Case study · NICE
Rebuilding NICE's intranet
Digital delivery, content, and user research at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).
01The problem
NICE had run its intranet on the same platform for fifteen years, and the platform was heading out of support. Content had grown faster than anyone could manage it. Staff relied on it daily and trusted it less every year.
When we surveyed staff during discovery, more than 90% said they used the intranet at least two or three times a week. This was a critical tool in bad shape, not a neglected one.
A supplier, Civica, ran the discovery phase. They did the user research and design work, then came off the project before the build. The internal communications team took the build in-house, and I led that delivery as a product owner.
02What I did
The research came first. I recruited participants through staff blogs and emails, and around one in six of the whole organisation answered a forty-question survey inside a week. Over half volunteered for follow-up sessions, and what they told us became the user stories and priorities the build ran on.
Then the estate. Over 800 articles, nearly 1,500 documents, and around 270 pages went through a keep, archive, or remove review, with content owners responsible for justifying what moved. Only what earned its place made it across, and more than 200 outdated pages were retired. Anything failing accessibility standards was excluded outright.
I set up the SharePoint site structure myself: the parent site, every site beneath it, permissions, pages, web parts, and navigation. The build ran as eleven fortnightly sprints against a backlog in Azure DevOps, working to Agile principles, with a NICE project manager supporting. We launched NICE Space on 16 October 2023, five months after the first sprint.
One correction along the way. Discovery found business-critical information buried in staff blogs, so we launched with an approval step for new posts. Staff hated it. I removed it, wrote a plain definition of what a blog is, and let people publish instantly.
After launch I built the governance to keep the site healthy: a content framework meeting Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards, templates for editors, and a community of more than a hundred content producers, whose meetings I chair.
03The results
Site visits rose 65% against the old platform. Support requests fell by around 80%. A trained editor can now build a page in under an hour; on the old platform it could take five.
The work has not stopped. In 2025 I audited the site against WCAG 2.2 myself, eleven pages tested against up to 46 checks each, and fed the findings into the next phase. I now lead an improvement programme which aims to enhance information retrieval and platform functionality for all users. I own the backlog, write the user stories, and set the priorities.