coast through 39 branch libraries, an eLibrary and a books by mail service. Administrative offices are located in Nanaimo. VIRL was the second regional library in North America, opening its doors in 1936 as the Vancouver Island Union Library.
The Challenge: With branches spread out across large distances, and staff working multiple shifts, a unifying “Staff Intranet” is a key component of VIRL’s business model. The previous intranet was built in a web-development tool and was used extensively to store procedures, forms, templates, and the like. However, the site could only be modified by a small set of trained individuals, the search feature never works, and the technology used was aging.
The Approach: Lightlever won a competitive bid process in January 2015, and by June a fully functional SharePoint-based staff intranet was complete. Lightlever took a highly collaborative approach to this project, involving a design committee, a steering committee, and a key technical contact, to ensure the uptake was smooth and the site can be maintained independently by VIRL staff. This project was very well planned, and all key milestones were met, including infrastructure (hosted at Sherweb.com), Intranet design, build, file migration, training, and people change management. Key innovations in this collaborative process included heavier use of SharePoint Wikis, rapid collaborative design, cost-effective training solutions, and good use of Lightlever’s file migration tools and templates.
Site Overview Video: