Jennifer Ann Mason

In the past month I have had two clients share success stories with me on how they have been making governance work for them. I love stories like these, because it just re-enforces what has been preached to us all along! Maintaining governance within your SharePoint environment will only help you do your job better  Specifically they have had two major successes through their governance team structure. I just wanted to take a quick minute and share about those wins and encourage you to follow in their footsteps!

• Maintain control of Project List: SharePoint gets implemented and everyone wants everything yesterday.  It happens everywhere! I see it happen again and again at clients and it seems there is no way to stop the flood of incoming requests! That is…unless you have a management approved process to deal with them. Both clients have dealt with this by creating a request and approval process for managing these requests. Requests come in and the committee discusses them together. Some of the items discussed for each project include:
  
  • How does this jive with what we currently have going on?
    
  • Do we have available resources to help get this out when they need it? If not, do we have funds to secure those resources?
    
  • Would this fit better in a later stage of our implementation?
    
  • If we do this, what impact will it have on our ability to support the users who will access it?
    
  • What impact does the solution have to our organization?
    

  Once they have worked together to answer these questions, they are then able to respond to the users requests. Sometimes the project is done immediately, sometimes the project is put on hold for a future phase and sometimes a completely new alternative is developed that meets the current needs until the ultimate needs can be met in a future phase. No matter the end solution, the business is presenting a request and a committee of users, all from different areas is making a decision for what is best for the organization. The requestor working with this committee is included in the process and included in the decision making.
  

• Adding Resources to the SharePoint Team: The other big win that I have seen firsthand is the addition of resources to the team, based on repeated needs. In this scenario, it became clear that while users were requesting solutions, they needed assistance layout the sites in a meaningful way. Users knew the basic content they needed on the site, however lacked in the ability to lay content out in a meaningful way. This includes things from look and feel to layout. After several iterations of requests a pattern from the organizations culture had been identified. Since identifying the need, a new team member has been brought on board that will made available to help assist with the site designs. This new resource has been added to the team and will be given time to learn and develop their SharePoint skills. The great thing about this example is that 6 months ago when we started to plan out their implementation, we never would have identified this skill set as a missing gap in the team. Because of the way they have structured their team and their approach to dealing with their implementation, this common need was identified. And once the need was identified they were able to address it by expanding their team and including a new resource in the existing structure. Their work as a team provided all the business justification they needed for the additional resources.
  

These are just two simple examples of making governance work for you. If you have any other examples, share them by posting a comment to this blog. These are the real life examples that people love to hear about.