Step 8: Obtain Approval for GUI and Start Developing
The GUI approval can take weeks or months to arrive. This is because it is the only really concrete stage of your intranet development that can be approved by non-technical stakeholders. As such, many corporate communications and design department members will want to have their say. After this stage, these stakeholders will have to wait until the project is about 90% done before they will see anything else. So be prepared to receive a plethora of opinions from corporate communications team members who want to have their say about the design. Stick to your guns here and remember that you're building the site for its users.
While you can certainly have the technical teams and content aggregators working concurrently with the designer, they may reach a point where they can do no further work without the final design. This can result in team members sitting idle, causing cost overruns and other miscellaneous problems.