Last week James Milne began his examination of why  failed SharePoint projects have become so commonplace they are referred to as another, ‘‘SharePoint Shipwreck’’. In Part II he examines some more strategies to avoid being sunk. View Part 1 at this LINK.

Deciding on on-Premise or on Cloud

A number of organisations are still grappling with deciding to deploy SharePoint on their own premises or in the cloud. The management of the physical machines required to support an on premise SharePoint deployment can present some ominous challenges.

SharePoint is a massive and complex product. To build, retain and develop a full SharePoint practice involves a team, not an individual. This team requires technical skills ranging from infrastructure, active directory, network infrastructure, SQL Server database skills (SSRS, SSIS, SSAS and DBMS), web development skills (ranging from user interface, CSS, HTML, XSL, XSLT and more) plus a number of specialist SharePoint skills covering Search, Profile services and SharePoint designer to name just a few.

Non-technical skills include user management, staff management, solution experience and application of solution experience to the specifics of SharePoint’s capabilities.
Now throw in the usual HR challenges of attracting and retaining good talent, career options and opportunities for highly skilled people. External competitive challenges include high staff turn-over combined with the high demand for SharePoint support engineers in the IT industry.

Many businesses are seeking to resolve these challenges by either outsourcing the SharePoint development and management or moving the infrastructure. This can be achieved by either moving the capability to the cloud or by purchasing a managed services contract from a specialist SharePoint shop; or a combination of both!
Many businesses are either implementing, or at the very minimum evaluating the cost benefits of these two options.

Each of these approaches provides benefits to utilise the technology for business advantage whilst providing cost effective services to the business.
An emerging trend is to migrate to a private or hybrid cloud scenario that removes the complexity of managing the SharePoint environment whilst still leveraging your existing infrastructure, Microsoft licenses and core capabilities. We will write further articles covering cloud services and delve into some case studies and scenarios where exciting possibilities exist!

Got Governance?
SharePoint governance has become such a buzz word that for a lot of people it has lost its meaning. Fundamentally, there are two types of governance. The first thing you should focus on is the ‘Strategic Governance’ which is the ‘As a business, what are we going to do with SharePoint?’. This of course must be driven by your upper management and align to your company’s strategic goals and objectives.

So how do you assess, define and align your strategic governance position? We will focus on this in future articles, for the moment; here is a very high-level view of how Myriad Technologies strategic governance methodology approaches the strategic governance question. Within this over-arching methodology, we can provide a full assessment for an organisation. Then we can work with you to evolve the specifics of making your SharePoint governance journey successful!

The common problem we see here is most people’s attention is quickly drawn to the operational governance, and the strategic governance is ignored. This is the fundamental reason why projects lose their traction with upper management. From a technical perspective the project might be perfect, but if the project is not aligned with the corporate objectives then you may find your project being abandoned by your executive sponsors. Without this sponsorship or buy in from upper management, your technically perfect SharePoint project may be left high and dry. So before you set off on your SharePoint journey pay a visit to your executive team to make sure they are on board.

Once you have decided on your strategic governance you can then focus on the ‘Operational Governance’, which should answer the question of ‘how are we going to enforce our decision and policies?’
Be careful! Many executives we deal with are ‘fully on-board’, ‘totally behind it’ and all sorts of euphemisms for ‘go ahead - I’ll focus on my priorities and goals’.

Buy in from an executive requires skin in the game. This requires personal time and effort to be involved with the project, active sponsorship of the project and its goals, as well as the usual fiscal requirements.
We always budget time into our projects to actively manage the executives, help them understand what their role needs to be and what responsibilities they need to accept. This is not always an easy conversation to have, but it is essential to success.

We will write further article’s outlining good and poor approaches to governance. These will provide some good clues to help you avoid the governance failures that lead to another SharePoint shipwreck.

Plan for Change
In reality, a SharePoint project should be viewed as a change management project. There are some serious ‘game changers’ that SharePoint brings to the table and we cannot expect users to suddenly change their behaviour overnight just because we have release of a new SharePoint platform.

