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the Free CMSWire NewsletterIn my last post, I spent some time giving advice on how to get SharePoint right the first time at your organization. In this post, I want to roll up my sleeves and dig in to the details on how to get SharePoint right the first time and step you all through the kinds of activities you need to do to adhere to the six things we discussed in the last post.
To be successful with SharePoint the first time, you need to address the following mix of strategic and tactical concerns.
- Raise awareness that SharePoint is an enterprise platform requiring enterprise governance
- Create a cross-functional governance body
- User segmentation
- Use case development
- Triage
- Process mapping
- Capabilities mapping
- Training and communication
Some of these I’ve written about at length elsewhere, some will be net new. But by pulling them into one post, I hope to provide you all with a practical guide to what you’re getting into if you’re committed to being successful with SharePoint.
Let's dig in to each of these in more detail.
1. Raise awareness that SharePoint is an enterprise platform requiring enterprise governance
This one is the foundation for getting SharePoint right at an organization — without it, you might as well pack up and go home. I haven't seen a large-scale SharePoint implementation be successful over the long haul that wasn't approached as an enterprise platform with enterprise governance needs.
Unfortunately, there's no easy way to do this, because how you go about making it happen will depend largely on the culture of your organization, and the culture of each organization is different.
At some organizations, a top down approach is the way to go, so you’ll have to gain support from executives with a stake in SharePoint's success before socializing the effort out to the organization. At other organizations, executives won't get fully behind an initiative until they see some evidence of broad based support for it, so you’ll need to build support from the ground up.
However, all things being equal, I find that beginning from a grass roots effort works best at most organizations. If you can get a base of support from key stakeholders, it makes it much more likely that the executives you need on board will agree to support you. It also gives you a chance to vet your ideas with folks before you air them in front of your execs.
2. Create a cross-functional governance body
This one is related to the first — so much so that I often tackle them at the same time. I find that they tend to work together to generate the support needed for SharePoint to be treated as an enterprise platform, with all the governance that it requires.
In almost all cases, this is a grass roots effort. I can count on one hand the number of times that I've seen an organization birth one of these cross-functional bodies fully formed by executive fiat.
More typical is for the body to form from the ground up, out of a group of concerned stakeholders, all of whom have a vested interest in SharePoint succeeding at the organization.
No matter how it forms, however, such a governance body needs a couple of things to be successful.
- IT, compliance, and line-of-business participation. Having coverage from all three is critical to making this governance body truly cross-functional. It allows the body to balance business operational concerns, IT operational concerns and the legal requirements of the organization when structuring the SharePoint implementation.
- Influence or authority (or both). Depending on whether you took a top-down or bottom-up approach to building the governance body, you'll likely start with a certain amount of one or the other…although don't underestimate the importance of both to your success or the difficulty of acquiring them.
3. User segmentation
At this point, we take a tactical turn and broach the first of the implementation focused activities you need to accomplish to make SharePoint a success at your organization: user segmentation.
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