The Website Project: The Trojan Horse of Organisational Transformation
A new website project can transform your organisation when done well. However, more often than not, it is a sneaky transformation—a Trojan Horse.
The Trojan horse comes from the legend of Troy—an ancient city with impenetrable walls. The Trojans were tricked into bringing the wooden horse containing Greek soldiers into their city, where the soldiers emerged and opened the gates, allowing the Greek army to conquer Troy.
A website project is a Trojan horse that smuggles digital transformation into the organisation without stakeholders realising the journey they've embarked on. I like it—it's transformation that slips past stakeholders' defences.
From my experience, digital transformation projects can be a little too bureaucratic, a bit boring and feel disconnected from staff’s day-to-day. However, transformation is a nice word, even though it doesn’t feel practical, tangible, or achievable at times.
A website mitigates many of these challenges. It’s tangible, practical, exciting, and staff will see and hopefully feel the project’s impact. The process of a new website involves putting a lot of digital transformation practices into action. Transformation in disguise!
Here are ways in which we’ve observed how a new website has smuggled digital transformation into our clients’ organisations.
Establishing responsibility for sections of the site
Trojan transformation talents: Cross-department collaboration
About 70% of the website projects I’ve worked on have staff regularly updating content or posting low-traffic blog articles, while core pages like the home or about page remain unchanged for years. Pages with significant traffic and impact on the organisation.
There’s a reason for this. The responsibility for these core pages is either unclear or unrelated to the day-to-day workers. Changing the home page may draw the ire of a stakeholder in another department. Individuals may not feel they have the authority or permission to make a change on a core page, even if it were obvious or simple change.
A key part of starting a website is establishing responsibility for sections of the site to stakeholders within the organisation. Who is responsible for the content’s accuracy and freshness, and who updates it? If you prefer, there are more sophisticated stakeholder matrices like RASCI or DACI.
Like the Greek soldiers hidden in the wooden horse, transformation champions will emerge from within departments when given ownership and responsibility.
With stakeholders identified and responsibilities assigned, the next step of assessing the website’s Information Architecture can proceed smoothly.
Restructuring the site informed by data and user behaviour
Trojan transformation talents: Data-driven decision making and user-centric thinking
A key part of a website project is assessing the existing structure, pages, and flow (Information Architecture). Does the current structure reflect how a customer should view the organisation or is it a replica of the internal organisational structure?
From our experience, a lot of larger organisations struggle to structure a website in a user-centric way. It’s hard for them to think outside their organisational structure or navigate the stakeholders required to make the change.
Enter data. Most websites have Google Analytics tracking pageviews, engagement rate, and page timings at a minimum. Pageviews isn’t the best metric, but if we’re getting 10s of pageviews a year, the page is worth culling.
Data-driven decision making is the horse that enables you to slip through the stakeholders’ defences (or defensiveness). When you demonstrate the existing structure’s problems and how your idea solves them, they will be more open to change.
Nobody wants to recreate 100 pages that saw no pageviews, nor do stakeholders want their site parts to go unnoticed. It’s important to tell the story.
Use the data to tell the story of the volume of users visiting your site and where they are going within it.
Less but better is key for a great website. Analytics will show you don’t need to say everything nor need a page for every little thing.
Many websites have a lot of shallow content. It’s great to know you do XYZ, but I’d like more information about how, when, how much, and what happens when… You get the idea.
Combine low content and low performance pages. Ensure relevant information is in a location that makes sense to the user. You don’t need a Corporate Partnerships page for a single paragraph—that could go elsewhere. Either scrap it, merge it or make it worthwhile.
Outline the new homepage
Trojan transformation talents: message clarification and organisational prioritisation
The hardest page to navigate with stakeholders is the homepage—it can feel like staring up at Troy’s impenetrable wall; an impossible task. Everyone wants everything on the homepage (and in the navigation bar). The simple truth is that it can’t be.
Your homepage needs to be exceptionally clear to ensure a high-performing website. What is the top priority to communicate to a new visitor?
Too many sites have conflicting options on their home page. It’s like stepping into a room and six people start yelling at you at the same time. It’s overwhelming.
Your homepage should outline who you are and your value proposition concisely. Reworking it is a great litmus test to check if an organisation knows its identity and the value it provides to customers/supporters.
The homepage discussion forces stakeholders/leadership to agree on unified priorities. Stakeholders collaborating on the homepage don’t realise they are defining and clarifying their message and organisational priorities, like the Trojans admiring their new horse.
Identify legacy platforms and streamlining processes
Trojan transformation talents: business analysis, technology rationalisation, process optimisation
Websites without intentional product management or oversight tend to be laced with mid-project surprises (a Trojan horse within a Trojan horse?).
We’ve seen a lot. Different form tools for different pages—each using a different Zapier account. Unmaintained integrations with no staff knowing how it works. Staff maintaining public pages as an intranet because they didn’t know how to use the existing intranet, or using it to upload large files to use as document transfer. A new website launch broke all the images in our clients’ email signatures.
Once inside the organisational gates, the website project exposes the need for technology rationalisation and process optimisation.
Yes, we can automate responses from this form into the CRM. Yes, you no longer need to manually enter all the data. Yes, we can add an automated approval flow. No, we don’t need another form tool.
Identifying legacy platforms and optimising processes can enlighten stakeholders. They learn firsthand the benefits of digital transformation and that it doesn’t need to be big or complicated.
Improving the editing and management experience for stakeholders is often missed in website projects. Improving customer experience is usually the priority—and rightly so. However, we’ve learned that a key to our success is improving the experience for staff and stakeholders. It is through working with stakeholders and discovering surprises that you have the opportunity to create delightful and welcomed transformation.
Successfully running a technology project
Trojan transformation talents: organisational confidence in delivering a technology project
Most organisations do not regularly run large technology projects. As a result, they have low confidence in their delivery ability.
Additionally, many staff are dealing with the fallout of a poorly executed past technology project. These issues undermine organisation confidence and fuel the transformation cynics.
For successful transformation, you need the momentum and confidence gained from delivering technology projects—and a website is generally an easy one.
A website project has stages and should have a defined process. They are typically on the outer edge of an organisation’s technology sphere. They require less complex integrations than a CRM replacement and have less complex stakeholder requirements.
We recommend working on a website with an external partner. You need someone experienced to guide you. Many of the problems an organisation is trying to solve have already been solved. We’ve picked up several website projects that a client initiated alone but got stuck with.
Delivering and exceeding stakeholder expectations will build organisational confidence, create transformation champions, and quiet the cynics (they won’t completely go away).
With the website project delivered, the organisation’s gates are permanently opened to digital thinking, the resistance within conquered.
Closing thoughts
Website projects are the perfect Trojan horse for driving organisational transformation. By smuggling in change under the guise of a new digital presence, leaders can enact meaningful, lasting change without encountering the typical resistance.
From defining ownership and responsibilities to restructuring based on data, streamlining legacy processes, and building confidence in technology delivery—the website project becomes a catalyst for transformation in disguise.
So the next time your organisation embarks on a website overhaul, see it not just as a digital update, but as an opportunity to fundamentally reshape your culture, processes, and technology capabilities. Embrace the Trojan horse and let the transformation begin.
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This article was original published for beech.agency
