Full RSS Feed
Receive
the Free CMSWire NewsletterLast month I presented a quick-start guide to the art of SharePoint success, a framework I’ve developed that aims to ensure that investments in SharePoint deliver measurable returns. The framework consists of four key elements: Governance, Strategy, Architecture and Transition, and over the next few months I’ll be presenting a series of articles examining each of these elements in more detail. But I am beginning this month with a look at the top 10 reasons why SharePoint projects fail; these are some of the issues that my framework addresses.
The most common causes of SharePoint failure in my experience are:
- Politics
- Not knowing what SharePoint is
- Lack of information and knowledge management skills
- Vision, the business case and measuring success
- Executive support
- User adoption
- Individual choices derail SharePoint initiatives
- Information management
- Defining requirements
- Technical skills
The following sections discuss each of these challenges.
1. Politics
Politics is the biggest barrier to SharePoint success.
If you’re thinking, “Not in my case,” then you’re the most at risk! There are a number of reasons why SharePoint can become a political football. First, SharePoint has many potential uses, and that can often lead to it being perceived as a threat. For example, at a major international insurance business, I saw an IT-led SharePoint collaboration project lose its £350,000 budget because the Marketing and Communication department responsible for the existing intranet felt threatened by the introduction of SharePoint and questioned the business case for the collaboration project.
Second, SharePoint can be a catalyst for extensive change within an organization, including changes to power structures and processes. This type of change is usually accompanied by political maneuvering.
Third, SharePoint requires different areas of the business to work together, sometimes to the extent of pooling departmental budgets in enterprise-level platforms and solutions. SharePoint is a shared platform, and without some ground rules scuffles usually emerge.
2. Not Knowing What SharePoint is
Can you clearly describe to someone what SharePoint is? In my experience, not many people can. Forrester neatly summarize the problem:
Like the ‘Shimmer’ product commercial in the old Saturday Night Live skit, SharePoint can be difficult to define… Without clear definition of SharePoint Enterprises struggle… Lacking appropriate guidance, organizations grapple with SharePoint…
Simply put, if you don’t know what something is, then you’re going to struggle to use it successfully; and if you can’t write down on a piece of paper what it is, then you don’t know.
3. Lack of Information and Knowledge Management Skills
SharePoint is about three things: People, Processes and Information. Sure, you need experienced IT professionals to design, build and maintain the technical solution, but you need an information and knowledge management professional to design the business solution first. Have you got someone who fits this description on your SharePoint project? If you’re working with a Microsoft partner, then do they have the soft skills and experience as well as the technical skills?
4. Vision, the Business Case and Measuring Success
Many organizations embark on SharePoint initiatives without clearly understanding what they are trying to achieve. For example, here’s an extract from a document I received from a client talking about their aims for a “Collaboration” project:
In essence, staff want to work better together, to share knowledge, to work informally, to communicate, to connect across boundaries and to innovate. They want to move from a set of happy families defined by organizational structure to a networked community.
Continue reading this article:
Email It
