Requirements Gathering - We developed, categorized, and ranked a list of 80 business requirements to help us select an appropriate product to replace our website.

Product Search - I helped lead the product search, which largely included Intranet and wiki products. We made reference phone calls to customers of the three finalists, and received tutorials via 'webinars' to assess product functionality and usability. Our team scored the products according to our business requirements, and we selected SamePage, an enterprise wiki by Etouch.

Content Inventory - Because of the haphazard file structure of the existing site, there was no easy or automated way to inventory our existing pages. I therefore set up a system for manually creating an inventory using Excel. We systematically clicked through all the links on our website and documented each page's name and URL in a hierarchical manner on a spreadsheet; we thus created a visual representation of our website that was at least six levels deep. In this way we were able to get a handle on our content, and so we were in a better position to plan and allocate resources. We found that the site has over 4,000 pages.

Consultant Search - We needed some direction and assistance with our content reorganization, rewriting, and reformatting. We interviewed a number of knowledge management, website design, and information architecture practitioners; we ultimately chose to work with Project Performance Corporation (PPC), who impressed us with their modular and proven approach to taxonomy design.

Taxonomy Design - Our team worked with PPC's Zach Wahl, a recognized 'taxonomy guru,' and his colleague Jill Tabuchi to devise a new taxonomy for our site. They first educated a representative user group on taxonomy principles and then led the group through intensive multi-day design workshops. While the prior website had been organized solely alphabetically, by the end of the workshops the users had completed the 1st and 2nd levels of a subject-based taxonomy. I was able to facilitate subsequent workshops to expand the taxonomy to the 3rd level, where needed. I also subsequently provided training on taxonomy basics to other departments within VSAC who were interested in reorganizing the categorization of their own information.

Writing for the Web - PPC provided a 1-day 'Writing for the Web' workshop to a group of content editors; the editors learned to effectively break up and organize content at the page level to allow for faster comprehension. I later modified this presentation and provided it to an expanded group of content editors and supervisors in my department.

Content Template Creation - Because a consistent look and feel across the site was very importnat to us, we worked with a designer at PPC to create three levels of page templates: primary landing pages, secondary landing pages, and content pages.

Content 'Migration' into Wiki - After training an initial group of SME content managers on using SamePage, we began the work of moving the pages into the wiki. We used the established taxonomy as a guide, and made judgement calls as necessary. This activity was scheduled around the call center employees' other work, and I was responsible for working directly with the department scheduler to obtain necessary daily resources. Through this migration phase, my role was to maintain spreadsheets to track of our progress, help with technical troubleshooting, inform supervisors and all members of the department of our progress, help keep morale high, and help actually move the content into the wiki.

Load & User Testing - While load testing to ensure the wiki could withstand heavy use by up to 60 people at a time, we incorporated user-testing tasks. We asked users to perform certain tasks and find specific information in the wiki, and record places where they ran into problems. This helped us to fix some taxonomy issues.

User Training - I trained 80 users, from the Customer Relations department as well as other departments, how to use the wiki's features to locate information and save preferences.