Some examples of these game changers are getting users to let go of their folder structures and to start using metadata. IT has driven users to the classic ‘Files and Folders’ view of documents and information for over 40 years. The way of thinking about documents and information have become so engrained into people’s psyche that it is hard for them to adjust to the new world of Metadata management. People’s views of the new methods of tagging and arranging information; range from ‘I love it’ to ‘I hate it’ and everywhere in between. Resistance to changing a way of thinking or working cannot be over-stated. Even if some people ‘get it’ it does not mean they will adopt or use the new methods. Many, including executives in positions of influence and authority, will actively seek to undermine the technology based around pet likes or hates around certain features. Unfortunately, this often leads to the discussion of questioning the value of the technology, rather than them simply realising that they need to move forward with a new way of working and thinking.

Concurrent editing of Microsoft Office 2010 documents is also another major change into which users need to be eased. For the last 30 years we have been telling the users ‘that only one user can edit a document at a time’. Now we can have up to 10 people concurrently editing the same document at the same time. This is a huge shift in mindset around managing documents and information. Whilst the gains in productivity and substantial, people will take time to gain an understanding of how to use these new capabilities. These changes need to be managed accordingly.

A recent reference case was a client who deployed SharePoint as their Intranet platform and after going live there was a sudden drop of email traffic. In the first month there was a drop of 29,000 emails, which for a company of only 1000 people demonstrated a huge change in the behaviour of the users and how their carried out their day to day work.

The change management plan should first and foremost focus on a strong communication plan. This will ensure that the project stakeholders, champions and general business users are aware of what is coming and when. The ownership of the site content and the support channels for staff should be clearly communicated to ensure there is no confusion surrounding the project and the ongoing platform use. If anyone has questions of needs support they should know who to call. The people they call need to be fully conversant with the questions and technology. Simply saying ‘we have a helpdesk’ and not ensuring that all the helpdesk staff are trained and educated on the new technology is not good enough.

A common problem we see organisations make is the SharePoint project is led by the IT department. The moment you think implementing SharePoint is a technology project, you are in serious trouble! This approach very rarely succeeds as it quickly becomes the perception ‘that SharePoint is something that IT has thrust upon us’.

Through your change management plan you will need to formulate a stakeholder engagement plan that will enable each department to be represented in a committee forum. This is typically facilitated through the formation of a steering committee or equivalent; this may (should) continue long after the initial project has been completed. Through the formation of this committee we can ensure that each department is equally represented and IT is seen to be another key stakeholder at the table rather than leading the charge and enforcing SharePoint on everyone else.

Through your governance strategy and your change management plan you should formulate a number of key policy changes that can be used to guide and direct the content owners, authors and others on what is expected from them. As part of your change management plan you may also need to have people’s position descriptions updated to ensure their new roles and responsibilities are formerly recognised. This is another reason why it is important to receive sponsorship from upper management.

A very effective technique we have seen implemented is through the training plan these new policies and procedures are incorporated into the training manual to ensure no one can use the excuse that they have not seen the policies before. You will also need to ensure your training program lives on long after your initial project, as staff turnover means you need to cater for new staff joining your organisation on a semi-regular basis.

Summary
So, with SharePoint 2013 on the horizon we are expecting the usual excitement and enthusiasm about a ‘brand new’ SharePoint to start rolling out.

I hope this article has given you a moment to pause and consider some of the key attributes that will make a success of your SharePoint project (s). Take a moment to reflect on the fact that a good project is very rarely about the technology and more about the engagement of the business and how strategic alignment of the company’s goals to your project will be a key factor in the success of your project. I hope I have provided you with enough to think about before SharePoint 2013 arrives on your shores.

For more information on how Myriad Technologies is helping businesses avoid the SharePoint shipwreck, contact info@myriadtech.com.au and quote IDM003

James Milne is (Chief Technology Officer) at Myriad Technologies