Need management involvement everywhere

In case it isn't obvious, in a post on making good corporate intranets, Gerry McGovern tells us that senior management engagement is critical. The intranet gets serious: Part 1

The surest sign that an intranet will fail happens when senior management is disengaged. It's easy to get senior managers to make broad, meaningless statements about the importance of the intranet. But do they use it? Do they read it every morning? There is no better way to get staff to engage with the intranet than for them to know that their managers are engaged.

Whether you are doing web design, project management, knowledge management or even selling your latest widgets, it is important to have buy-in from management to take the project full-scale.

In a twist on this, even if management have given the go-ahead to a project, having more explicit approval from them is important too. For example, we found that getting approval for project plans (and goals) to be an important step in moving the project forward, particularly in terms of building momentum for the project and work detailed in the current plans. Without this step, it seems that teams flounder in the general direction of project completion without ever really getting there.