The short-sighted scope of the whole project is enough to give any web designer with any concept of scalability, usability or coherence the heebie-jeebies.

Management at both companies have presumably been aware of the possibility of a merger for a number of months, if not years. However, no contingency plan was made to create and publish a joint corporate intranet. I find this lack of planning astonishing.

The hurriedly put together project, given to me a few weeks ago, goes something like this:

1. Create a new intranet to be made live on Day 1 of merger.

After much amazed discussion, a couple of bemused meetings and a desperate search through James Robertson's excellent Sixteen steps to a renewed corporate intranet to see if the process can possible by compressed into the space of a week, this was revised to:

1. Create a mini intranet which will sit on top of the current intranet from Day1 of the merger. This mini intranet will contain news items and links relevant to the merger. To access existing content users from both companies will be required to click a link to go to their respective intranret sites, which will remain unchanged in both form and function. Please note there is no branding available for the new site. Please also note that we currently have no content for the site. Please look at the BBc's site for inspiration.

Apart from the shock of the new, the lack of information users will be expecting, the forced click-through to their existing intranet site and the almost impossible task of creating a site as busy and content-rich as the BBC's with no branding, content or guidelines of any sort, my real worry was that if this is their approach to creating a couple of temporary pages what would their strategy be for building a huge and complex corporate intranet.

2. The new site wil be called "Meg" and the "voice" of the site will be a character called Meg's. We do not have any branding or assets for the Meg character.

Words fail me. This cycle was repeated throughout the high-speed development phase, with the dark and sinister "corporate communications" department regularly springing apparently full-formed but half-realised marketing gimmicks on me.

The last few weeks felt completely absurd, like I was trapped in a real-life Catch-22 meets Kafka nightmare. The lack of any foresight, planning or real understanding of the function of a corporate intranet and the way it's users behave and interact with it has completely astounded me. However, I have done my best with the limited resources available and you can see an early working example here.

In the meantime, Day 1 approaches...