The Brittle Raccornel

In setups with this shape, the homepage has stopped being an entrance and become a courtesy visit before the real route begins. Role-blind content weakens take-up, poor self-service teaches escalation, and buried tasks turn bookmarks into infrastructure. The answer exists, but everyone trusts the colleague who pinned it two reorganisations ago.

Left alone, this pattern keeps 15–25% of tickets sitting with the desk that guided self-service should have absorbed, while a further 25–40% of routine task completion stays outside the portal. That is not traffic; it is a parallel support culture with a bookmarks bar.

Six months in, each audience lands somewhere that looks built for their working day rather than for an org chart nobody believes. Common IT requests stop starting with a Teams plea, and the service desk stops being the organisation's memory palace.

This does not need to become a year-long rebuild: the lead move is 4 to 6 weeks, sits in the mid-twenties, and is specific about needing Employee Center Pro. The wider plan has 9 moves; take the lead move, take a few, or use the whole map.