The IPR Portal is open for business
March 12 marked a significant step for the replenishment organization at The Home Depot. Over 6 months of planning, development, construction, and socialization culminated with the launch of the IPR Portal, a new collaborative SharePoint presence for the organization. The most impactful tool to deploy to the organization in several years, the Portal will be a resource for every associate, new and seasoned, to simplify their activities and provide them with the information they need to support replenishment for the retail giant.
The Portal will resolve several concerns for IPR:
- Simplified new associate on boarding
- Centralization of reference and SOP materials
- Implementation of common practices among 20+ department teams
- A single resource to access common applications and reporting
- Archives for team workshops
- Training and Events management
The project began inauspiciously with a desire to redefine what "It's on SharePoint" means to the 250-person Inventory Planning and Replenishment organization. Project leads Jose Barratt and Stephen Hulsey, with leadership and guidance from me, engaged end users to determine they key elements that would result in user acceptance and a successful deployment.
Taking the feedback into account, a simple and elegant design was constructed for the Portal. Consisting of a clean landing page with prominent search functionality and high priority links, and supported by sub sites for Operational and Learning/Support content, the team achieved the objective of providing a easy-to-navigate, but robust, tool for the user community.
The Portal team has managed to generate significant enthusiasm among their target audience through several rounds of socialization. The team did this by introducing the tool at the management level, partnering on content and functionality decisions, migrating content, and turning over ownership for team sites to the teams themselves. As users become more familiar with the Portal, the team anticipates requests for additional functionality to further leverage the available tools in SharePoint.
Posted by Andre Torres at 3/16/2012 3:42 AM 
Categories: Problem Solving, Leadership
Tags: 2012 problem solving SharePoint collaboration project management web design SDLC
Categories: Problem Solving, Leadership
Tags: 2012 problem solving SharePoint collaboration project management web design SDLC
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