CLIENT STORIES
When One Person Pushes Open a Very Large Door
This team was formed by the “magic” of great interplay, or as the team describes it; that special combination of right brain and left brain.
It began, as many engagements do, with one person doing excellent work. Anne Claire Siegert Morgan, a content strategist, was embedded at a global pharmaceutical company in a ServiceNow-focused role, and she was largely working independently of her team.
But her work was noticed.
When the company began exploring a full intranet overhaul, someone on the client side said, “Anne Claire knows what she is doing. Let’s give RGP a shot.”
“That shot became a proposal. The proposal became a win. And what followed was over a year of some of the most complex, cross-functional consulting work the team had done together.”
The company’s employee satisfaction scores around their intranet were, in a word, poor. People couldn’t locate the documents, templates, or tools they needed to do their jobs. They couldn’t distinguish between different systems; many employees didn’t realize that Workday and ServiceNow were entirely separate platforms; they just knew things were hard to find.
The business impact of this experience is easy to underestimate. Multiply even a few minutes of wasted searching per employee across tens of thousands of people and the productivity loss becomes significant. Then layer in the softer cost: employees logging into a clunky, outdated system every morning who don’t feel proud of where they work.
A great intranet isn’t a nice-to-have. For a company of this size, it’s critical infrastructure.
What made this engagement special was the deliberate way the RGP team was assembled. Two practice leads—Danielle Custalow and Terry Peters, both based in Richmond and longtime collaborators (they’ve been working together on intranet projects since 2009)—brought together complementary capabilities across the project’s phases.
Terry’s team led the creative and strategic side: UX, design, content strategy, and user research. Danielle’s team handled the technical ecosystem: architecture, business analysis, and project management. As Terry described it, the magic was in the interplay, “UX plus experience platforms, right brain, left brain”
Not everything was smooth. The team had to deliver a recommendation the client didn’t initially want to hear: the platform they’d been hoping to use wasn’t the right choice.
RGP made the call anyway, stood behind it, and ultimately the client stood behind RGP. It’s a moment the team points to with real pride; a demonstration of what they call “veracity,” the commitment to tell the truth even when it’s uncomfortable.
The content migration effort was another test. The team had to work directly with 135 different stakeholders across the organization, training them on SharePoint, setting governance expectations, holding office hours, and, in Danielle’s words, “herding that many cats.” It was painstaking, manual work, and it was essential.
Then there was another large global consulting firm. They had a deep relationship with the company and ultimately won the development contract that RGP had also pursued.
Rather than treating it as a loss to dwell on, the RGP team responded with professionalism and an open hand. The firm’s global lead for the relationship reached out to Danielle directly, wanting to ensure there were no hard feelings. There weren’t.
What followed surprised everyone: the two firms worked so seamlessly together—business analysts partnering closely, teams collaborating openly—that during one retrospective the client actually joked there was too much mutual praise happening. As Danielle put it, “I don’t know if it’s because the project itself was so intense that we united just to make it happen, like two teams who needed each other.”
The new intranet, featuring AI-powered search as a centerpiece, a clean information architecture, and a unified gateway to tools like Workday and ServiceNow, went live in time for the company’s annual employee survey. The score for the intranet rose by approximately 18 points.
That outcome mattered…. but what came next mattered just as much.
Because the RGP team had worked across departments, touching finance, legal, HR, operations, public affairs, they had built relationships across the entire organization. Those relationships didn’t disappear when the project wrapped. A smaller team stayed on through early the following year to support continuous improvement and governance.
When that work concluded, the goodwill the team had generated led directly to new engagements: an HR content strategy project, a marketing operations rollout, training support, and now a seat at the table for a potential public website overhaul.
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