mspCircuit

Overview

For over 25 years, Manchester Science Parks (msp) has supported the growth of innovative companies across sectors such as ICT, biotechnology, industrial technologies and digital media.

They offer quality business accommodation to innovative, knowledge based companies. On top of this they provide first rate business development support including seminars, networking events, access to academic resources and a free PR service. They also provide introductions to programmes, people and funding in order to help companies grow and to sustain that growth.

Key Problems

Manchester Science Park already had an intra-net in place; however, they wanted to encourage more tenants to use it and to make it easier for its staff to update.

The main roles the intra-net performed were

A place to post messages for other tenants to respond to
A resource to find out about any known faults or maintenance work in the building
Somewhere to report faults by the tenants
A list of current news which would be of interest to tenants
Room booking facility

Many of the above roles were less effective because of the under use of the intra-net. We felt in order to make the intra-net more effective we needed to tackle the following problems:

Make the intra-net easier to find
Make it easier to access information (especially if you didn't have a log-in)
Make it easy for your pc to remember your log-in so you didn't have to remember it
Try and make the intra-net a more attractive place to visit, or stumble across.
Make the features easier to access and use
Make it easier for Science Park staff to update and maintain

The Solution

The biggest problem we felt was making the intra-net easier to find. We had been msp tenants for quite a while and we didn't really remember the intra-nets domain name.

Intranet as Homepage

One solution that came to mind was to try and encourage tenants to make the intra-net their home page. In order to achieve this we surveyed the tenants with assistance from the msp marketing team. We discovered that almost 80% of tenants used Google as their homepage. In the same way firefox's default home page is Google with firefox branding we did the same with the msp intra-net. We took the google page layout and added the mspCircuit branding.

Limited the Need For Login

One other problem we had with the existing intra-net was the need to log in to see anything. The first page was just a log-in dialogue. Going through the intra-net it was obvious that most of the information was far from confidential. Most of the information wouldn't cause any problems if the whole world could see it.

We then identified the areas which required a log-in, and made everything else publicly viewable. This meant if you didn't know your password you could still keep up with maintenance alerts and news without the need to log-in.

Because the information was no-longer password protected we could pull much of it through to this new Google-like home page. We created 4 lists for News, Alerts, Events and Tweets. This 'all on homepage' approach makes it easy for people to stumble across information. Rather than treat the intra-net as a destination, as your homepage it just became the beginning of every journey.

Keep Users Logged In

Another issue was the need to log-in every time you went back to the old intra-net. To fix this we added a simple 'keep me logged in' tickbox. Once ticked, it would keep users logged in for up to six months.

Easy to Add a Message

One of the final features we added was the idea of a simple internal tweet system. Not actually linked to twitter this just allows users to tweet a short message internally for viewing by other tenants. Unlike the previously used (or unused) bulletin board, this system requires very little time to add a message, and it's instantly pulled through to the front page. Anyone who visits the home page will see the tweet quickly and can respond if they wish. Because all the messages are in the same place, very little interaction is needed to give the site a busy feeling.

iPhone App

Keeping tenants up-to-date on what's happening on-site doesn't stop when they leave their desks. The basic information of alerts, news, events and tweets which are on the front page of the intra-net were also made accessible in a simple iPhone app. This app pulls the data live from the website which means the msp Staff only need to add the information once and the app takes advantage of the same data. The app also allows users to log-in and tweet directly from their iPhone.

Room Booking and Fault Reporting System The Reception Staff Can Use

mspCircuit needs to be administrated by multiple staff, many of whom work on the reception desks around the science park. To make their life as easy as possible we made the administration of the room booking and fault management system as simple as possible. We based the interface elements for these features to be like Microsoft Outlook, a program many of the staff are already familiar with.

The result was a simple and intuitive interface which could be explained within a couple of minutes. The fault management was particularly effective because it actually flashes the taskbar block and pop-ups as a message to indicate when a fault has been reported. This allows the reception staff to leave the website open on this page and respond to fault reports almost immediately. Science park staff have 'key performance indicators' (kpi's) based on their fault response times so this proved very useful as it made their responses much more effective. The faults and updates are also recorded in a back-end database which the estates team can download monthly to use as their performance statistics for the month.

Screen Cast Training For Reception Staff

Training of staff in these new systems was also streamlined with a series of screen casts recorded by Duo. We simply walked-through how to use the room booking system for administrators so they could create, modify and delete room bookings as well as look after the fault reporting aspects of the intra-net.

The Result

mspCircuit has proven to be a successful platform on which msp has built their internal communications. It has doubled in its usage during 2010 serving well over eleven thousand page impressions a day, with over 200 unique visits a day.

Since its launch a number of additions have been made to the system including a messaging system which allows Jan Hilton (Innovation Services Manager) to keep all the company directors at msp up-to-date with business news in a professional and well laid out news bulletin. It has also been expanded to include the management of a new science park in Salford, and the facilities management of One Central Park, which msp took over in 2010. Because the system was built with the intention of expansion adding these extra sites was possible with very little extra cost.