Scenario

Avi Yogi just joined the communication department at the Denver office of RandomCorp, a global technology conglomerate. At RandomCorp, Avi will be leading a three-person team of communication specialists. The primary task of Avi’s team is to disseminate information from different departments at RandomCorp like HR, Product development, Marketing and Sales etc. to all employees at the Denver location through the Corporate intranet and print newsletters. Additionally, the department also plans and organizes corporate and community outreach events.

Prior to Avi’s arrival, an off-site manager located at the San Francisco Office led the team. A quarterly performance review of the team identified quite a few problems. This was attributed to lax supervision of the team owing to the off-site location of the manager. It was decided that a manager needs to be hired at the Denver location who would be able to provide day-to-day supervision and real-time feedback to the members of the team. When Avi joined the team, he undertook a review process of the work produced by the department in the past year to gain a better understanding of the problems facing his team. Some of the problems he identified were:

· The web pages published on the intranet had: either too much content where the end-user would be lost or would find it hard to locate relevant information; or too little content where the user would have to search for additional information on his own.

· Equal emphasis was placed on information of a routine nature (daily announcement of power outages) and information about key accomplishments of a specific department (a successful product launch)

· Inconsistent page layouts for web pages containing similar information

One of the key problems identified by Avi was that his team while competent in producing print based newsletters and news releases, had still not adapted to the way of presenting information on the intranet and utilizing its ability to foster cross organizational communication.

Avi wants to make some changes in the department and make a good impression on the corporate management before his first performance review due in three months. He wants to train his team in the best practices of information design for the internet/intranet.

Will you help him?

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