With its new Intranet, Drummondville is transforming the way it communicates organizational information. Its employees are offered a tool that serves as a central point for keeping abreast of the processes and achievements of the various municipal departments. Nexus worked with the in-house development team to create an easy-to-use tool that allows employees to interact with each other like never before.

The City of Drummondville has nearly 500 employees working in 14 departments (plus their divisions) and 12 establishments, providing municipal administration and citizen services. Drummondville’s population is growing steadily, and now ranks 14th among Quebec’s most populous cities, with over 83,000 inhabitants.

Business goals

The City’s need for sharing information (documentation, news, events, work processes) was constantly increasing, and managing e-mails had become a tedious task.

• With difficult email management, there was no unified information platform for employees to exchange information.
• Communications involving all employees were carried all by e-mail.
• Most of their staff did not have access to a fixed workstation (with computer and e-mail address). It was therefore necessary to have a solution that facilitated internal communication and enabled the sharing and distribution of information outside the city’s network.

In this context, and considering that the City was already using Office 365, a SharePoint intranet was the right tool to deploy.

Proposed solution

After reviewing the client’s business challenges, context and technical requirements, Nexus’ M365 experts were able to propose an architecture of five SharePoint sites, each with a well-defined vocation. This made it easier for the City’s production team to structure information, and generate a user experience based on the reality of Drummondville’s employees.

The City’s intranet has 4 main communication spaces, depending on the type of message and its origin. This makes the purpose of the communication clearer from the employee’s point of view.

To stimulate employee engagement with the new communications platform, Nexus implemented a series of features, such as :

• Use of a digital form to register for the City’s various contests
• A personalized search to identify employees according to their respective roles and tasks
• Dynamic display of employee birthdays directly on the home page.

Nexus was our partner of choice for this project. The development of the intranet has had a number of positive spin-offs for the City, particularly in terms of efficiency, communication, document management and reinforcement of the organizational identity. We are very pleased to have benefited from Nexus’ expertise in guiding and supporting us throughout the various phases of the project. As well as being highly competent in their field, the Nexus team members were able to communicate information effectively and in layman’s terms, making it easier for us to understand the more technical sections. They created a working climate conducive to innovation, and the atmosphere at our meetings was always pleasant. It was a real pleasure to work with them.

Véronique Leroux, Project Manager | Information Technology Department

Adoption

Right from the start of the project, key actions were put in place to encourage adoption:

• Define the main sponsor of the project, as well as personally engage the managers of the various departments by proactively training them on the project, to fully understand the changes to be varnished and prepare the ground.
• Nexus provided 2 training sessions for super-users, giving them an expert to support them in learning best practices in content creation and to better engage them.
• Nexus also provided 1 training session for the Information Technology (IT) department, to ensure understanding of the various configurations and facilitate system maintenance over time.
• Nexus supported the City of Drummondville in the creation of a Governance and Accountability Plan (GAAP) to develop a clear plan for maintaining the solution and resolving problem situations as required.
• Nexus advised the implementation team on how to communicate with employees to facilitate change management.
• Through change management coaching, Nexus provided the tools to help the adoption process for departments more resistant to change. Whether these risks were potential or real, action was taken to improve the message about why Drummondville was getting a modern intranet, and what would change in their lives.
• Ongoing support is now offered, to ensure the solution’s longevity and to accompany users in their adoption.

Impact on the organization and its people

• Significant reduction in internal e-mails
• Fewer emails sent to internal communications team
• Easy content creation thanks to an intuitive platform
• Centralized communications by type & origin (corporate, city employee community, human resources, IT)
• Rapid identification of employees through hybrid search
• Increased employee engagement across the employee lifecycle
• Enhanced user experience over time thanks to a scalable platform
• Successful adoption thanks to change management activities and user training.

Project team

• Joel Vézina, M365 Expert
• Lyamine Benkhadra, M365 Developer
• Alicia Villeneuve, Agile Project Manager
• Alexandra Lévy, Project Delivery Manager